Garbage and Globalization

Part three in a speaker series on waste on a global scale: GARBAGE AND GLOBALIZATION - Join us for an evening with anti-waste activists from around the world. The third installment in our speaker’s series will feature: * Sonia Mendoza of Mother Earth Unlimited in the Philippines. Sonia will speak on her recent efforts to ban garbage incineration in the Philippines, and her work in implementing the country’s first “Ecological Solid Waste management Plan” * Shibu K. Nair of the Thanal Conservation Action &information Network., India. Shiubu will focus on the Zero Waste Kovalam initiative, including efforts to ban disposable plastics, source separation of waste, biogas, chicken farm projects, and the promotion of self-help organizations utilizing waste materials to create crafts and other goods * Zini Derrick Mokhine, Earthlife Africa, South Africa. Earth Life Africa is a grassroots organization that focuses on information distribution and public organizing. Zini will discuss the group’s plans to implement sound waste management practices near Johannesburg and the rest of Southern Africa. It is impossible to understand the waste crisis in the third world without considering the larger economic processes which drive the growth of garbage. Across the globe, poor countries are facing the expansion of non-biodegradable garbage on an unprecedented scale. This can be attributed largely to four factors: (A) the little controlled import of waste materials for disposal, (B) the increased import of inexpensive consumer goods designed with disposable packaging and (C) the unregulated production of non-biodegradable wastes on a national scale (D) the ongoing loss of rural livelihoods and the need for urban migration. The latter three are widely explained away as part of the process of integrating poor nations into the “global economy,” or as part of the condition known as “modernity.” In either situation the results are the same: the growth of pollution and environmental health hazards. At 7pm. Suggested donation $5, no one turned away for lack of funds. Proceeds will benefit the Zero Waste Fellowship, an project initiated by the Ecology Center Recycling Program and The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) to train environmental activists from the global south in sound recycling and waste management strategies.