Caption 1:
Before we stepped into
the station of the recycling company in Iceland, we saw a group of birds gliding
in the sky. They changed directions all at once, creating pretty patterns
collaboratively in the smelly air with a background of giant cubic containers. Although we stood in such broken and
industrial landscape, I was amazed by the bird dance in the drizzle of that
day. This place is the home for those birds. They are the guardians of trash. I
keep thinking that the things they guard deserve a better name then “trash”.
However, it seems no one really cares the “useless” stuff that have been dumped
away.
Caption 2
This is one of the
major recycling companies in Iceland, located 20 miles away from the capital
Reykjavik. We learn that after recycling products were collected from
recycling bins, they would be sorted, packed up in such recycling station and
sold out oversea to the country such like Netherland or Norway. There is a global
market for processing recycling products. Following the footprints of these
usable trashes along the shipment and process, one might find out that the trip
ends in a country such as China or India. Actually that is not the whole story,
when new products are produced in China or India after using the processed
recycling materials, they can be sold back to Iceland again.
Caption 3
To some extent, it sounds pretty sustainable
when people use recyclable materials in production. However, the quality of processed
recyclable materials, health issues with adding chemicals to bleach paper or
re-boil the plastic and labeling of products made of recycling materials are
questionable. Secrets are hiding in recycling products processing. However it
is not ordinary people’s responsibility to care about this last sector of
production. But to retain the value of usable materials in trashes and use them
as raw materials in production, it is our concern to ensure the quality of
recycling products if we treat those as the raw materials. One important note people need to keep in
mind is to clean the recyclable products before dumping it into a recycling
bin. Otherwise, it will discredit the
value of recycling products. The worst of all, recycling products will be transported
to landfill when they are considered to be contaminated.
Caption 4
Different recycling
products including paper (office paper and household paper), plastic (dairy
product plastic, plastic bags, others), timber, battery, metals are being
separated in different blocks. It is really confusing to figure out how the
manager categorizes recycling products. Last year this company sent out 8000
tons of recycling products and 4000 tons were cardboard.
Caption 5
There are the
plastic tubes for coca cola bottle before they are blew up. They were sent to
recycling company because they are defective products.
Caption 6
People sent a cart
of brand new metal paper with wrong prints to the recycling station. The
manager plan to grind those paper and find a market to sell them.
Caption 7
These are the boxes
of crushed Coke tins, which look like the scenario in the movie Wall.E.
These boxes are not going to be shipped oversea.
Caption 8
Household wastes
are compressed to go to landfill. It is very depressing when I know Iceland
could not recycle glass because they don't have machine and technology to
process it. On the other hand, it is fairly expensive to ship it away into
global market. Thus glass products are going to landfill as waste.
No comments:
Post a Comment