Apropos volumes of trash.

Above: Artist Chris Jordan, Plastic Bottles (detail), from an earlier post.

From yesterday’s New York Times, ‘Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up.’ Matt Richtel and Kate Galbraith report on how the global economic crises has reached the American recycling sector. In their words, “Trash has crashed.”

From the article: “One reason prices slid so rapidly this time is that demand from China, the biggest export market for recyclables from the United States, quickly dried up as the global economy slowed. China’s influence is so great that in recent years recyclables have been worth much less in areas of the United States that lack easy access to ports that can ship there.”

Richtel and Galbraith report on a wide variety of worrying domestic cases,
and one is reminded of another artist’s global perspective on this subject,
Ed Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes.

Above: Via Mongrel Media, see Burtynsky’s TED lecture here.