Most people crossing a dumpster immediately cover their noses; the overwhelmingly disgusting smell nauseates them. The area is swarming with flies, dogs, vultures, crows, to scourer the picked over heaps for morsels of food. Welcome to the home of the human scavenger.

This is the site of competition where people compete against one another for aluminum cans, beer battles and plastic wrapped food items.

In most developed countries thrash sites are far away from human settlements, where they don’t get the noxious stench or a feeling of guilt that they might somewhere be responsible for it. A life dependent on the garbage dumps is a life of real poverty: denial of clean water, food, healthcare and a clean environment. Humans were better off tribally, at least the jungles sustained them. Developing countries like China, Manilla, Philippines, Dakar, Senegal, India and others like Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, and Egypt have the worst kind of scavenging.

What is the worst of this inhuman life?
• No access to the essentials vital for life.
• Loss of complete human dignity, eating some one else’s half eaten food leading to psychological poverty.
• Malnutrition and mortality especially amongst the children.
• A life in absolute zero hygiene conditions, especially with dirty water leading to a number of diseases. The air is thick with the smell of garbage and dust, the ground breathes methane. Respiratory and skin diseases and diseases of the eyes are common.
• An unsure life, they don’t know if they will get even food to eat the next day or not.
• Toxic dumping for example a cell phone battery can sometimes cause explosions or contaminate the waters leading to horrible diseases.
• Death by being crushed under heavy vehicles and dump trucks.
• Where the landfills for dumps are not properly lined, they turn into filters that pollute the groundwater and damage the environment.

Yet these are the very people that help you! where you should have recycled, they salvage materials from waste at the price of their health. There are 64 million scavengers in the world today. Real profit is being made also in this realm but these poor people are at its worst end. Proper management can convert garbage dumps into sustainable waste management system, with a better life for these people.

Real poverty doesn’t just happen, it is artificially created by a system of cold self-indulgence. It can be stopped, but only by removing the organizations that implement corporate globalization and by giving the essentials of life back to the people from whom it has been stolen.