Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Foreworda valuable service to the planet and to the municipality; they should be celebrated andsupported, not scorned and excluded from the official waste planning processes.The failure to recognise, validate and support the people in this informal recyclingsector – often called ragpickers – leads to short term techno-fixes, such as landfills andincinerators, which not only encourage continued material wasting, but also wasteentire communities which survived through small scale recycling. Incinerators andlandfills lock up valuable resources in inherently destructive technologies, decimatingthe informal recycling economy and driving the demand to extract, mine, harvest, andprocess ever more resources from the earth – thus fueling the cycle of destruction.And if we take another step back in our systems view, we can see that even the mostskilled ragpickers cannot recover certain discards because they have been designednot to be recyclable or they contain too many toxics to be safely handled and re-used.The problem here lies not in the piles of waste, but in the corporate headquartersand design labs which reward product designers for making products containingtoxic materials which are designed to break soon after purchase. The problem lies inour elected officials and regulatory agencies who grant permission for corporationsto routinely use toxic compounds known to cause cancer, neurological problems,reproductive disorders and other health threats. Toxics used in production inevitablylead to toxics in our environment, our communities and our waste. We’ll never finda solution to our waste problem within a regulatory system which permits the use ofinherently toxic compounds in the products we bring into our homes, schools andworkplaces every day.And if we take one final step back, as Wasting the Nation does, we see that a trulytransformative solution depends not just on supporting informal recyclers andredesigning products to be more durable and less toxic, but in rejecting an entireeconomic system which values unlimited economic growth and capital accumulationover public health, ecological integrity and community well being. It is throughchallenging and replacing this underlying system with one that respects ecologicallimits, nurtures public health, and fiercely promotes social justice that we’ll finally stopwasting both the planet and its people.Annie LeonardAnnie Leonard is an expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, with more than20 years of experience investigating factories and dumps around the world. Annie communicates worldwideabout the impact of consumerism and materialism on global economies and international health. She isthe co-founder of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives which was launched in Johannesburg inNovember 2000.- 2 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation