$2/day - Further thoughts on appreciation

Event though I have been trying to limit my environmental impacts by living trash-free, I never felt a...shortage, for lack of a better word...of anything. That is probably because living trash-free didn't really involve me purging much out of my life - I was close to trash-free from the outset of this journey. The things that I did thought were important to me - good food and good music as two prime examples - I have continued to surround myself in. I have never had a lack of money for these things, so much so that I haven't really cared about money whatsoever. In fact, I have a lot of money especially, even as a graduate student, because I haven't had the need to buy new things, like new electronics, at all. And while only a part of this trash-free-ness has been about showing people that it is possible, in retrospect, maybe trash-free living wasn't a big enough challenge for me. That's okay, though, because this has still been a tremendous learning experience, and it is easy to add onto this experience with other experiences, like living on two dollars a day (or thereabout).

It hasn't even been three days yet living on two dollars a day, though, and I can feel a change in thoughts in my mind. While I have always tried to appreciate everything I have been granted - by my family, friends and mentors, these past three days have made me appreciate even more the luxury I live in - being able to drink tea whenever I want to, being able to meet a friend for a cup of coffee, or going out for pizza in the middle of the night with Amit. I continue to recognise day after day that I am fortunate for being born where and when I was.

I think a lack of appreciation is one of the fundamental drivers of our behaviour in the industrialised world. We are made to feel wholly inadequate about almost everything - women aren't "beautiful" enough, our smiles aren't "perfect" enough, our shoes and bicycling parts aren't the "latest." Very little of what we have already is appreciated. That makes us look to the next. In satisfying the wants driven by this lack of appreciation, we have created economies that support themselves on the backs of people least powerful to defend themselves. This cycle perpetuates itself, and has gone on so long now that we've lost sight of what the actual problems actually are. We now think that charity will help the poor out of their plight, or that a continuation of the current economies will trickle down and magically raise everyone from their poverty. However, it is fair to say that the lifestyles of people in the industrialised world have led to poverty both here, like in inner cities, as well as elsewhere, in places like Africa and Asia. What do these lifestyles entail? They entail high amounts of products, of services, of new things. No "value" is brought into the world without new things, and the process of bringing this "value" into the world is highly extractive and highly violent, towards both nature and the poor. Poor people have to deal with bridges cited in their neighbourhoods, landfills in their backyards, and petrochemical wastes in their cities.

So if there is only one thing that each one of us can do to combat issues of environmental injustice and poverty, it would be to more fully appreciate and be thankful for what we have, and lessen our wants for things that other people tell us we need.

Trafigura update

A few posts ago, I recalled the story of Trafigura having dumped tons of petrochemical waste in the capital of Cote d'Ivoire, Abidjan, in 2006. Well, a Dutch court has found Trafigura guilty of exporting the waste from Amsterdam, and concealing the nature of the waste. This decision does not comment or judge upon what happened in Cote d'Ivoire, however, and it seems like Greenpeace may push for further litigation against Trafigura for the incident.

Inequality, globalisation, trash and waste

My last post was about Vanessa Baird's 1997 article from the New Internationalist, which talked about the world's ecological classes, the "under-polluted" South, and countries either incinerating their trash, or just simply exporting their trash to other places. As much as technocrats would like to have us believe that inequality across the world is slowly being erased, you should think otherwise. It is absolutely true that the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider, not only in places like India, but also in the US. This has serious implications for trash generation - who produces it, and who deals with it.

As you may have gathered from previous posts, trash is an environmental justice issue. Most of the trash and pollution of the world is produced by so called "rich" countries, regions and locales through industrial processes and private consumption, and this trash is exported to poorer countries, regions and locales. In most cases, I would think the "rich" will pay a nominal fee to the "poor" to keep the trash away from the "rich." An absolutely wonderful and shocking example of this is the 2006 dumping of toxic petrochemical waste in Cote d'Ivoire by a Swiss multinational company of the name Trafigura. I will copy-paste some sections from the Wikipedia entry on it here:

In 2002, Mexican state-owned oil company Pemex began to accumulate significant quantities of coker gasoline, containing large amounts of sulphur and silica, at its Cadereyta refinery. By 2006 Pemex had run out of storage capacity and agreed to sell the coker gasoline to Trafigura. In early 2006, Pemex trucked the coker gasoline to Brownsville, Texas where Trafigura loaded it aboard the Panamian registered Probo Koala tanker, which was owned by Greek shipping company Prime Marine Management Inc and chartered by Trafigura.

Trafigura desired to strip the sulphurous products out of the coker gasoline to produce naphtha which could then be sold. Instead of paying a refinery to do this work, Trafigura used an experimental process onboard the ship called "caustic washing" in which the coker was treated with caustic soda. The process worked, and the resulting naphtha was resold for a reported profit of $19 million. The waste resulting from the caustic washing would typically include highly dangerous substances such as sodium hydroxide, sodium sulphide and phenols.

On August 19, 2006, after balking at a €1000 per cubic metre disposal charge in Amsterdam, and being turned away by several countries, the Probo Koala offloaded more than 500 tons of toxic waste at the Port of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. This material was then spread, allegedly by subcontractors, across the city and surrounding areas, dumped in waste grounds, public dumps, and along roads in populated areas. The substance gave off toxic gas and resulted in burns to lungs and skin, as well as severe headaches and vomiting. Seventeen people were confirmed to have died, and at least 30,000 were injured. The company has claimed that the waste was dirty water ("slops") used for cleaning the ship's gasoline tanks, but a Dutch government report, as well as an Ivorian investigation dispute this, claiming this was toxic waste delivered from Europe to West Africa, after the ship had previously tried to offload at the port of Amsterdam, but was rejected there. During an ongoing civil lawsuit by over 30,000 Ivorian citizens against Trafigura, Trafigura, following an investigative report by the BBC's Newsnight programme, announced on 16 May 2009 that they will sue the BBC for libel. a Dutch government report concluded that in fact the liquid dumped contained two 'British tonnes' of hydrogen sulphide.


Indeed, the "rich" nations are sweeping dust under the rug. It is wrong to believe the "rich" are clean, and that the "rich" live impeccably by consuming. Since many "poorer" nations are in the "rich" nations' "debt," (however you'd like to define debt - "rich" nations giving loans to "poorer" nations via the IMF, World Bank, or "charitable donations" or "humanitarian aid") it would be easy for "rich" nations to take advantage of the situation by offloading the harmful byproducts of their way of life to the "poorer" nations, and pay them a fee to basically keep them quiet.