A documentary about the plight of the Cairo waste pickers – Garbage Dreams. Here they are at recycling school.

Thanx Rolando!

Rolando Politi went to Copenhagen this summer for cap activism.

Wow, sometimes it’s good to check out what’s going on outside my head. Look what I found today:

It’s part of the Plastiki project…  recently arrived in Sydney. Click here for an entertaining critique.

King Leopold II of Belgium was a greedy and cruel colonial rapist – fuck him. I say take down all his statues. But Brussels knitta-gang “Tricot Trottoir” knit a string of plastic hands to place around his statue behind the Royal Palace to commemorate the atrocities of the colonial period. Atrocities like this: “Villages who failed to meet the rubber collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in cut hands, where each hand would prove a kill.” The Democratic Republic of Congo won independence from Belgian rule on June 30, 1960, and soon-to-be-assassinated Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba gave a kick-ass speech to mark the occasion. Oh, but back to plastic: love the hood-mask this plastiekfabrique girl’s wearing!

Let the sun shine in through the walls of your plastic bedroom – that’s what you could do in this cottage at Puerto Iguazu, near the frontier between Argentina and Brazil. A local family made it entirely with recycled materials; its walls have over 1200 PET bottles and its ceiling is made of more than 1300 Tetra Pack cartons. Click here for the full article on TreeHugger.

Don’t forget the Temple of Million Bottles . . .

via Carol Marley

I’ll be wearing my plastic polar bear mask in the streets of Copenhagen on December 12th. Check out Climate Justice Action for more on that subject.

I contribute occasional blog posts to an upcycling portal called re-imagining our waste. Here’s a little something from Aerin Dunford, another contributor. It’s a purse she made from can pull-tabs saved for her by family and friends. I’m posting it because I like Aerin’s emphasis on upcycling as personal creativity as opposed to mass-marketing. As in “need something? Want something? Try and make it before you try and buy it.” And by the way, have you fondled your stuff lately?

Rick Haithcox made this image from a photo he took at the Gaston County dump (NC). Check out the deer – what’s that doing there? Did it have Chronic Wasting Disease? Anyway, the world’s in a sorry state if we’ve got dead deer in landfills. And don’t even get me started on people! Violence is the biggest disgrace, but the fact that there are homeless people anywhere in “the first world” is right up there with it as the shame of shames.

Hell, anywhere in the entire world, for that matter.

This marked me as a child . . .

pics from Lucky Ranch