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!

The Zero Waste Cities approach is a continuous effort to phase out waste – not by burning or landfilling it – but instead by creating and implementing systems that do not generate waste in the first place

Waste avoidance is simply avoiding the production of waste. It is often associated with the terms ‘waste reduction’ or ‘source reduction’, as well as ‘waste minimisation’. As stated in Background to Waste Management, minimisation is at the top of the waste hierarchy, and contrary to popular perception, reducing the amount of waste that is produced can be achieved relatively simply. Slight modifications of procedures and/or altering procurement practices can improve efficiencies in utilising resources, leading to a reduction in the amount of waste produced.

This pains me to write, but we all have to come to terms with the harsh reality that recycling validates waste and is a placebo to the complex waste crisis we have designed ourselves into. The things you are separating and putting in your recycling bins are probably not being recycled — and there’s a good chance that they are ending up somewhere you never imagined.