(3 Dec 2010)
1. Wide interior of briefing
2. Mid shot of panellists
3. Camera cutaway
4. Wide of display with graphic showing greenhouse gas emissions
5. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Exequiel Estay, President, Chilean Scavenger Association:
“We are professional recyclers. We are doing the job others don’t want to do. We are not a problem to society, we are not a problem to the system. For decades we have been part of the solution of solid waste disposal on this planet.”
6. Set up shot of waste picker Supriya Dilip Bhadakwad
7. SOUNDBITE (Unknown/English) Supriya Bhadakwad, 13-year-old Indian landfill recycler:
“When I started working, I was not aware of all these issues that they are working on. We are helping the climate from all this pollution, but now I have come to know about all the consequences of waste management and became aware of what I’m doing. (++Followed by English translation through translator++).”
8. Wide of bus loaded with rubbish
9. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Marcela Puc, Waste picker:
“There are slow seasons, like now we have a slow season. We don’t have work like we used to, and now we are not allowed to work as we would like.”
10. Various of rubbish, rubbish burning
11. Wide of large mound of rubbish
12. Wide of rubbish truck
STORYLINE:
Clambering over garbage heaps, rummaging through trash cans, 13-year-old Supriya Bhadakwad didn’t set out to save the planet, just her family.
But two decades later, in the global arena of climate negotiations, she and other scavengers are making their voices heard, tilting with big corporate players in a tug-of-war over the world’s dump sites.
The Goliaths they’re taking on are companies building incinerators worldwide to burn waste from landfills, material generations of “waste pickers” have survived on.
Many of the projects are supported by private funds raised under the UN climate treaty.
Bhadakwad had come 11-thousand miles (18-thousand kilometres) to the annual UN climate conference in Cancun on behalf of 6-thousand organised landfill recyclers in her native Pune, India, to demand access to the waste now trucked instead to a new incinerator.
Without their dump, they’re trying to survive by going door to door for trash in a community 12 miles (20 kilometres) away.
Their environmentalist allies say some 50 (M) million people worldwide depend on scavenging for a meagre livelihood. And these advocates and poor recyclers have an environmental argument to make:
By collecting and recycling plastic bags and bottles, glass, aluminium and other material, those 50 (M) million scavengers represent a huge opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to Mariel Vilella, a campaigner with the international group GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.
She told reporters, since what’s destroyed must be replaced by items newly manufactured and transported in a process using up natural resources and producing more greenhouse gases.
“For decades we’ve been part of the solution for solid waste management on this planet,” said Exequiel Estay, head of a Chilean scavenger association. “We demand that our jobs become sustainable.”
The GAIA group proposes alternative approaches: Don’t burn anything, but deliver decomposing organic waste to facilities that will capture and use methane gas for electricity production, and leave solid waste to the landfills for waste-picker collection.
Her organisation and other supporters flew representatives of scavenger associations from eight nations to Cancun to, among other things, raise their concerns with the CDM board of directors at an open discussion Tuesday, when they urged the board to reconsider its approval of such incinerator and landfill projects.
Could she have imagined she was helping the planet?
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Post time: Jun-18-2017