Waste management workers stand outside a waste processing plant in Bengaluru, India. By formalizing the waste collection process, the ‘I Got Garbage’ digital platform transformed waste workers into micro-entrepreneurs.
(Suchit Ahuja)
To focus on sustainable development goals, platforms need to change from being exclusively focused on profits and value appropriation to perceiving themselves as public goods.
Polar bears are increasingly seeking sustenance in human trash because of melting sea ice and a loss of hunting opportunities. The result is a rise in human-bear conflict – and dead bears.
A garbage dump fire is seen smouldering across the bay from the city of Iqaluit on July 9, 2014.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
Priority should be given to improving municipal solid waste management in First Nation communities because they currently lack financial resources, infrastructure and solid waste diversion programs.
When people have to pay for every bag of trash they throw out, they produce less waste.
Mint Images RF via Getty Images
When governments want people to do less of something, one way to make that happen is to charge them for doing it. That’s the idea behind pay-as-you-throw waste policies.
Portrait of waste recycler Liberia Mapesmoawe in South Africa.
Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images
From oil disasters in Mauritius to street artists in South Africa, the story of rubbish in the media helps shape popular culture and environmental change.
Garbage in New York’s subway system offers easy meals for rats.
AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
Climate change, globalization and concerns about rat poison soon could drive rat infestations to levels not seen in centuries. One way to curb them is getting humans to stop wasting food.
More of this, please.
PictureAccent/Shutterstock.com
Every year the US burns more than 34 million tons of garbage in incinerators. These plants are major pollution sources, and most are clustered in disadvantaged communities.
Plastic waste from Australia in Port Klang, Malaysia. Malaysia says it will send back some 3,300 tons of nonrecyclable plastic waste to countries including the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.
AP Photo/Vincent Thian
A year after China stopped accepting most scrap material exports, other Asian countries are following Beijing’s lead, forcing wealthy nations to find domestic solutions for managing their wastes.
Giving food that would otherwise go to landfill to hungry people does little to ensure the well-being of Canadians who are food insecure.
(Shutterstock)
Great areas of rubbish – known as ‘garbage patches’ – are known to form in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, but not the southern Indian Ocean. Why is that?
A plastic waste dump.
Mohameed Abdulraheem/shutterstock.com
Incineration of household waste has gotten a bad name, argues an economist, who sees today’s recycling crisis as an opportunity to reconsider how the U.S. handles its waste.
A research study found that most of the debris in gulls’ stomachs is plastic – exposing the birds to high levels of chemical contaminants and potentially limiting their reproductive success.
(Shutterstock)
Seagulls have no qualms about sifting through dumps for scraps. But this buffet comes at a cost, filling their stomachs with plastic, glass, metal and even building materials.
Citizens protesting at the Volokolamsk town hall, after noxious fumes from a local landfill sent 50 children to the hospital.
Radio Free Europe
Massive noxious garbage dumps piling up around Moscow have sparked citizen protests. And those protests are turning into criticism of the political system, which could threaten the Putin regime.