Preventing waste generation, especially non-recyclable waste, would deliver the greatest benefits for the environment. The reduction in waste needed to meet the target would require very ambitious waste prevention measures to be implemented at both EU and Member State levels, for instance by increasing the lifespan of consumer goods and ensuring strong support for product reuse.

In other words, waste generated by Western imperialism or produced for the comfort and consumption of privileged white people ends up being dumped on racialized people, either at home in impoverished racialized neighborhoods, or in the countries of the Global South.

Waste is fundamentally crucial to environmental discourse both in physical and digital domains. It contains the value, usage, and temporality of things, although many are unaware of how much these phygital wastes contribute to the climate catastrophe. Just from our daily lives, we are in situations that contribute to carbon emissions generated through our devices and internet use. In contrast, other parts of the world, such as Nairobi, the subject of KMRU’s piece, are battling with tactile wastes, surrounded by landfills affecting communities and the life of humans and other species. waste(s) (2021, 15:48 min) seeks to reflect on the concept of pollution. It asks: How is waste created? What happens when waste is thought of in different ways, and can waste be a source? To create the piece, KMRU collaged field recordings of waste(d) spaces, electromagnetic sounds of social media sites, and the digital debris of trashed and recycled audio fragments into new compositions. A juxtaposition between the digital-physical concept of waste, waste(s) is recontextualized  as an artistic resource for real and imagined pollutions.

GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 800 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 90 countries whose ultimate vision is a just, toxic-free world without incineration.

Makery: What was your first impression when you entered the bowels of this processing plant?

Stefan Shankland: The sheer scale of everything. The orders of magnitude here are monumental, gargantuan, in terms of both spaces and quantities. More than 700,000 tons of waste are processed each year, 100 tons are incinerated each day. This waste is ours—mine accumulated with 1.5 million other residents’ waste. It makes you acutely aware of how much garbage we produce collectively without realizing it. Through this visual, physical, spatial experience, we enter the imagination and the representation of what we produce as a society, or even as humanity.

In your video pieces, the workers are barely represented, or else they are played by dancers who seem to be imitating machines. Are the workers invisible in this world of scrap metal?

This is another aspect that struck me during my first visits. You enter an enormous site that processes waste from 1.5 million residents, but you don’t see anyone. You might see three people working in an office, and there’s a series of trucks that come in, but nobody gets out of them. They dump the waste in the pit, and then they leave. You don’t run into any humans, it’s something very mechanical.

Occasionally you do meet workers, mostly men. But they have a difficult relationship with their professional image. When it comes to the popular image of their profession, there is a kind of shame associated with garbage. The workers don’t voluntarily expose themselves as working in a waste processing plant. We always respected their right to privacy.

The chatarreros are Barcelona’s itinerant scrap-metal collectors, and there are thousands of them. Most are undocumented migrants and so there is no official census, but Federico Demaria, a social scientist at the University of Barcelona who is conducting a study of the informal recyclers in Catalonia, believes there are between 50,000 and 100,000 in the region. About half are from sub-Saharan Africa; the rest are from eastern Europe, elsewhere in Africa and Spain.

Hoje em dia, a indústria do lixo é considerada a mais propensa a lavagens de dinheiro. E tudo isso devido ao fato de ter emergido uma economia clandestina, a partir do empreendedorismo da Camorra, a máfia napolitana.

A maneira como a Camorra se apropriou do negócio do lixo está bem descrito pelo jornalista Roberto Salviani no livro “Gomorra”, que narra as entranhas do crime organizado italiano. E permite entender os passos da nova política ambiental brasileira, implementada pelo Ministro do Meio Ambiente Ricardo Salles.

Com as exigências ambientais, a reciclagem do lixo, especialmente dos materiais tóxicos, tornou-se bastante onerosa, se tratado corretamente. A máfia passou então a entrar no negócio através de empresas-mãe, cercadas por um arquipélago de stakeholders, formalmente independentes, incumbidos de dar um fim ao lixo, despejando, enterrando ou transportando para locais distantes. Eles trabalham para várias famílias, sem exclusividade. Quando estoura algum escândalo, as famílias ficam blindadas.

Since 2016, Indore’s municipal corporation (IMC) has eliminated garbage dumps, ensured 100% household-waste segregation and converted waste to usable products, such as compost and fuel. It partnered with non governmental organisations for an awareness campaign to change the behaviour of its citizens, contracted private companies to run some waste management operations, used technology, and improved municipal capacity to ensure the implementation of its waste management plan.

Chennai has become the first city to have an online waste exchange for municipal solid waste.

Residents who want to sell their waste online will be able to contact 2,600 scrap dealers and other agencies across the city.

The Madras Waste Exchange, which is both a web portal and an application, has been conceptualised by the Smart City Mission, with support from the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The web portal is www.madraswasteexchange.com and the Android app can be downloaded from Google Play.

Let's move away from single-use plastic and put robust reuse systems in place!