The World Is Drowning In Trash. How Did We Get To This Point?

The plastic soup floating in the Pacific is only the tip of the iceberg.

The trillions of micro plastic particles scattered across oceans and seas are only the proof of our failure at taking care of the planet.

But if we really want to learn about this environmental emergency, if we want to discover the true relationship of our society with trash, we also need to look somewhere else.

That's what Alexandra Spring does in this three-episode series called The History of Wastefulness.

The journalist travels around the world and talks to different experts to analyze the issue in depth. Some of the best takeaways are:

• We live so far away from the enormous amounts of trash we ourselves create that is hard for us to completely understand the scale of the problem. 

• Trash pickers—poor and marginalised people, who we tend to think of as criminals and/or drug addicts—are doing much more to save the environment than we can imagine.

In the second episode, Spring takes a look into how past societies and civilizations dealt with rubbish. Surprise: they were also drowning in trash.

Imperial Rome and its discarded amphorae relate to today's plastic crisis (although—of course—in a much smaller scale).

Also, through history we can learn how difficult is to change people's attitudes regarding trash. In 19th century Paris, people protested against Prefect Eugene Poubelle and his decision to introduce what later evolved to our modern trash bins.

However, we haven't yet learned much about it.

Our streets—depending on the country—can be cleaner, but that doesn't put an end to the root cause: our consumption-based economies.

In that sense, it's very interesting to discover in the podcast the approach to trash that communist states took in the past.

As the journalist tells us, only at war, when throwing things away is almost treason because everything needs to be used, we don't waste too much.

Only Japan shows us the right way to go.