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Trash

Downtown Oaxaca city in southern Mexico. 

Oaxaca trash dump closure wreaks environmental havoc

Environment

The closure of Oaxaca’s trash dump in October is wreaking havoc on the environment. As world leaders gather for the COP27 climate conference, Oaxaca’s trash problems indicate just how complicated climate protection can be at the local level.

Recyo

What Munich’s coffee houses learned about waste from beer culture

Environment
The Rumney Marsh, a haven to both birds and fish, sits in a highly industrial area north of Boston. For decades, the marsh's welfare has been in jeopardy due to its close proximity to an incinerator.

Residents worry Massachusetts waste incinerator is contaminating waterways

Landfill Artist

Arts, Culture & Media

Junk Sculptor

Arts, Culture & Media

Special Guest: Niall Kirkwood

Arts, Culture & Media

Niall Kirkwood teaches Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard where he is also the director of the Center for Technology and Environment. His passion for trashed and neglected landscapes has led him to focus his work around urban brownfields, Superfund sites, and closed landfills.

Volunteers crouch on the wet sand as they pick up trash from a beach near Mumbai's Versova jetty

This Mumbai lawyer inspired a massive beach cleanup

Environment

He couldn’t stand by while his beloved childhood landscape piled up with trash.

Najat Rabat and Yassine Mazzout used to work picking trash from a landfill outside Morocco's capital. Now they work together at a new recycling cooperative.

These trash pickers used to have miserable jobs. Now they run their own recycling cooperative.

Jobs

Fifteen million people around the world have perhaps the worst job imaginable: scavenging junk from the world’s dumps. But in Morocco, a group of trash pickers has made the transition to well-paid employees of a new recycling center. And they hope it’s an example others can follow.

Garbage piles up in a riverbed near Beirut in late 2015. The region's almost year-long trash crisis prompted a political crisis, but also the emergence of nascent recycling programs.

Never waste a good waste crisis: Beirut’s trash woes give birth to recycling

Environment

Household recycling was virtually unknown in Lebanon until Beirut’s trash crisis began last year. That’s when the region’s only landfill shut down, people started dumping trash wherever they could, and one activist saw an opportunity for people to think differently about their waste.

A scavenger collects plastic for recycling in a river covered with rubbish in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 20, 2009.

5 countries dump more plastic into the oceans than the rest of the world combined

Environment

Plastics are destroying ocean ecosystems — here are the worst offenders.