Cleaning Up After Ourselves

Something that really bothers me about the consumerism rampant in today's world is the unrelenting resulting garbage that ends up strewn across our planet.  Malawi does not have a garbage disposal system, so people burn their garbage or dump it in an empty lot near their house.  As you walk down the road, you step across piles of broken glass, avoid blowing plastic bags, and sometimes (more often for clutz-extraordinaire moi) slip on plastic food wrappers that end up underfoot.  I have read many times about the issues of garbage in developing nations, and living here has given me even more of a passion to fix this ( / maybe an irritation with the needless disorder and negligible recycling... I am German, after all!).  Thankfully, there have been some developments in the past few years, by people from my generation, that are giving me hope that there may be a way out of this mess, and the will to get it done.  Both approached the problems in profound ways - coming up with simple solutions that 'smarter' people with PhDs and such didn't think of as options.

The first is a teen from the Region of Waterloo (my home region!), who, realizing that if plsatic does decompose, there must be microbes that do the decomposing and could possibly be manipulated, bred a strain of microbe that eats plastic much faster - which reduces the time required for the degradation of plastic from hundreds of years to a few weeks!  Read more here if you are interested.

The second is a teen who invented an ocean cleanup array that is solar powered and filters plastic out of the ocean,separating it from organic material, and allows it to be recycled.  Again, if you'd like to read more about it, click here.

A kitten (that reminds me of my Lucy-cat) playing with the garbage on the road in camp.