He was day dreaming of hitting the winning runs in a cricket match and his dad cheering away to glory; only to be snapped out of it by an incessant cough he has developed after working in waste dumps and landfills for a year now. He works as a rag picker by the day like thousands of others, young and old.
Why is improper waste disposal a social justice issue?
Even if we forget all other environmental impacts for a second, the grave social injustice meted out to people who handle our waste cannot be missed.
When we pack all our garbage- plastic wrappers, bottles, bags (and a hundred other things that we don’t remember a second after discarding) -into one big plastic bag, do we know where this ends up? A young boy working on the landfill segregates the waste we throw, with his bare hands and catches diseases, because we mindlessly throw away waste that we could have avoided. 90% of the waste we generate need not have been generated, they could’ve been reused/re-purposed, composted or recycled.
If the garbage we generate is out of sight, it is instantly out of our minds; and we are back to our tastefully decorated spic and span homes. We do not realise our luxury and convenience comes at a cost. Cost of the health of a rag-picker who handles the waste we throw at him, cost of good drinking water, clean air, micro-plastic free food, marine life… and the list goes on.
What can we do?
- Let’s Study the waste we generate. What do we throw into our dustbins? Could they have been re-purposed or reused instead of discarding?
- Do we see plastic packaged food that will soon rot away in a dump? Synthetic diapers? Plastic wrappers and plastic bottles? Could they have been avoided? Could we have made a better choice by choosing an eco-friendly plastic-free product?
Let’s think before we buy or consume and follow an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. Read this post on the top 5 environment friendly things you can do right now.
Reduce and reuse. If you cannot reuse refuse. Make a choice for Mother Earth and for the guy who is segregating our waste that we have left to rot away.
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