The NYT magazine has an amazing photo essay up on the computer waste trade in the Agbogbloshie slum of Accra, Ghana.
via unconsumption
Archive for August, 2010
Agbogbloshie
Tuesday, August 17, 2010Park Avenue trash
Tuesday, August 10, 2010Look out hipsters, dumpster pools have gone mainstream—for several Saturdays this summer, the city is closing off part of Park Ave so that people can swim in pools made from old trash receptacles. While Vic and I did lament not getting invited to take a dip in one last summer when we kept hearing about hidden pools in Brooklyn, I can’t imagine anything less fun than stripping down to a swim suit and aqua dumpster diving with strangers on Park Ave. A for effort, though, New York City.
Photo by David Belt via Green Picks blog
via Green Picks blog (thanks for the tip, Brendan!)
Kappo in Copenhagen
Monday, August 9, 2010Rolando Politi, spiritual leader of the Yanbuki trash worshippers, recently organized a trip to the utopian neithborhood of Christiania, Copenhagen.
Kappo and Lady Kappo
An email summary of events states:
to all world yanbukis, here are the links for the kappo tour and ceremony from this july.
Findings: they never thought about collecting and cleaning and repackaging caps and lids before KAPPO was introduced.
Future: great potential for a bottom up start up of cap enterprise anywhere in the world!
hungry people and redeemers and also creatives should contact [recycleandpray AT gmail DOT com] for more details and know how.
The Trash Worship Network
expanding trash spirituality for ten years and going
The message includes links to these photos and this YouTube video of a cap gobbling ceremony. From the photos of packaged bottle caps and cap-ardorned Yanbukis as well as a poster promoting Kappo in New York and Copenhagen, I am guessing/deducing that the Yanbukis have embarked on a world tour with at least one stop (Copenhagen) where they share the benefits of plastic bottle cap harvesting with locals in the name of art and trash worship. Part of this endeavor requires building a cap-gobbling receptacle by decorating a trash can in bottle caps and dropping more caps inside.
Fresh caps
The proper attire at such a ceremony appears to require decorative capping. And the leader of such a ceremony is known as Kappo, or Lady Kappo depending on one’s gender. Yanbukis and anthropologists in the know are encouraged to correct this post should I be misinterpreting anything. Regardless, the result looks like a lot of fun and, hopefully, results in greater awareness of plastic waste (without ever uttering such a painfully dull phrase as “greater awareness of plastic waste”).
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Burning trash makes troops sick
Friday, August 6, 2010U.S. military bases in Afghanistan (the site of that war to the right of Iraq, just past Iran) generate a lot of trash—tons in fact. That trash is burned and generates a lot of smoke which is making U.S. service men and women as well as military rent-a-soldiers from big outsourcing companies ill. Those soldiers are now suing. The Washington Post reports:
In a lawsuit in federal court in Maryland, 241 people from 42 states are suing Houston-based contractor Kellogg Brown & Root, which has operated more than two dozen so-called burn pits in the two countries. The burn pits were used to dispose of plastic water bottles, Styrofoam food containers, mangled bits of metal, paint, solvent, medical waste, even dead animals. The garbage was tossed in, doused with fuel and set on fire.
For more details, such as lovely descriptions of the stuff the affected soldiers have been coughing up and other side effects of toxic exposure, click here. Be sure also to click through the haunting photo timeline beginning way back in 2001 and full of haunting images and once-familiar faces like Rummy and Powell.
via Newser
Ghost of a Dream
Friday, August 6, 2010
Chinese trash islands
Wednesday, August 4, 2010In China, following serious flooding, several cities are now under threat from large islands of trash blocking water flows, potentially causing more flooding. In the city of Baishan, a 160,000 square feet trash island has parked under a bridge. If this floating monument of weirdness isn’t cleared soon, the bridge might collapse, according to the Straits Times.
The Guardian has a picture and a fuller story on the threat at the Three Gorges dam. One can only hope that Chinese authorities have the boldness to rewrite the crisis plan for things-to-do-when-a-flood-comes to include some more garbage workers upstream. Then again, as per usual, the amount of trash to begin with is the problem.
Facebook.com/everydaytrash
Monday, August 2, 2010We have a new, easy to remember url for our Facebook page. Pass it on.
everydaytrash 