"Growing mountains of solid waste,
|
Click on link to go directly to sub-section, or scroll down to read entire chapter.
Growing Heaps of Garbage in the Cites
Nuclear Waste
Toxic News
Seeking Solutions
Taking Community Action
Addressing the Individual
At Home
At Work
An Egyptian Success Story
Waste is unavoidable in any society,
but now we produce more waste than ever before. The Age of Convenience
is also the Age of Waste. Around the world, modern civilization
has been stuffing its refuse into abandoned mines, canyons and
even dumping it in the oceans. Some of it is being incinerated,
releasing poisonous gases into the air. This problem is worse
in the industrialized countries of the North than in the South,
but with the spread of technology, industrialization and accompanying
standards of living, the garbage factor is an unwelcome and often
unnoticed side effect of "development."
Growing Heaps of Garbage in the Cities
By the year 2000, it is estimated that half of the world's 6.3 billion people will be living in cities. Over two billion are expected to reside in the metropolises of developing countries. In its 1991 report, The Challenge of the Environment, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that 720 billion tons of world urban wastes are produced annually, of which 440 billion tons-more than half-are generated by developed countries. "The problem in both industrialized and developing countries is twofold," the report declared. "People often are too wasteful in their production and consumption, and then pay too little attention to proper disposal of refuse."
Rapidly multiplying urban households also generate far more solid waste than local authorities can handle. According to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS), only between 25 and 55 per cent of all waste generated in large cities is collected by municipal authorities. Up to 95 per cent of the refuse is thrown into open dumps, which can render land unusable and endanger human health.
Management of wastes is a formidable challenge facing governments around the world. How to dispose of refuse economically and without degrading the environment is a problem shared by developed and developing countries alike. A lack of sufficient resources, however, severely limits the range of options open to cities in the developing world, where the disposal of solid wastes created by households and industries often consumes up to half of municipal budgets. Many have yet to install sewage and wastewater treatment plants.
Waste can have far-reaching and sometimes long-term and irreversible
consequences for human health and the environment. Thus, its disposal
and management must become a critical feature in future urban
planning in developing countries. The volume of wastes created
must also be reduced if the problem is to be solved.
The issue of nuclear waste is not directly related to communities and households. However, since the use of nuclear power is spreading throughout the world, it is an issue with which your community may be soon confronted. The information in this book regarding nuclear power is brief, and is meant only to provide some general information on the subject.
Since the invention of nuclear power in 1942, modern science has been seeking ways to properly dispose of the radioactive waste that is stockpiled around the planet. Irradiated uranium fuel from commercial nuclear power plants is among the most dangerous radioactive waste. According to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world's 413 commercial nuclear reactors produced 13 per cent of the world's electricity in 1991. In 1990, these reactors also created about 9,500 tons of irradiated fuel, bringing the world's waste accumulation of used fuel to 84,000 tons-twice as much as in 1985.
IAEA estimates that the total waste generated from all the nuclear
reactors now operating or under construction worldwide will exceed
450,000 tons before the plants have all closed down in the middle
of the next century. All of this waste, so far, is being stored
in pools of water on location at the nuclear reactors. Governments
around the world from China and France to England and the United
States have been trying to develop a "safe" way to dispose
of it. Some propose to bury it deep within the Earth with a marker
warning future generations of the danger. The trouble is, the
Earth moves so much over time that no one can accurately judge
where or when volcanoes and earthquakes will take place. Only
the process of natural decay, which takes hundreds of thousands
or even millions of years, diminishes the radioactivity of nuclear
waste.
Only a small proportion of total human-produced waste is 'hazardous' (needing special handling or disposal to avoid harming health, the environment or both). Improper disposal of hazardous waste often results in tragedy. In the 1950s and 1960s, some 2,000 people at Minamata and Niigate, Japan, suffered crippling neurological diseases after eating fish poisoned by mercury wastes discharged into the sea. More than 400 of them died.
