Garbage, waste or waste: whatever we call it, what we throw away is a great challenge for society, and journalists around the world have set out to investigate what happens to our discarded objects, drones, trackers and databases to interrogate a global waste trade. .
According to a 2022 OECD report, the world produces twice as much plastic waste as it did two decades ago, with most ending up in landfills, incinerated or flowing into the environment. Only 9% is effectively recycled.
In the United States, about 221 kilograms, or just under 500 pounds, of plastic waste is generated annually depending on the user (in terms of weight, it’s the same as an upright piano), while in Europe it’s about 114 kg. In Germany alone, more than 380 million pairs of shoes are thrown away one and both years, or only about five pairs depending on the user.
Research into where our waste goes and the implications for other people and the environment play an important role in raising awareness, says the award-winning US-based investigative journalist. U. S. Mark Schapiro, board member of the Environmental Investigative Forum (EIF).
“When things are thrown away, they don’t just disappear. Research revealing the risks that waste can present is incredibly vital from a public fitness attitude and reveals another size of the deep inequalities of who is exposed to poisonous leaks from the waste stream. ,” says Schapiro of “Presentations: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power. “
German hounds who investigated the fate of discarded shoes as part of the “Sneakerjagd” or Sneakerhunt investigation, a story nominated for the 2022 European Press Prize, have shown that while recycling can ease consumer awareness, it offers a simple answer to the waste problem.
The project’s bloodhounds, Christian Salewski and Felix Rohrbeck, co-founders of the investigative journalism publication Flip, had in the past used GPS trackers in an investigation into illegal e-waste exports and made the decision to rework the concept to read about the fast-paced fashion industry.
They chose shoes because production is booming, their layers of glued molded plastic make them difficult to recycle, and the insoles provide a convenient hiding place for trackers.
“We thought, why don’t we wear celebrity sneakers? We seek to influence social media and publish the story on other channels, employing other people with social media fans who are not necessarily interested in investigative journalism. We look to target other young people online, sneaker buyers, through participating in the challenge according to their own schedule,” says Salewski.
The bloodhounds recruited celebrities to film videos of selfies donating their used shoes, which were then placed in recycling bins provided through retailers, sneaker brands, nonprofits or textile recycling companies. ), a GSM antenna (a wireless transmission formula that connects mobile phones) and motion detectors to save battery life in standthrough mode. They have been programmed to transmit in certain cases – after a big movement, for example – helping to make the communication of the tracker bigger. time for as long as possible.
Working with their media partners NDR and Zeit, the team created an interactive online page to tell each pair’s story in other episodes with a committed knowledge team and API to turn the trackers’ raw knowledge into an informative visual journey, with maps, images, videos and text that put the tracker’s pings in context.
They filmed themselves following the progress of the shoes and, in some cases, went to the broadcast sites to see what was happening on the ground.
“GPS is a very difficult tool for figuring out where things end up once they’re thrown away and GPS leads to data, which can be visualized on a map,” Salewski says. A little wisdom about technology, however, is a laugh, it creates an herbal suspense: stick to me as a journalist, I don’t know what’s going to happen.
The strategy paid off. In one of the biggest firsts of the research, the team found that new Nike sneakers were being destroyed or recycled.
And a pair of white Pumas belonging to TV presenter Linda Zervarkis drove them to Nairobi, Kenya, where journalists were traveling to learn more about textile imports into Africa and the disruption they cause, adding massive environmentally damaging landfills largely built from unwanted old clothes. .
Sneakerjagd has made a huge impact, reaching around 10 million people, Salewski says, with high-profile TV shows, and Tagesschau adds, helping to spice up his profile even more than social media.
“These stories are very important in capturing the hint of poisoning created through waste,” Schapiro says. “People want to remember this over and over again. When waste leaves your home or workplace, it doesn’t go away. Part of that research is also about shifting duty to the manufacturer: there are far less poisonous opportunities available.
A careful review of knowledge, followed by on-the-ground reporting, served as the basis for an investigation through the bloodhounds of Ojo Público, which published Latin America: The Repository of Other People’s Garbage in November 2022. They have an effect and the moral problems created by exports of plastic waste to the region.
Journalists from the point of sale, a member of GIJN, discovered that the recycling procedure itself is riddled with pitfalls and that the industry surrounding it is transparent.
The cause of the investigation?” A small report that said that Latin America is the world’s dumping ground,” says Ojo Público journalist Kennia Velázquez, who has worked with Moníca Cerbón and other colleagues on the story.
Mexican and Peruvian journalists teamed up to deepen, a knowledge platform that offers data on the shipping industry to identify shipments of plastic waste.
The way governments provide plastic waste and recycling as disruptions Americans want to solve has fueled their efforts. “There’s a lot of discussion about what we’re doing with plastic. Industry and governments say “you have to recycle your waste, be responsible”. putting the duty to the consumer, not to the industry,” says Velázquez. “Thinking about this research, I saw around me that plastic is everywhere, in the supermarket, in my house. We seek to look at the dimensions of that.
