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Karachi is widely known as a colourful city - from the clothes people wear, the food they eat, and the highly decorated public buses they travel in – but some of the colour also comes from garbage strewn along roads, streets, parks and other public places. Karachi, Pakistan. 18/12/2009.

Karachi is widely known as a colorful city -- from the clothes people wear, the food they eat, or the highly decorated public buses they travel in – but some of the color comes from garbage strewn along roads, streets, parks and other public places.
Pakistan produces 48,000 tons of solid waste every day, most of it dumped in makeshift landfills or burned in incinerators. It isn’t uncommon to see heaps of cloth strips outside the tailor’s, wasted food outside a restaurant or coffee shop, wrappings and empty boxes lining roads, and plenty of assorted rubbish at the beaches, all despite several clean-up operations to date. Also, “after the completion of construction works, construction materials are left lying there itself. 
People living in flats generally discard their waste by leaving their bins outside their front doors. Each building’s janitor then dumps the garbage in one of the numerous landfill sites in the city.
Often, once these landfills are filled to capacity, someone sets fire to the piles of trash. That adds polluting and irritating smoke to the stench and ugly filth. The people who live around the landfills cannot keep their windows open because the smoke and smell are overwhelming.
The burning of waste, however, is not just carried out informally. Over 600 tons of hospital waste is generated in Karachi daily and, of that, some 130 tons are incinerated.
Most people blame the government for the lack of proper disposal and recycling facilities at the root of the problem. “The government should provide citizens with proper system for disposal of garbage. 
“The government should install fixed dustbins.  “So that people don’t take them to their homes.”

Environment

Garbage Adds Ugly Colour to Karachi

DMTX. Karachi is widely known as a colourful city - from the clothes people wear, the food they eat, and the highly decorated public buses they...

by Majid Hussain in Pakistan on 20/12/2009

Unskilled workers make a living from the rag trade in Bagong Barrio, a former slum in the city of Caloocan. Caloocan, the Philippines. 18/04/2009. 

In the 1980's, some enterprising individuals started the rag industry by recovering the excess material from clothes factories. They then made these into the familiar disposable, round rags that are now sold in the streets of the metropolis, shops, big factories and companies. The underground industry employs people with learning difficulties who can't find regular jobs, thus enabling them to earn a living. 

Today, Bagong Barrio is considered the largest supplier of rags. While only a few families are said to have the capability to provide the raw materials, each one has dependent families and individuals who make the rags and output around two tons of the product per week. Although there is no study as to how many are engaged and benefiting from this industry, or the extent of its distribution, interviews indicate that these are not only sold within Metro Manila but buyers come from near and distant provinces within Luzon, the largest island in the country. 

The industrial complexes of Subic get their supply from Bagong Barrio as well as the many factories in the export processing zones of Laguna, Cavite and Batangas provinces. Every Thursday and Monday morning, wholesale buyers from the northern province of Nueva Ecija come to get their stock for distribution in many more areas up north in Cagayan Valley.

Business

The Rags of Bagong Barrio

Unskilled workers make a living from the rag trade in Bagong Barrio, a former slum in the city of Caloocan. Caloocan, the Philippines. 18/04/2009.

by Estan Cabigas in Philippines on 18/04/2009

BREAKING NEWS

20/12/2009 - Garbage Adds Ugly Colour to Karachi - Pakistan - DMTX. Karachi is widely known as a...
18/04/2009 - The Rags of Bagong Barrio - Philippines - Unskilled workers make a living from...

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