Worldwide, freshwater wells have often been contaminated by leaks from chemical dumps. Also, the building of housing estates-such as those at Love Canal, in the United States, and Lekkerkerk, in the Netherlands-on land where chemical waste has been dumped has resulted in mass evacuations and hundreds of millions of dollars in clean-up costs. While most of these problems have occurred in developed countries, the lessons can be learned by developing countries as they continue to industrialize and consequently produce more hazardous waste themselves.
In recent years, as controls on waste disposal have tightened in many countries, companies have begun to export hazardous wastes to countries which have better treatment facilities or less stringent regulations. Differences in national laws-and even in the definition of which wastes are hazardous-have made this traffic hard to monitor and left loopholes for unscrupulous operators. In 1984, 41 barrels of dioxin waste turned up in an abandoned abattoir in France. They contained heavily contaminated waste materials from a chemical plant in the town of Seveso, Italy, resulting from a chemical accident in 1976. The scandal prompted the European Union to regulate trade in hazardous wastes between its members.
As well, hazardous waste from industrialized countries has ended
up in many developing countries. Developed countries, producing
more hazardous waste than could be legally disposed of within
their own borders, often were willing to pay other countries to
take it. Developing countries, desperate for foreign currency
to purchase imports and pay debts, often took the waste, only
to dispose of it in a haphazard and dangerous manner-sometimes
leaving it out in the open near communities.
Many governments
are taking urgent steps to deal with their waste problem. China,
for example, now offers tax breaks to companies that recycle wastes
or use recycled products. The largest and most diverse of such
companies is the Shanghai Resource Recovery and Utilization Company
(SRRUC), which recycles garbage created by Shanghai's 13.5 million
people. SRRUC received technical expertise under a UNDP-World
Bank global resource recovery project. From waste materials, the
company makes various products, including manhole covers and counterbalances
for lifts and bridges.
Many governments, recognizing that they cannot manage wastes from a national level, have decentralized the task to local authorities and non-governmental organizations. For example, an NGO in the Philippines, the Metro Manila Council of Women Balikatan Movement, has successfully organized households of San Juan to separate their wastes for recycling. In Mali, UNDP's project for Promotion of the Role of Women in Water and Environmental Sanitation Services (PROWWESS), together with other UN agencies, organized unemployed women college graduates as garbage collectors, hygiene trainers and family planning counselors. The women formed a garbage collection cooperative and won a municipal contract to clear trash from an area in Bamako.
At the intergovernmental
level, the Basil Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements
of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, was adopted at a conference
attended by 116 states in Basel, Switzerland, in March 1989. The
Convention's aim is to encourage countries to cut back on the
quantity and toxicity of the wastes they generate, to manage them
in an environmentally-sound way, and to dispose of them safely
and as near to the source of their generation as possible. The
aim of the Convention is to ensure that any authorized traffic
in hazardous waste that takes place is carefully controlled.
The Convention emphasizes that every country has the sovereign right to ban imports of hazardous waste altogether and that a party may not exchange wastes subject to the Convention with a non-party. It also requires industrialized countries to help developing countries to improve the management of the waste they produce.
To continue and expand the success of these examples there is
a desperate need for greater responsibility among industries,
community organizations and people regarding waste reduction,
proper waste management and proper waste disposal. To get the
waste problem under control, the citizens of the world need to
take action as individuals, as families and as
communities.
When making a commitment to reducing the planet's waste problem,
it is important to understand the "cradle to grave perspective."
This means taking into account the entire production process starting
from the collection of raw material and its environmental impact,
then on to the manufacturing process and its efficiency and energy
use, then the product use, and finally disposal of the product.
There are positive and negative impacts on the environment during
all phases of the product life-cycle, from cradle to grave. It
is important to understand that our buying decisions should take
all these environmental impacts into account. As consumers, broadening
our minds and improving our understanding of how used products
must be disposed of should lead towards a change in our consumption
patterns.
Communities, and community organizations, are in a perfect position
to make a major impact on the amount of waste that is generated
in their societies. The collective voices of your group can persuade
government officials to notice the problem, and can influence
industry to be more mindful of its responsibilities. Following
are a few more ideas to consider when drawing up your own action
plan:
Actions at the
individual level are important and should be encouraged by your
community organization. Start with making sure that the members
of your organization are doing all they can to minimize waste
in their households. Following are some key areas in which an
individual can take action to minimize his or her contribution
to the waste stream. Some of the tips may be obviously more useful
in developed countries while others are more aptly suited for
developing countries.
