What is Rubbish?
Economist
Viv Brown, poses the question: ‘What is rubbish?’. He says: 'One answer is that
it is something that has no value…. It is what nobody wants, so it is
worthless….Items have value because people value them…. Similarly, if rubbish
has no value, this is because people disvalue it (not because the item is in
and of itself worthless). So looking at rubbish … can tell us something about
the social processes that are involved in valuing, or in this case, devaluing,
an item.' (Vivianne Brown, Rubbish Society: Affluence, Waste and Values,
2009, p.105).
What may be labeled ‘rubbish’ in the West, represents
a resource for other less wealthy communities around the world.
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/international-development/environmental-science/getting-wasted
In many Chinese cities street recycling is a way of life. Here ‘waste’
is a means for people to earn money to live. If they work hard (and are lucky)
they make more money than if they had not migrated from their villages. Many
cities have a steady supply of materials such as paper, corrugated card,
plastics and metals. These are collected for recycling (that is, making into
new items with a similar function). The
recyclers will spend their entire day travelling around neighborhoods
collecting and buying materials. Once they have collected as much as they can
carry, they then take their load to depots where the waste is weighed out and
money changes hands. In many cases the people collecting waste are rural
migrants who have moved towards China’s coastal cities in search of a better
life for themselves.
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