Reduce Reuse Recylce

I remember reading an article a few years ago about recycling efforts in Bangladesh. Apparently there is an industry here for collecting and sorting the plastic drink bottles from other countries. There were pictures in the article of children climbing over color coded mountains of plastic. There were pictures of women carrying huge loads of discarded plastic on their heads.

There is also a big shipbreaking industry here. Aging ships come here on their final journey, deposit their wares, and then stay, beached and ready for demolition. They're torn apart by hundreds of men climbing like spiders up and over every inch, sorting and saving every last usable item.

There is road out of Chittagong lined with shops selling salvaged shipbreaking items. There are piles of rusty beams, sheet metal, circular windows, ladders, gumboots, faded orange life rings and anything else you can imagine being recovered from the doomed disabled vessels. Our friends told us they once found dozens of slot machines for sale there. What kind of ship was that?

Of course, this is a great thing. I'm truly impressed with the environmental and financial benefits harnessed by these efforts.

And, I hope that this same spirit of salvage and reuse isn't applied (as rumors have said) to the piles of medical waste sometimes seen, heaped and waiting for removal, on the side of the street. I stepped on a catheter the other day (accidentally, with shoes on). It was lying next to a syringe.