As an individual, the first thing to do is to evaluate your life
to see what areas are responsible for producing excessive waste.
In this chapter are some ideas, but each individual action plan
will depend on each person's unique situation.
The best place for an individual to start is in the home. Our
home is where we spend most of our time, and it is where we have
the most control over how things are done. To begin with, you
should conduct a household waste audit by determining what kind
and what amount of materials are discarded each week. Following
are a few ideas to get started:
If you work in an office, there are many things you can do to ensure that your office is doing its share to protect the environment. When you work with a group of people, you have an ideal opportunity to help to educate your coworkers and your bosses about environmental issues.
Whatever line of work you are in, there are things you can do to improve the environmental performance of your company. Be sure to use your voice to suggest changes, improve facilities and adopt ecological policies. Also, encourage your company to support environmental projects in the community.
When making your office more environmentally friendly, get all
your co-workers involved. Make sure that everyone is aware of
the changes and why they are happening. If people feel involved
in the process of change, they are more likely to want to participate
fully, and take their environmental enthusiasm home. Following
are a few ideas to get started:
Turning Garbage into Gold in Egypt
A Success Story
The 20,000 people of Mokattam, a poor community in Cairo, live mostly from the refuse of one of the world's largest cities. They collect 600 tons a day and turn 80 per cent of it into recyclable material which is sold to support the community. Clothing is shredded and turned into mattress filling, paper is recycled, aluminum is melted down. To facilitate the collection process, the organization was able to get the people of Cairo to separate their garbage into organic and inorganic waste.
Though some people would consider such an occupation unworthy of attention, the people of Mokattam are proud. Everything they do is done with the dignity of a people who know they possess a trade that is increasingly valuable in a world that is running out of room for its garbage.
The Association for the Protection of the Environment is an Egyptian NGO based in Cairo that has worked with the Mokattam community for ten years. There are more than 200 women and girls who work for the organization, producing everything from greeting cards and handbags to quilts and pillows from refuse. The products are exported around the world. The workers earn a regular wage and all profits are divided. Besides working, all women are given training in various skills including family planning, literacy and health. More than 400 women have been trained since 1984.
Aside from reducing the amount of waste that enters the landfills
of Cairo, the activity has numerous other environmental benefits.
Project organizer Laila Iskandar, who attended the 1994 U.N. International
Conference on Population and Development, says this form of community
development is directly linked to reducing population. "Through
the availability of education, heath, employment and economic
independence, families naturally have fewer children," she
said. Iskandar was given the prestigious Goldman Environmental
Award for her efforts.
Contact:
References
50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, The Earthworks
Group, UK Edition. Great Britain: New English Library Paperbacks,
1990 - Guidelines for Action, Household Waste-Issues and Opportunities,
CONCERN, Inc. 1992 - Confronting Nuclear Waste; Nicholas Lenssen;
State of the World 1991; WW Norton and Company, Washington, DC,
1992 - Defusing the Toxics Threat: Controlling Pesticides and
Industrial Waste, Postel, Sandra, Worldwatch Institute, Washington,
DC, September 1987 - The NGO Treaty on Waste, NGO Global Forum,
Rio de Janeiro, 1992 - "Nuclear Waste Disposal: Can the Geologist
Guarantee Isolation?, G. de Marsily et al., Science, 5 August
1977 - Radioactive Waste: Politics, Technology and Risk, Ronnie
D. Lipschutz, Ballinger, Cambridge, Mass., 1980 - World List of
Nuclear Power Plants, Nuclear News, August 1991 - Ways With Waste,
Kane, Sid, World Development Magazine; United Nations Development
Programme "Wastes," UNEP Profile, United Nations Environment
Programme, Nairobi, 1990 - What Individuals Can Do, Household
Waste-Issues and Opportunities, Concern, Inc. Washington, DC,
1992.
| 
|
