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A stream of waste in Indonesia
F
Fuck this dumb world
D
It’s insane how much garbage we produce and how easy it is to ignore when you have effective trash collection and places to hide/dump it.
L
Also important to note that landfills are engineered to properly manage the fluids they produce and the methane produced by garbage is often used to generate power.
H
Generating power is one the biggest incentives to funding a landfill, because you can make money to cover maintenence over the ~30 years its legally required after it’s closed.
Q
Waste management (when done right) is super interesting this way. Those systems are really cool. The amount of money and tech we funnel to weapons could go towards WM and other logistics. But. We don’t. We blow shit up.
M
Hear me out, we just blow up trash instead of people
S
Microplastics speedrun any%
Q
Pretty much. Incineratoration of plastics to generate energy is exponentially better than tossing it into the “ether”. In this case the ether is SE Asia. We’re burning petrochemicals en masse anyway.
C
High temp incineration is also significantly cleaner than just burning trash.
B
Plus, it has the added bonus of any metals being able to be salvaged. Since people are often too lazy to separate their recyclables properly here in North America, and I imagine in India, where they’re too lazy to even throw away the garbage properly, that would also be the case.
J
I was interested to read the guidance where I live for recycling old kitchen pans which is more or less “put it in the trash, we burn everything now and reclaim metals from the slag”. I guess that’s pretty cool.
R
Are you suggesting we blow up the moon? – Austin Powers Movie
O
Would ya miss it?
N
We just burn the garbage directly for energy instead. Half of our trash gets burned, the other half gets recycled and 1% gets into landfills. We even get paid to deal with other countries garbage.
D
Who is we?
N
Sweden.
B
Same here in Denmark
G
Same here in Norway. Well in all fairness, we sell a lot of our trash to Sweden
B
This should be more commonplace. Obviously it releases a lot of CO2, but it also prevents the release of methane that landfills create, so the environmental impact is basically a wash, but at least one creates useful energy in the process. They can also recover useful materials, such as metals, that would otherwise be perpetually trapped underground.
B
Here in Denmark we collect food waste seperate from other trash, so we can use it in methane generators and collect the methane
F
I enjoyed [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRx_dZawN44&t=107s) video which focused on how landfills work. There’s a surprising amount of work that goes into them.
L
It scares me. Almost everything has plastic in the packaging that’s going straight to a landfill. It is so wasteful
S
AFAIK Indonesia has ran out of space for landfills, and a lot of this plastic is disposed of the same way you and I sort our waste, then promised to be recycled only for the trash company to dump it elsewhere. Worth noting that Indonesia is experiencing a revolution currently, overthrowing a regime that made lots of false promises and will go down as one of the most corrupt ever. The people are well aware of the waste crisis, I assure you. It sucks honestly. Indonesia is home to the last remaining healthy coral reefs on Earth. There’s massive international efforts being done to preserve it. Marine biologists are working in those waters daily trying to save countless species, and they’re constantly swimming in plastic. That whole area of Oceania is so bad, and there’s so many indigenous people who pay the price despite have little to no contribution to it in the first place. Real shit show.
M
Im fairly certain we sell our grabage to other countries.
L
We do, but first we put it in blue and green containers. Then we pack them into bundles, take it overseas in dirty ships. When it gets where it’s going, it’s unpacked and put into the place where the water run after raining and cleans it up into the ocean. It’s all good.
B
Worse than that is our recycling. You think you’re doing the right thing and helping the planet, you sort everything into all the right bins, then they bail it up, ship it off to some far away place with loose regulations that ends up just dumping it into landfills, if you’re lucky, rivers and oceans if you’re not, because the vast majority of “recyclables” have little or no value once they’re properly processed. If there was value to be had they’d just process it here.
B
This is not true for everywhere in the world, but unfortunately, because it is so repeated that in places where it is true, it causes people not to properly separate their things, and then they go to waste.
G
This is a govt that has no respect for regulations. This is like acid rain in the 70s, or the Ozone layer in the 80s and on and on. This problem can easily be solved but they absolutely choose to not solve it.
P
i think they have this issue since forever over there. the culture is the problem, not poverty. how come in south america this dosen’t happen
S
One of my friends is dating an Indonesian woman, and when visiting their family in the old country they were lighting a BBQ using a heap of trash plastic. He very politely but consistently refused to eat anything that touched that grill afterwards, it sounded like an awesome way to get cancer.
Z
Saw a documentary recently about how they have a whole poison tofu industry that basically runs on burning plastic trash.
G
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tA2HWLiVDxU
S
I know Guatemala is technically Central America, but when I was there a few years back, the beaches near Livingston were covered in about 6-12 inches in washed ashore plastic.
H
Guatemala has or had a river like this also
R
100% it’s on them, the people living there. Hypothetically speaking, if they moved to another country where everything is clean, you would see that they continue to litter in this way. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
F
Nope. Indonesians magically follows the law when there are consequences. My friends would keep their trash in their hand when they’re in Singapore or Japan but would litter when they’re back in Indo.
L
One part of that is that a single piece of litter makes all subsequent littering much more likely. If the ground is full of trash, why would you take your trash with you to put it in a (possibly rare) container? When in Rome… (or Milano like, ten years ago)
B
While acid rain was not easily solvable, it had immediate effects, and the ozone layer also had relatively immediate effects. Everyone gets a sunburn, and it’s not too hard to extrapolate to cancer from there for people. It also had a relatively easy way to solve the problem. Fixing how we produce everything with plastic now, and it is not easily broken down, and it is so not easily broken down that it gets to the point that it becomes small enough to take the place of individual chemicals in our body, and the environment is not easy to solve. They have been trying to solve plastic recycling since The early 70s. It wasn’t until literally just weeks ago that **maybe** a new nickel-based catalyst will allow for the easy breakdown of unsorted and contaminated plastics into reusable quality material. That’s a big if. That doesn’t excuse governments and people’s lazy handling of plastics in between all this time, and in the future as well. But saying that the problem can be easily solved is just downright false. that’s not even getting into the financial aspect of why these countries don’t have any garbage collection in the first place. Or even why manufacturers and retailers and everybody in between create so much waste plastic at every step. Could that be solved easily? Definitely not. Could it be solved? No, there’s reasons for the plastic at every step, some of it good, some of it bad. It’s still excessive.
N
Any advanced life form will pass this planet… the life forms here are too dirty. Actually makes me sick… a street was cleaned, it took about 2 weeks, and they had to clean it again – it continues every 2 weeks. Why do people throw trash out of their car?
B
Out of sight, out of mind. Plus convenience.
D
More so fuck THESE dumb people. I wash out my fucking yogurt pots and then see this shit.
P
Actually it’s Indonesians living wherever this is, the world didn’t leave the trash in the river
O
Fuck these people
T
We are. …and the world isn’t what’s dumb. Again, we are.
_
We are the world
C
We are the children
A
We are the ones to make a brighter day and shit in rivers 🙂
N
oh there’s a poop we’re making
E
The smell kills all the cows
L
It’s trash, we’ll make a shitter place, for you and meee~~
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