Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 7: The question of the futureBox 22: Reductions in municipal waste from recyclingZabbaleen-served areas of Cairo, Egypt – 80 to 90%Opotike District, New Zealand – 85%Gazza, Padua, Italy – 81%Halifax, Canada – 65%Curitiba, Brazil – 65%Sun Valley, the Philippines – 59%Barangay Bagumbuhay, the Philippines – 52%Source: Platt 2004: 31.There is also great variety in who really manages waste, wet or dry, and in thedistribution of benefits. Recyclers save ‘air-space’ in municipal landfills. The immediatebeneficiary is the local government but it is ultimately the main producers of waste,richer households and businesses, who benefit. Researcher Brenda Platt [2004] reportsthat in some cases, such as Barangay Bagumbuhay in the Philippines, waste pickers arerewarded for this saving. In most places, they are not. Rather, it seems, waste pickers– and the waste itself – are disregarded and a substantial part of the value of theirwork is effectively appropriated. Ironically, it is because waste is disregarded that theresource is left open to the poor who toil long hours in dangerous conditions. Theirreturns are generally low and, in the formal market, they are at the mercy of volatilepricing and vulnerable to exploitative pricing by dealers.In the North, waste activists and local groups have created a politics of zero waste,confronting the immediate problems of municipal waste created by consumerism andcomplimenting this with campaigns directed at retailers and producers to eliminateunnecessary packaging and toxic products. This is partly a response to the unease thatpeople in Northern countries feel at their complicity in wasteful consumerism. Yet,in contrast to corporate zero waste spin, it also aims to enlarge the democratic spacein relation to local and national government and it gestures towards the possibility ofanother world. Box 23 briefly summarises the zero waste campaign in north America.In the South, waste picker organising is frequently articulated within the strategies ofneighbourhood organisations or movements of the urban poor, sometimes supportedby NGOs. In some cases, they have taken initiatives to move from the dump to interceptWasting the Nation - groundWork - 185 -