Rumor has it China stop importing plastic after this documentary came out:
This puts the recent "90% of ocean plastic comes from Asian/African rivers" story[1] in a drastically new light.
The issue was previously framed in terms of poor waste management due to lack of infrastructure for native waste (agreed) and uneducated Asian/African consumers (a blame-laundering technique that the disposable product industry has already successfully deployed in the US[2]). But on further examination, it seems the countries with "good infrastructure"[3] and "well-educated wasters" may be part of (or even a majority of) the problem.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16913389
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050401192355/http://www.altern...
[3] "good waste infrastructure" being, in part, a euphemism for "keep that expensive-to-handle waste in a box until it's outside our border so it's technically Not Our Problem"
Even then I wish everyone would see it.
Humanity sucks sometimes ... if not most of the time.
"..they made him wear a radioactive exposure badge and fired him when the badge tipped over the safe range."
The union bosses wouldn't even go down there and called orders from megaphones.
There are videos/photos of many other countries that look much worse than this, think India, even Mexico.
Edit: The homeless man I mentioned lives in a major city in the US, not a third world country.
Isn't that a good thing? You wouldn't want people to be working there to get unsafe radiation exposure.
Not to defend the company in this case, but I suspect he reached the annual occupational dose limit [1], so unless they had office work for him there probably wasn't anything else to do. This is something migrant radiation workers [2] need to be vigilant about, to make sure they aren't out of work for a year after one job, or at least make sure that job pays them appropriately.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part020/p...
[2] Commercial nuclear power plants generally shut down once every 1-2 years for a several-week maintenance and refueling outage, during which time the plant will bring in several hundred extra workers, often contractors, to help. This has created a community of highly-skilled rad workers who travel around the country.
Also, they weren't given any protective gear, so what use is a badge saying you've been over exposed if it's guaranteed everyone will eventually hit the limit?
The point of the badge is to make sure that people don't get more than the limit of exposure, to keep the workers safe. I know tour guides in Mammoth Caves in Kentucky work this way - the caves are generally safe, but if you spend many many hours in them you will get more than the radiation limit. It just isn't a job you can work for 40 hours a week your whole life.
They also don't wear protective gear. There isn't really effective protective gear that you can wear to protect against a constant low level of background radiation. They make lead aprons for x-ray workers but those are impractical for constant wear and don't protect from every direction anyway.
You have to wonder though, if a cleaning job is only suitable for temps (mostly homeless people) that get persistent radiation exposure, it seems that corners are being cut. Unlike a cave, where there's nothing to be done other than stay out of it...
These are all sorts of externalities of out current lifestyles that these poor desperate people have to deal with. This is simply a reflection of an inhuman society we have created, making money is meaningless if you can't take care of your own. Dehumanizing others only dehumanizes ourselves.
Its not sustainable and extraordinarily wasteful packaging, convenience lifestyles and abuse of plastic currently benefits too many businesses. Uncontrolled free markets with only concern of profits with no concern for the environment and complete lack of responsibility for other people is solely to be blamed.
> Oyther countries can handle nuclear process, but cannot handle trash sorting