Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries “first and worst,” with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet.
“In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. But if you create a world where you don’t trash people, you can’t trash the planet.”
Learn to appreciate the little things. Not all people get what they need.
Payatas, the dump site of Manila’s garbage. Home to many people, who make their living searching amongst the visible stench.
In Payatas, Philippines, this is what the new shipment looks like, the one that they wait for while you await the new iPod.
Payatas evokes an image of extreme poverty where the country’s poorest of the poor reside. It is a place where people who have been pushed from the margins of society have converged to build their future from the filthy dump site they called haven. And such woes in the widespread of poverty continue to bury a growing number of the urban poor under a trash of social, political, and economic issues and problems. Payatas remains shackle from anguish severity of the urban poverty and its remaining progress is pilfered by incapacity of local governance.
