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Beauty Bike Dump Images Further Highlight Garbage Problem

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On this, World Press Day, the UK’s Guardian newspaper is carrying a story revealing the hidden art in China’s bike share dumps that includes inspiring arial photography of our very own Nanjing. But as the London Commonwealth Heads meeting regarding sustainable development comes to a close, and China’s ban on the import of foreign garbage forces nations to deal with their own disposal problems, should the dumping and burying of waste ever be considered beautiful?

The arial shots, to the unknowing eye, certainly could be described as candid beauty. “There’s always something quite beautiful about repeated patterns on an enormous scale, but these images show a conflict between that beauty and the devastating wasteful reality that they represent”, says The Nanjinger’s Art Critic, Francesca Lieper.

This publication has also previously discussed Nanjing’s very own bicycle graveyard catch 22. “It’s easy to look at them and blame the companies who made too many bikes, but we’ve all ridden them making us not only witnesses of these graveyards but also participants in their creation”, Leiper further added. That same Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) just held in London, focused on sustainable development policies regarding the 53 countries that make it up.

As reported by C. Uday Bhaskar for the Millennium Post, “Global industrial-scale production of plastic crossed the 100 million tonnes per annum mark in the late 1970s and the 400 million tonnes mark in 2017. China leads the list at 62 million tonnes (2013).”

Bhaskar notes that only 18 percent of plastic is recycled properly and that the rest is dumped, often in the oceans, and, “It is estimated that eight billion kg of plastic is released into the maritime domain annually”.

As China enforces its worldwide ban on the import of plastics and other garbage, countries such as Australia, that relied on this service in the past, have been scrambling to come up with viable solutions. Since the ban, Liang Yu for Xinhua News reported, “Customs authorities in Hangzhou turned away some 469 tonnes of solid waste from the USA”. Australia exports 4 million tonnes of recycled waste annually; 1.3 million of that went to China.

“All Australian waste will need to be recyclable, reusable or combustible by 2025, after an agreement between federal, state and territory ministers to deal with China’s decision to stop becoming a dumping ground for waste from around the world”, writes Mark Ludlow for the Financial Review.

It is clear that China has enough of its own garbage with which to deal, hence its refusal to accept any more from the rest of the world. What remains unclear is how China plans to tackle this problem. While bike sharing has helped alleviate smog produced by cars, it has unfortunately added to the countries ever growing trash problem.

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