5 Places on Earth We’ve Packed to the Brim With Trash
Consumption leads to waste. As true about the global economy as it is about your lunch. We, maybe more than ever, simply can’t get enough of things — using them, owning them, but above all, buying them.
So what happens to all the products we’ve fallen out of love with? Most of them, even the ones a corporation promised you they’d recycle, end up just sitting around somewhere, doing nothing — especially not decomposing. They key isn’t really to take care of our trash, it’s to push it somewhere the first-world can’t see it.
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Here are five places around the globe that we’ve used as global dustbins.
Agbogblashie, Ghana
If we’re talking about sneakers or car tires, things that by their nature do wear out, it’s easy to shrug and ask what else we’re supposed to do with them. One thing that we constantly replace that’s a little harder to explain away is electronics. Sometimes it seems like all someone needs is a couple slow webpage loads to buy a whole new laptop, not that most manufacturers make what should be easy upgrades possible.
That electronic waste, or e-waste, is particularly gnarly, and a lot of it ends up in Ghana. What makes it worse is that e-waste is tricky, and therefore expensive, to recycle or dispose of safely. Instead, in Agbogblashie, the preferred method of disposal of unwanted, unsellable waste is fire.
Pacific Ocean
At this point, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is something most of us just try not to think about as much as possible. The ocean is vast, after all. Famously so. It’s not showing up on the horizon of anyone’s beach pictures, so it’s all very out-of-sight, out of mind. Of course, it’s also leeching an incredibly amount of plastic that isn’t as immediately visible as an empty Pepsi bottle.
The messed-up part is, those trashbergs of visible debris on the surface are probably less harmful than the uncountable fragments of plastic waste whipping around beneath the surface. Plastic is just one of the ingredients in ocean water, it seems — at least from now on.
Dzerzhinsk, Russia
Not such a bad-looking place, right? Arguably charming, especially with that little tram trundling along. Beneath the postcard vibes, though, Dzerzhinsk is one of the most polluted places on Earth. Not only that, the garbage that Dzerzhinsk is stuck with is the kind that doesn’t just mess with your nose, but with your life expectancy, too.
In a full bingo card of human cruelty and indifference, Dzerzhinsk had an incredible amount of chemical waste from weapons manufacturing improperly dumped there for the better part of a century. If you want to know just how nasty the waste we’re talking about is, consider the fact that sarin gas was one of the things being manufactured. As you can imagine, the runoff from chemical weapons isn’t exactly kind to the human body.
Mount Everest
You’d think that going to a place that’s a literal pinnacle of natural beauty would inspire people to keep it clean. The kind of sights and power that can bring people to tears might also bring them to consider proper waste disposal. Not the case!
Especially as climbing Everest has turned into more of an expensive thrill ride than an explorer’s greatest achievement, the mountain has started to be overwhelmed with trash. If you’re planning a trip, hoping to come face-to-face with the awesome power of Mother Nature? You might end up instead impressed by the power of human beings to ruin a nice thing.
Accra, Ghana
Yes, Ghana again. Cities in the small African nation are swamped with clothes that are, at least in the Western mind, “charitable donations.” A pair of jeans worn to the thickness of a Ziploc bag, that someone proudly hauled to a donation box? It turns out that the person who ends up with them doesn’t know what the hell they’re supposed to do with them, either. And so, they send them off to Ghana, where people straight up burn them for fuel.