Iron Crows
This film examines life in the Chittagong ship demolition yard, where workers risk their lives for two dollars a day to provide for their families.
This film examines life in the Chittagong ship demolition yard, where workers risk their lives for two dollars a day to provide for their families.
A couple competes to live with zero waste for a whole year, with comedic results.
Jeremy Irons leads the viewer around the world as he explores the worst effects of the amount of waste humans produce, and what can be done about it.
This film follows the efforts of the city of San Francisco to reach zero waste.
This film follows an entrepreneurial father of 27 children as he runs a recycling business in Sao Paulo to sustain his huge family.
Agbogbloshie (Ghana) is an unnerving and fascinating example of human ingenuity, but at the same time an environmental and social tragedy.
Urban mining—reclaiming valuable metals from discarded electronic devices—has become an important economic activity in the informal sector in places such as Agbogbloshie, a slum in Accra, Ghana. This article examines the material flows linking Ghana with the rest of the world, the politics of waste recycling, and the hazards faced by those processing e-waste.
In case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of bicycling and waste recycling—tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.
Is a world without waste truly achievable? The essays in this volume of RCC Perspectives discuss zero waste as a vision, as a historical concept, and as an international practice. Going beyond the motto of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” they reflect on the feasibility of creating closed material cycles and explore real-world examples of challenges and successes on the way to zero waste.
Society’s approach to environmental protection has so far relied on certain prevailing, but perhaps specious, beliefs—that we cannot impact the environment positively, or that environmental protection is incompatible with economic growth. Braungart explores how, rather than making ineffective changes to an already broken system, it would be more beneficial to rethink that system entirely.