Garbage

9 Responses

1. The city of Kingston, Jamaica has a place called the Riverton City Dump which has caught fire almost every year, for the last 12 years. The smoke shuts down schools and events in the city, but this garbage dump fire is particularly “special”. Here’s a paragraph from the report on it:

   “We know that millions of dollars have been spent on this latest fire; money that is not going to be available for proper waste management in future. It is an open secret that the fire is often set by people who have access to the unsecured dump and may well be some of the same people who benefit from the funds which then must be spent to extinguish it.”

   http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/This-recurring-Riverton-nightmare_18572234

2. The KFC smell truly never leaves. I worked there for two weeks in high school and my coat carried the stink forever after.

3. A bit of pop culture from Downunder for you: here’s Tim Michin doing his bit for the environment as part of his Ready For This? tour a few years ago

   http://youtu.be/CI2JANBzbV4

4. And I really should see if I can find this old spoof on Star Trek about a crew who go about cleaning up garbage in space: Quark (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(TV_series)). There are only 8 episodes, so I imagine it wasn’t quite as successful as the producers had hoped.

5. Holy crap, I actually have a follow-up! I just listened to this episode driving to Ottawa a couple days ago. I recently moved to Iqaluit, Nunavut, last July, which is home to Canada’s very own trash fire. It was termed “Dumpcano”, and it started in May 2014 and was extinguished in October-November. Iqaluit doesn’t exactly employ a rigorous trash program, so everything that’s thrown out here ends up in the dump… And I do mean everything; typical garbage, compostables, electronics, anything recyclable, tires, couches, diapers, everything. So naturally, it spontaneously combusted and fired up! And I can vouch…. it smelled like shit, and kept on smelling like shit for the better part of a year. The “funny” thing is, this the second time this has happened, the first being in 2010, I believe. Obviously, lessons from that one weren’t written down. And why they put the dump on the very edge of town and 100 m from the ocean? I’ll never know…

   Nunavut has some pretty ridiculous garbage issues, like I believe a month or two ago, the community of Pond Inlet declared a state of emergency because 1 or 2 of their sewage trucks broke down, so they couldn’t “take care” of their sewage fast enough… I’ll just let your minds wander with that one. I do love this country, but the north is something else entirely.

   Anyway, I put a couple links up, and I have a couple up close and personal shots if you’re interested…!

   http://news.nationalpost.com/news/fiery-dumpcano-filling-iqaluit-with-noxiously-smelly-fumes-too-big-to-extinguish-firefighters-say/

   http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/09/16/iqaluit_dumpcano_garbage_fire_finally_extinguished.html

   Love the show… It keeps me going in my dank office.

6. I`ve seen a few episode of Quark on youtube, they are something. not sure what, but they`re something.
   some other garbage related superhuman pop culture
   In the first TMNT cartoon there was the character Muckman who was a sanitation engineer who got mutagen dumped on him and his buddy, resulting in him turning into a creature of living garbage and sludge. the action figure is truly disgusting in appearance, and was designed with several reservoirs where you could place the toy lines signature `Ooze` so he would leak snot-green slime out of his mouth and a hole in his stomach. One of the modern TMNT had another character called Garbage Man, but he was basically a dude with a tank who was running some sort of slave colony on a garbage island.

   X-men 2099 had a character named Junkpile who would build his body out of whatever scrap metal was available.
   And DC has a character called Garbage Man who seems to be made out of living garbage with toxic skin and regenerative abilities.

   and, in addition to occasionally fighting ghost animated refuse and … ‘dehbriss’ from time to time the Real Ghostbusters occasionally tangled with a ghost called Sleaze and his brother Glob who could merge into the gestalt ghost called Slob (this was in the bad time of RGB where Slimer was pushed to the forefront of the show) who had an affinity for garbage.

   a pic of Muckman avec Ooze
   https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8052/8384985612_440a447031.jpg

7. so you know…
   you can recycle plastic bags, batteries and lightbulbs at London Drugs.

8. I’m curious if the recent Nepalese earthquakes & avalanches dislodged some of the poop off the sides of Everest. Possible follow up topic?

9. From the front line of Jakarta’s dump:
   ABC correspondent falls into toxic sludge dump and lives to tell the tale
   http://ab.co/1QChxoU