Carl Sagan - Robert Fortey - A Bronx Tale 1993 - Euripides - Simon Reeve TV - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Star Trek: Voyager TV - The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer TV - Horizon TV - The Secret World of Your Rubbish TV - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Secrets of the Mega-Landfill TV - Tonight TV - Cities: Nature’s New Wild TV - ToxiCity: The Story of a Graveyard for Electronics … and People TV - The Secret Life of Landfill: A Rubbish History TV - Adnan Sarwar TV - Reggie Yates TV - The Lightbulb Conspiracy TV - Daniel Benjamin - Penn & Teller TV - Ronald Reagan - William Shakespeare - Proverb - Ian Dury & The Blockheads TV - Tony Benn - Matthew 7:6 - Matthew 26:8 - Kurt Cobain - Into Eternity 2010 - Theodore Roosevelt - Recycling: Is It a Con TV - Dirty Business: What Really Happens to Your Recycling TV - The New York Times - United States Environmental Protection Agency - Tim Flannery - Panorama TV - Nick Broomfield TV - The Cover Up at Times Beach 2017 - Adam Leith - Ian R Crane - Atomic Homefront TV - Inside America's Abandoned Nuclear Sites? 2023 - Dispatches TV - Radioactive Waste: A Nuclear Nightmare 2023 -
The universe is a pretty big space. It’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So, if it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space, right? Carl Sagan
They [fungi] have successfully recycled the world’s waste for hundreds of millions of years. Professor Robert Fortey, The Magic World of Mushrooms, BBC 2015
The saddest thing in life is wasting talent. A Bronx Tale 1993 starring Lillo Brancato junior & Robert De Niro & Chazz Palminteri & Taral Hicks & Francis Capra & Joe Pesci & Clem Caserta & Kathrine Narducci et al, director Robert De Niro, dad to Calogero
Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. Euripides
Central Asia: Once part of the Soviet Union. It’s a region dominated by oil, Islam and enough radioactive waste to terrify the West. China, Russia and China are all vying for power here. The countries are strategically vital and they’re all called Stan. Simon Reeve: Holidays in the Danger Zone: Meet the Stans: Kazakhstan & Kyrgyzstan, BBC 2003
An estimated 730 tons of plastic waste is now entering the Mediterranean every day. Mediterranean with Simon Reeve IV, BBC 2018
I love all waste
And solitary places. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo
Your technology would throw the waste export industry into chaos. Before long I would be obsolete. Star Trek: Voyager s5e1: Night, Malon
Target their cargo hold. Time to take out the garbage. ibid. Janeway on bridge
In the hidden world beneath London an army of 4,000 workers is attempting to build the biggest sewer in Britain’s history: seven metres wide and twenty miles long, the enormous tunnel will run directly beneath the River Thames. The five-billion-pound tunnel is urgently needed. The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer I, BBC 2018
A project first mooted almost twenty years ago. ibid.
London’s excess sewage has to go somewhere so to stop it backing up into people’s homes – it’s released into the Thames. ibid.
London’s Victorian sewers are a labyrinth of more than 500 miles of interconnecting tunnels. Parts of the network have never been accurately surveyed. ibid.
If successful, the new super-sewer will capture this waste and transfer it to Europe’s largest treatment works east of the city. The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer II
Jim must scan every inch of the 20-mile stretch of the Thames to complete the underwater map. ibid.
Every day over 30 tonnes of wet-wipes are flushed down London’s loos. ibid.
During tunnelling, engineers plan to excavate over 40,000 tonnes of earth every week. ibid.
The most important part of the machine is the cutter-head; it’s been built specifically based on the predictions of what the earth will be like sixty metres bellow the Thames. The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer III
Sixty metres below the assembly team’s feet deep underground in Battersea excavators have been battling through the tough ground. ibid.
In the 1990s strange things began to happen in the small town of Corby. Mothers began to give birth to children with severe deformities. As the number of cases grew, the mothers demanded to know why this had happened to their children. This is the unknown story of the worst child poisoning case since Thalidomide. A case that changed our understanding of the dangers of air pollution. Horizon: Toxic Town: The Corby Poisonings, BBC 2020
‘Mothers all from the same small area all of whom had given to birth to children with very similar deformities.’ ibid. Stephen Bevan, Sunday Time journalist
The waste sites were located on land where the town’s steel works once stood. Corby started life as a village but in the 1930s one of the largest steel plants in Europe was built. But in 1980, faced with huge government cuts, the steel work shut down, leaving 11,000 people unemployed. Corby Council devised a plan to regenerate the town (1983). This tiny council took on the biggest land reclamation project in Europe with a ten-year regeneration programme to help bring Corby back to life. But demolishing a steel works is a complex process: steel making generates toxic waste that must be carefully disposed of. ibid.
As this story spread, more and more mothers started coming forward. ibid.
‘It was such a cover up.’ ibid.
With the Council claiming no evidence of a cluster, the mother’s fight for answers seemed to be over … ‘My reading the article in the Sunday Times was complete happenstance … I had back in the day worked in the steel works.’ ibid. Des Collins, solicitor
‘It isn’t normal for secret documents to turn up; it’s like something out of a John Grisham novel.’ ibid.
The advice included that the contractors cover their lorries and make sure no dust is created particularly on public roads … ‘Lorries weren’t covered with sludge raining out of the back of these dump trucks. All the roads in this area are judged covered in this silt. And that’s where things went pear-shaped … A tremendous amount of pollution over the whole of the district. That is basically a toxic soup of dust hanging over a town … over many many years.’ ibid. Environmental health officer
18 families were now involved in the fight for compensation, and they were finally ready to go to trial … A case that had never been proven before: 10 years after their battle began, all 18 mothers made their way to court … The judge visited the reclamation site … The issue of how far the dust could travel … [Corby Council] was hit with a legal bill of almost £15 million. It was the first case in the world to rule that air pollution could harm babies in the womb. ibid.
Look beyond our disgust and we might see it’s a substance with amazing potential to give the ultimate renewable resource, capable of solving some of humanity’s greatest challenges. Its gases have the potential to generate power. It’s full of nutrients that are essential to agriculture. And it contains medical secrets that could transform healthcare. I’m talking about human waste, sewage. Horizon: The Secret Science of Sewage, BBC 2021
The average adult produces one pooh a day of 250g in mass … 75% is water. ibid.
Wet-wipes have only become an issue in the last twenty years. ibid.
Human waste: In the UK we produce 11 billion litres of it a day. The single biggest volume of human waste we produce is urine: two litres a day each. And its rich in minerals. ibid.
Globally we dump a colossal two billion tons of rubbish every year. But what we chuck away has got to go somewhere. The Secret World of Your Rubbish s1e1, Channel 5 2019
In our capital city thousands of dustbins go out every day of the working week to collect around three million bin-bags full of rubbish. ibid.
Now a tightly regulated industry. ibid.
Landfill waste is bursting at the seems. ibid.
We recycle less than half of our household waste. ibid.
We send around seven million old mattresses to landfill every year. ibid.
Air Salvage International – a company that recycles on an epic scale. ibid.
Underground fires can last for up to twenty years. And are almost impossible to put out. ibid.
All too often they [Crapper & Sons] find stuff that should never have been thrown out in the first place. The Secret World of Your Rubbish s1e2
We dispose of over fifty-two million tons of rubbish in landfill every year. ibid.