All that trash

Forget the 80 million barrels of oil the world consumes every day, what about all the waste we generate? Just lean back and think about all the trash in your city. How much lies in half-decomposed state in landfills? How much litters roadsides?

Want to see a miniature version of the world and its waste? See the picture above. This is a real place outside Cairo called Garbage city and populated by a community of workers called Zabbaleen, who personally collect, sort, reuse, resell or otherwise repurpose Cairo’s waste.

This ‘metropolis’ is actually a very efficient waste management system: food scraps are fed to livestock, what can be repaired is, and everything else is recycled, sold for scrap, or burned for fuel. The Zabbaleen live at poverty levels but live a long-held tradition of scavenging as skill.

As the site says, is this how the earth will look if a giant hand caught hold of it and gave it a good shake? Maybe we have more things on the planet than humans? Scary!