The team painstakingly analyzed the knowledge that appears in waste boxes arriving in Latin America, separating plastic waste from shipments, such as used batteries, infected water and chemicals.
“He gave us the concept that he is bigger than we thought. In Mexico alone, we discovered 50,000 shipments,” says Velázquez.
Other countries send waste to Latin America, supposedly to be recycled through personal corporations in a lucrative industrial stream. Journalists have discovered that waste is not fit to be recycled, will have to be washed with polluting chemicals and water, or will end up dumped in a landfill, potentially polluting the environment with microplastics. Some companies involved in the recycling procedure did not comply with environmental standards.
“Something appealing about stories that reveal the export of waste is how they show, explicitly or implicitly, that corporations that manufacture products containing poisonous factors are not under pressure to process the waste component of their product,” Schapiro says.
The Ojo Público investigation was done manually, Excel, verifying each of the description lines of each of the containers, since the description of each of the containers was different and the automation of the procedure may have meant a lack of valuable information.
The bloodhounds then contacted the corporations and governments guilty of the expeditions. They only gave them an answer. We have noticed a lot of opacity. We have written to many governments, they have never responded. Only one corporation responded and said everything perfect,” says Velazquez. “There is no official knowledge that is available in the countries, that’s why we went to the platform. “
The team should zoom in on individual sites, highlight the scale of the challenge, and make the massive numbers less difficult for readers to understand.
Photographs played a role and the team’s photographers even used undercover to take photos of a municipal landfill in Mexico, while drone images also helped get a sense of the waste situation. “One of the things I looked for to illustrate is that we have a lot of waste, so why do we import waste?” said Velazquez.
In many parts of the world, the coronavirus pandemic has increased the use of single-use plastic and sharpened attention on the big question of what to do with used plastics. Back in Europe, in the two years since Sneakerjagd, the challenge of European waste has not disappeared.
Last month, Investigate Europe published a large-scale survey on the region’s plastic challenge called Wasteland — Europe’s Plastic Disaster, which aims to lose sight of all facets of the data-driven plastic waste challenge.
The survey highlights the shortcomings of the European circular economy, highlighting problems such as pollutants from waste incineration and illegal industry in waste.
“There’s a lot of knowledge processing, but we use undeniable techniques, like spreadsheets, Excel, etc. ,” says Nico Schmidt, principal investigator of the Wasteland survey.
As for the Ojo Público journalists, combing through the knowledge revealed a major transparency problem. “Knowledge comes first, but then comes history, so you look for particularities, question knowledge, and end up with a series of questions,” Schmidt said. says. ” With waste, you have many other sources of knowledge and, of course, then you have to look at where the knowledge comes from, who offers it. “
Sometimes the knowledge of plastic manufacturers is presented almost as official knowledge, he notes. “A lot of effort has gone into comparing other knowledge resources and even understanding very fundamental principles, because things are just hidden in footnotes. “
Sweden’s first investigative program, Public broadcaster SVT’s Mission Investigate, joined foreign colleagues in revealing how organized crime made millions of euros by stealing garments from charity collection boxes. This 2021 documentary used GPS trackers, hidden cameras, drones, and street searches to catch foreign gang operating in countries.
This recent Reuters special report proved claims by petrochemical giant Dow, which said it was collaborating with the Singapore government to turn donated old shoes into gaming rigs and jogging tracks within the tiny nation. But after GPS trackers monitored 11 pairs of donated shoes, Reuters found that 10 of them ended up being forwarded through intermediaries and eventually scattered across Indonesia. The team eventually tracked down 3 of their target shoe pairs, which ended up in secondary shoe markets. None of the shoes followed the claimed recycling direction. through the company.
In 2022, this Slovenian research site undertook an ambitious series that tested the fate of that country’s waste through several other categories of consumers. , a computer, a doll, a backpack and a vacuum cleaner. He found that many recyclable materials ended up in normal waste streams and that other pieces went to Croatia and Pakistan. Oštro also published a useful methodological article on the lessons learned. and recommendation for others seeking to reflect this line of research.
This reporting assignment was initiated through a waste treatment company that got caught illegally dumping recyclable fabrics in the capital of Brasilia. To find out whether this was a single incident or emblematic of a systemic problem, the Brazilian online site attached more than five dozen trackers. to non-unusual recyclable materials and tracked their progress for a month. Journalists found that recyclables were occasionally misdirected or combined with household waste and ended up in landfills. The story prompted several waste control corporations and a municipal company to react in an attempt. For its pioneering use of remote trackers to conduct waste liability reporting, Metropoles won a 2022 SIGMA award.
These stories from Finland, published in 2020 and 2021, have attracted foreign attention. Journalists from the country’s public broadcaster, Yle, concealed six small trackers in spoiled used garments, placed in charity bins and mailboxes where streetwear chains gather used clothes and unwanted clothes. Despite claims through charities that they export garments in poor conditions, the team traced them to Latvia, Pakistan and Africa, where they are called “the dead white man’s garments. “
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Helen Massy-Beresford is a journalist and editor in Paris, France. It covers business, sustainability, aviation, science and food, among other topics.
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