Waste is costing us money. Waste is despoiling our environment and exposing ugly corporate practices. Waste is destroying health and causing us to leave our homes.
Waste has been and always will be with us. Pre-industrial societies produced waste and our discovery of their waste informs our knowledge of them.
Aboriginal shellfish midden - Stradbroke Island, Queensland.
Modern society is producing masses of waste due to large populations, intensive consumption and highly manufactured products. We are not only producing waste that is hard to dispose of because of its quantity. We are producing waste that is dangerous to health because of the sophistication of manufactured products and the materials used in that manufacture. We are aware of this - because we are very keen on sending that waste somewhere else.
Major corporations are involved in inflicting waste on powerless black people. A democracy like Australia is prepared to over-ride the majority wishes of people to dump waste on its black citizens that citizens in major urban areas don't want anywhere near themselves.
Humanity - and that includes my countryfolk in Australia - is living in cloud cuckoo land with regard to waste. We are killing everything we rely upon for a good life: our own health; our own environment; our own water and air. Australia has not faced the music on the waste-front yet. It is certainly not demonstrating that it is prepared to pay the piper - in fact, face the real cost of living in the form of the cost of waste.
The light is dawning for some. These are the people who are curtailing their consumption; living simply; purchasing ethically; mindful of how they dispose of possessions. These are thoughtful, reflective steps - but they are small ones being made by small numbers of people. Waste-mindedness has not infected the whole of Australia - yet. Waste-mindedness has not yet hit the mainstream of Australia. It is high time it did.
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