Plastic Soup by Michiel Roscam Abbing

Author:Michiel Roscam Abbing
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Because plastic does not decay and dumping it is the easiest option, bigger and bigger landfills are appearing everywhere, such as this one in Nepal.

Overpopulation and the low quality of waste management systems in many coastal countries largely determine which contribute the most to plastic soup.

The burgeoning global population is being accommodated in mega-cities. Most of these cities—those with over ten million inhabitants—are on the coasts. In developing countries, their growth is largely uncontrolled. It is estimated that one-third of all city dwellers live in shanty towns. A typical feature of these slums is the lack of facilities, including trash removal. High population densities within fifty kilometers of the coast are one of the key factors in explaining plastic soup. Three-quarters of the population of Indonesia lives in coastal regions, and the figure for the Philippines is over 80 percent. Most of the waste from these places is just dumped randomly.

There is no organized refuse collection service in the favelas, the shanty town areas of Rio de Janeiro, where about one-quarter of its residents live. The waste from about 7.5 million people flows untreated into the Bay of Guanabara. There are 55 rivers that empty into that bay; there is no longer any life in 52 of them because of pollution.

Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, lies in a valley. Penetrating and almost permanent smog hangs over the city, partly due to the plastics that are simply incinerated in the open air everywhere. Along part of the banks of the sacred river, the Bagmati, there are layers of plastic waste meters in height as the result of many years of dumping. Waste that is not incinerated is dumped on a landfill site twenty kilometers outside the city. Hundreds of eagles circle endlessly above it.

The United Nations has estimated that only 10 percent of waste in Africa is dumped in a controlled way. The rest is just left lying around or burned. Plastic bags are the big villains. The water drainage in shanty town areas gets blocked by these bags, and the stationary and stagnant water creates the perfect breeding ground for malaria mosquitoes. Whereas a good rainstorm used to rinse the gutters and ditches clean, they now flood because of the plastic that has all accumulated, mixing with human fecal matter.

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