A Placeholder for Interesting Things – Trash Pickers and Sustainability

Keeping my pledge to write more frequently means there will be posts like this one which are placeholders until I have the time to explore a topic in more detail. I ran across this fascinating article about trash pickers, the poor around the world who scrape out a living salvaging recyclables from the street and landfills. Someone has written a book about them, which I will pick up and review. After reading this paper a few years ago, which observed that a significant fraction of the global stock of copper resides in landfills, maybe the idea is possible that the despised (or ignored) trash pickers could become a global economic force.