Trash Talking

1. The Eastern Garbage Patch, Pacific Ocean.

Turning and turning in a widening gyre is a field of floating plastic trash bigger than Texas. Probably the world’s largest dump, the EGP is about halfway between San Francisco and Hawaii, an area where weak winds and sluggish currents cause flotsam from around the Ocean to collect. The trash comes mostly from land but also from loads lost or jettisoned by ships. One researcher recounts sailing for a week and being able to see plastic trash floating from horizon to horizon.

2. Fresh Kills Landfill, Staten Island, USA.

As every schoolboy knows, there are two man-made structures visible from space: one kept the Mongol hordes out of China, one received New York City’s garbage for fifty years. Fresh Kills is now sealed up and the City of New York plans to turn it into a park, but its sheer size earns it a place on this list. It is one of the largest man-made structures on the planet, 225 feet at its highest point and covering 2200 acres; during its peak intake in the mid-eighties, it received 29,000 tons of garbage a day.

3. Roro Asbestos Dump, Jharkhand, India.

Asbestos mines in the Roro hills in central India closed down in 1983, and since then a gigantic pile of mining waste has lain there unattended, slowly spreading downhill into nearby paddy fields. About 700,000 tons of leftover asbestos and the rock it was mined from form a toxic mini-mountain on the hills. While Roro can’t compete with the other Wonders for scale, the striking image it presents of an open geologic-formation-size heap of a substance which in this country is handled by people in full-body suits puts it on the list. Preliminary studies show major health affects on the local population, although the results are complicated by the fact that many of them used to work in the mine itself.

4. Smoky Mountain, Manila, Philipines.

Officially shut down in 1995, this garbage dump (its picturesque name comes from the clouds of methane that rose above it when it was active) for decades provided a livelihood for thousands of people who lived on or near it. Smoky Mountain makes the list because of its fame; it has probably been surpassed in size and relevance by other sites in Manila, where as many as 150,000 people, many of them migrants from the provinces, make their living scavenging trash. Men, women, and children alike live by the dumps in some of the world’s worst slums. In the year 2000, over three hundred people were killed when one of the faces of Payatas dump collapsed.

5. Shipbreaking Yards, Alang, India.

Every year hundreds of big ships are retired and sent to Asia for scrap. They are often dismantled on what were once pristine beaches, by workers with no protection from toxic materials. Conditions at Alang have somewhat improved in the last few years and it may soon lose its place on this list to an enormous planned shipbreaking site on Vodarevu Beach, which would cover an area of over 160 football fields. But it’s still impressive. Leonard says of her visit a few years ago, “it is the closest thing I have ever seen to what I picture hell to look like. Miles of filthy shoreline, gigantic tankers beached and being stripped for any valuable parts. There is smoking oil, huge hunks of metals, flames all over. Thousands of barely clad workers crawl all over these hulking ships with flame torches or primitive tools. Big pieces of metal fall and many lose their limbs. Some of these sites average a worker death a day.”

6. Yucca Mountain, Nevada, USA.

Exploratory work has begun on this proposed repository for nearly all the U.S.’s nuclear waste, which if completed would be a wonder that no living thing would ever see. Over 70,000 tons of radioactive material must be isolated for at least 10,000 years to avoid a potential toxic cataclysm. To do this, canisters of waste would be carried into the mountain by rail car, and remote-controlled equipment would put the canisters on supports in the underground tunnel, 1,000 feet below the mountain’s surface. The project is set to be completed in 2017, and costs are estimated in the tens of billions. Nevadans are not happy about the idea and have not been won over by the cartoon character used to promote the plan to children, Yucca Mountain Johnny.

7. Electronic Waste Dumps, Guiyu, China.

This small area near China’s East Coast is a major destination for North America’s electronic waste. While not as visually impressive as some of the other Wonders, the villages in the area process an incredible amount of computer waste. As many as 100,000 people are employed this way, most of them rural migrant workers. In every neighborhood, in backstreets, outside the town by the river, piles of electronic waste are dismantled by hand. In one small village, the residents make their living entirely by burning wires to recover copper. Such huge quantities of toxic e-waste have passed through the area that sediment samples taken near the river show levels of dangerous metals like tin and lead at tens or hundreds of times the EPA threshold.

(Behind The Scenes illustration from chezrump's flickr; Alang from Soumik's flickr.)