Payatas Dump

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Recommended: Industrialization history thesis

A piece of trash floats by like a tumbleweed in the hot and humid climate of the Philippines. “With small bare hands, they [the children] break light bulbs and pull the coiled copper from the bottoms.” (Lo) If you were a child born in the slums of the Philippines, this is how life would be like. These children have to be scavengers and find materials that they can sell to earn money. In the example above, the children find trash with copper and sell them for around $7. The contemporary industrial phenomenon where this takes place is the Payatas Dump. It is apparent that the Payatas is a hazardous and filthy junkyard; it has both negative and positive impacts on its inhabitants, and it can be compared to industrialization of the past.
The Payatas Dump is one of the many dumps in the Philippines. According to Matthew Power, it is “piled up to a 70-degree angle” (Power 1). Many slums were killed here when the dump once collapsed. The reason the dump was created in the first place was because an excess of materials in manufacturing kept getting thrown out. For example, when people use ziploc bags made of plastic, they throw them away and the waste ends up in the landfills. In contrast, sometimes useful objects are thrown in the dump, like the copper mentioned in the paragraph above. The reason why some people, farmers specifically, migrated to this landfill is to become one of the “10,000 scavengers, junk-shop operators, and garbage brokers” (Power 1). The article The Magic Mountain states, “The economic choice between farming in the countryside [...] and mining the wealth of the metropolis’s waste was not a difficult one”, which shows why the people who were originally farmers get paid less than if they were scavengers in the Philip...

... middle of paper ...

...ney was different, the amount of money was very low, comparatively.

Works Cited

Lo, Barnaby. "Living Off Toxic Trash in the Philippines" CBSNews. CBS Interactive, 24 Nov.
2010. Web. 20 Nov. 2013. .
Overdorf, Jason. "India: Buried in Garbage" GlobalPost. GlobalPost, 6 June 2013. Web. 20
Nov. 2013.
.
Power, Matthew. "The Magic Mountain: Trickle Down Economics in a Philippine Garbage Dump
(excerpted)" Harper's Magazine 1 Dec. 2006: 1-5. Print.
"The Payatas Dumpsite: From Tragedy To Triumph" Quezoncity.gov.ph. The Local Government of Quezon City, n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.
.

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