Indonesia Artist Wants People to Buy Back Their Garbage?

Rather than have Indonesians who are known as "trash pickers" pick up garbage that is reusable for an amount of money, Ann Wizer is paying them above market value for plastics for creating crafts.

When I first read the headline from CNN "Buy Your Garbage Back?" it really made me wonder what was up with this story. Ann Wizer and a few others in Indonesia have been making crafts from unsustainable trash, such as plastic packaging.

These people feel by taking the plastic wrappers out of the trash equation in Indonesia, it will help keep their streets cleaner and create a higher paying work force for those in this country. I can understand why it is wiser to use items, such as the plastic wrappers, can help eliminate the trash problem in Indonesia or any other country.

Since we are a disposable culture, more so than our parents and their parents, many of us don't think about what we throw away. I know many people who use to save their coffee cans and milk jugs to cover their plants in the spring to prevent them from being frost bitten. In most cases, these people would keep both of these items year after year for their gardens. They would use these items until they were no longer usable. That means the coffee cans were so rusted they were falling apart. The milk jugs were also disintegrating through their use in the gardens from the water and sun.

Ann Wizer's thought of artists in Indonesia buying back their own garbage to recycle it into something that is useful will help the local garbage pickers earn more than what they are making now. The amount the garbage pickers are making in Indonesia is $35 a month. Many of these people try to support their families on this small amount of money each month. That is truly sad these people are not getting paid any more than that for one of the filthiest jobs I have heard of or seen.

I do commend Ann Wizer for creating a company that recycles plastic garbage into something that is useable for a country that is rated as a third world country. Not only is she trying to improve the standard of living for many of the Indonesians, she is also trying to save the environment.

I know in the United States we have recycling centers that turn much of our plastics, paper, glass, and metals into new containers for our products. Many countries don't have recycling centers like we do.

Source

Tom Faust and Fredricka Whitfield; Would You Buy Back Your Garbage?; CNN.com