How Waste Management Affects our Perception of a Waste Problem
Thinking about the connection between waste management practices in the Global North and Global South, and how they inform our general understanding of the global waste crisis.
Source: A Greener Future | Photo by Mara Mahmud
Do you remember learning about recycling programs in elementary school? I do. I remember the big blue box, and the intentional lessons around how to separate our waste, the importance of washing plastic containers so as not to contaminate the whole bin, and all the possibilities of promise offered by a universal recycling program.
As I got older and moved cities, I realized that different cities had the capacity to recycle more and different things, like styrofoam, and from this I learned the importance of reading your local recycling plan and understanding what and how to properly dispose of your recyclables. But, what I didn’t learn until well into my 20s is that, in Canada, a mere 9% of what we recycle is actually recycled. The rest ends up in various end locations, from landfills, to our Great Lakes, and plenty of it was shipped abroad until recently.
City of Toronto Waste Management Guide (2015)
I think for most of us, the illusion of recycling offers a great comfort, knowing that it’s going somewhere and being taken care of. But the truth is much more complicated than that, and it’s important that we collectively examine our perception of waste management and the plastic pollution crisis — locally, and globally.
Here’s a quick, non–exhaustive, historical evolution of waste management in the Global North:
The idea of waste before the industrial revolution was very different from our current idea of waste (Quinte Waste Solutions, 2018). Before there was plastic and disposables, waste only really included organics, such as wood, ash, textile, and food waste (Quinte Waste Solutions, 2018). Reusing and repurposing wasn’t a novelty concept in the late middle ages into the turn of the 20th century.
“The idea that something was broken and therefore garbage is a new-school idea, as a result of our consumer society.” (Quinte Waste Solutions, 2018)
The first proper notion of waste management came about as a result of the emerging understanding that improper waste disposal could result in health and sanitation risks for the public. It wasn’t until 1864 in Tennessee that officials were made aware of the correlation between the Yellow Fever epidemic and rotting garbage in public streets. The public was then urged to take their garbage to designated spots on the outskirts of towns — the first iterations of modern day landfills (Quinte Waste Solutions, 2018)..
One of the first Material Recovery Facilities opened up in New York City in 1897, as a means of recovering valuable materials from trash and a response to understanding the connection between illness and waste disposal practices. Notably, most of the waste being sorted at this time was still organic, but they’d remove valuable materials like rubber, burlap, and horsehair (Quinte Waste Solutions, 2018).
Moving into the early 20th century, pop manufacturers like Coca-Cola, began facilitating bottle return programs, incentivising consumers to return their glass bottles in exchange for a cash deposit. But as we know, all that changed following the plastic revolution, when manufacturers recognised a missed opportunity to produce more product, package it for less, and do away with return and recycling programs, opting for single-use packaging instead. The culture around reuse and repurposing changed, along with our appetites for more (of everything).
The first mandated curbside recycling program came to life in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario in 1983, quickly followed by Mississauga in 1986. At the time, they chose the colour blue that would become the iconic symbol of a recycling container. By 1994, the Ontario government passed O. Reg 101/94: a regulation stating that each municipality with a population greater than 5,000 must establish a blue box program in their community (Quinte Waste Solutions, 2018). From this, our modern understanding of recycling programs in Canada was born. Recycling is highly encouraged in Canada, with the majority of municipalities offering universal curbside collection programs (Jennifer Olson, 2024).
Source: The Canadian Encyclopedia
There’s a lot of legal infrastructure that has gone into place to support this kind of waste management approach in Canada, such as:
Municipal Recycling Programs
Product Stewardship Programs
A lot of money, time, labour, and political action has gone into investing in an idea that doesn’t actually provide the results it promises. The PR is good, and messaging is consistent for everyday Canadians, so it’s no wonder many of us have been lulled into a false sense of security that our recyclables are actually being recycled and the rest of our waste is being managed properly.
Source: A Greener Future | photo by Mara Mahmud
At A Greener Future litter cleanups, it’s very common for volunteers and any passersby to have the same reaction to seeing the pile of litter grow on our sorting tarp. Statements like “wow, did you pick all that up right here?” or “that’s an insane amount of garbage!” Obviously the work we do is meaningful and effective as we are working very hard to remove litter from the environment that isn’t “properly” disposed of, but the truth is that the notion of “properly” is more nuanced than we think. Much of the reality of waste disposal in Canada is hidden from our site, behind the blue box, and universal waste collection programs. But what if we could see all our waste? What if we were regularly confronted with the impact of plastic disposables on our health, on wildlife, and the planet? Well, for many people in the Global South, this is their everyday reality.
We’ve discussed informal waste pickers, waste shipping, and the dark underbelly of the waste shipping industry on this planet, but must also consider our perceptions of waste. Pictures like these show a stark difference in how countries are capacitated to manage their citizens’ waste:
In Dhaka, Bangladesh, it’s commonplace to see litter all over city streets, floating in open sewage drains, and being thrown out of vehicles. The general perception of waste management practices in the city are influenced by the infrastructure in place to actually manage waste. The reality is that Greater Dhaka Area is home to approximately 50 million people (2023), and a big portion of those people live in informal urban settlements with no regulated waste management infrastructure at all.
The intersection of challenges in a city like Dhaka demonstrates an urban infrastructure under duress. A massive population, a high population density, degrading urban development regulations, and a under-capacitated waste management system all contribute to the waste problem in Dhaka, and it’s incredibly visible. The same can be said about cities in the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, India, Nigeria, and many more urban areas all over the Global South.
Image Source: Pexels, Tin Roofs, Informal Urban Settlement in Jakarta, Indonesia | photo by Tom Fisk
“On a global level, increasing population couples with high rates of urbanisation has resulted in still largely unacknowledged solid waste management crisis” (Joe Peach, 2017).
There are a myriad of challenges that arise, including how to effectively integrate the informal sector waste pickers in a formal waste management system. The nature of urbanisation in much of the Global South is haphazard and unplanned, making it difficult for robust, well-executed urban planning approaches familiar to us in the Global North, to be effective and applicable.
Referring back to the list of legal infrastructure that’s supports waste management in Canada, we also have to consider the “maturity and strength of the legal framework differs between the Global South and Global North” (Joe Peach, 2017). A legacy of colonialism affects how many countries in the Global South have gone on to develop upon gaining their independence. Which sheds additional light on many of the urban infrastructural challenges we can observe related to effective waste management.
For many people, the site of such massive amounts of unmitigated waste is radicalizing. It creates less space to be neutral. Less of an opportunity to overlook and ignore.
What if Canadians could see all the garbage hiding in our Great Lakes? Did you know that Lake Ontario alone holds approximately the same concentration of microplastics as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a patch of garbage 84 times the size of Lake Ontario I might add (1.6million km² vs. 18,960 km²).
Source: A Greener Future, volunteers collecting litter from Lake Ontario shoreline | photo by Mara Mahmud
What if we could see, with scale, how much of our recyclables don’t actually end up being recycled? What if we each went out for an hour every week and picked up litter at our local parks and beaches?
For many people, being able to actually visualise a problem holds more weight than numbers or words used to describe it. Comparative scenarios and illustrative examples frame problems much better than abstract calculations that don’t have a basis in most people’s everyday lives. The misconception that we’re not struggling with a waste problem in the Global North is literally a matter of optics. We have the luxury of resources that actively remove the evidence of our wasteful lifestyles from view, but that doesn’t make things less detrimental for the planet in the end.
Don’t be fooled by what you can’t see, seek to know more, and look deeper into things.
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