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Wasting Away: An Earth Day Look At Living Among Garbage

This Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency is focusing on environmental justice, the "fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people" when it comes to environmental regulations and policies.

Around the globe, waste can tell both an environmental and social story. Here are some reports of communities living in, among and off of others' trash:

India: 'Putrid Landscape'

In New Delhi, families make $1 to $2 a day picking through trash in a landfill, The Los Angeles Times reports.

The paper describes Ghazipur landfill as "a post-apocalyptic world where hundreds of pickers climb a 100-foot-high trash pile daily, dodging and occasionally dying beneath belching bulldozers that reshape the putrid landscape."

The city produces about 9,200 tons of trash every day, according to the L.A. Times. That's 50 percent more than it created in 2007 and expected to double over the next 12 years.

Venezuela: 'Empty Bellies'

An indigenous community in southern Venezuela says it is being marginalized by the government. They have turned to scavenging trash dumps to survive, Al-Jazeera reports.

In an Al-Jazeera video about the Warao, men, women and children pick through piles of garbage.

"They chase, from dawn, refuse trucks to grab the most valuable garbage first: metals to sell, clothes to wear and food to eat."

The community has built homes and a school at the site.

"We have to go to the dump every day. We've got no food. We're not made of iron," Raimundo Maica tells Al-Jazeera. "The government says they'll come and meet us on a specific day, specific hour. And we've waited with empty bellies."

Mexico: A Closed Landfill

In February, The New York Times reported on the closing of the Bordo Poniente landfill in Mexico. While officials were looking forward to new ways of recycling, burning and composting waste, there was opposition.

"... [That] European-style vision of handling garbage stands in sharp relief to the needs of the 1,500 trash pickers, or pepenadores, who rely on the refuse at Bordo Poniente every day for their livelihood."

Overall, Hector Castillo Berthier tells the paper he estimates some 250,000 people in Mexico City rely on trash.

"He ticks them off: street sweepers, garbage collectors, pepenadores, junk dealers and the families they support."

Haiti: 'Ubiquitous Piles Of Garbage'

NPR's Richard Knox has recently reported on the health risks plaguing Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Among the problems: lacking a sewer system.

"The cumulative sewage of 3 million people flows through open ditches. It mixes with ubiquitous piles of garbage," Knox reports. "Each night, an all-but-invisible army of workers called bayakou descend into man-sized holes with buckets to remove human waste from septic pits and latrines, then dump it into the canals that cut through the city."

This means the waste goes into the environment and eventually into the ocean. It's also dangerous for the people, especially in a time of cholera. Knox reports:

"Since cholera was introduced into Haiti 18 months ago — most likely by United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal, where the disease is endemic — more than a half-million people have gotten sick and at least 7,050 have died."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Dana Farrington is a digital editor coordinating online coverage on the Washington Desk — from daily stories to visual feature projects to the weekly newsletter. She has been with the NPR Politics team since President Trump's inauguration. Before that, she was among NPR's first engagement editors, managing the homepage for NPR.org and the main social accounts. Dana has also worked as a weekend web producer and editor, and has written on a wide range of topics for NPR, including tech and women's health.
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