WHENEVER THE GROWING PILE OF PLASTIC waste in front of her door takes up too much space, Asinate Lewabeka has a simple solution. She sets it on fire. She prefers to do so at dawn when the air is still so that the smoke rises in a black column. She says any later in the day, the coastal breeze risks blowing the acrid fumes straight into her home, a modest shack built on the edge of the Vunato dump site in Lautoka, Fiji’s second-largest city.
Lewabeka watches in satisfaction as flames consume the haphazard pile of empty water bottles, travel-size tubes of shampoo, juice cartons, wads of food packaging, a broken plastic fan, and coils of copper wire coated in PVC insulation, reducing it all to carbonized lumps. “Plastic rubbish is the worst kind,” she says. “It is everywhere. It makes our country look so bad. I don’t want it to be a pollutant in our neighborhood, so I collect it and burn it so I can get rid of it.”
It may no longer be an eyesore, but Lewabeka’s problem is far from gone. Burning plastic releases toxic substances that will remain in the environment for hundreds of years, with deleterious impacts on human and ecosystem health. Yet open burning is one of the most common methods for eliminating unwanted waste in a remote island nation besieged by a plastic tide. Less than a third of Fiji’s plastic waste is locally produced. The rest drifts in with ocean currents from as far away as South Africa and Mexico. It must be disposed of, wherever it comes from, and burning is often the simplest option.
この記事は Time の July 15, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Time の July 15, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
An exuberant ode to human possibility
VERY RARELY DOES THE RIGHT MOVIE ARRIVE AT precisely the right time, at a moment when compassion is in short supply and the collective human imagination has come to feel shrunken and desiccated.
Broadcasting a crisis for the world to see
ON SEPT. 5, 1972, A 32-YEAR-OLD PRODUCER NAMED Geoffrey S. Mason was working in a control room for ABC Sports in Munich while 12 hostages, including several members of the Israeli Olympic delegation, were being held in a building nearby.
The Power of the Peer
WITH MENTAL-HEALTH CARE IN SHORT SUPPLY, CAN REGULAR PEOPLE FILL THE GAP?
QUEERING THE STORY
Luca Guadagnino directs Daniel Craig in an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1985 novella Queer
Shopping under the influence
LTK CO-FOUNDER AMBER VENZ BOX SAW THE FUTURE OF RETAIL. IT TOOK YEARS FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD TO CATCH UP
The Kingmaker
Elon Musk's partnership with the President-elect
Turkey's Erdogan plots his next power grab
RECEP TAYYIP Erdogan is a political survivor.
Why maiden names matter in the age of AI and identity
IN THE DIGITAL AGE, A NAME IS MORE THAN JUST A label. It's tied to our professional history and social media presence.
The D.C. Brief
INSIDE DONALD TRUMP'S ORBIT, it's become a given that the former and future President can bypass Congress to magically fill his Cabinet with the loyalists of his choosing.
Let's embrace vulnerability in dating
AS A DATING COACH AND THE DIRECTOR OF RELATIONship science at Hinge, I often hear from people who feel like there's something big they need to disclose on early dates-chronic illness, mental-health struggles, college debt, family estrangement, lack of romantic experience, or trauma.