Last wkend Derrick and i went to revisit suburbia and beyond. D was out to get some documentary footage of these recycling communiities we went to before.
We edged our way in and hung out for a couple hours observing people sort through massive mountains of plastic pop and water and cooking oil bottles. It was mind-numbingly repetitive work. They would glance at D's otherworldly tripod and camera set up, possibly smile, possibly not, and then get back to the endless task at hand.
That was the woman's work.
The men's work happened when some young and some old men started dragging these huge bags of sorted bottles over to a shredding machine. They started up this goddawfully loud machine, and proceeded to start heaving and dumping the bottles in, and the quickly scooping the plastic shrapnel into smaller sacks, and piling them up into amazingly vertical stacks, which could reach 2 stories in height.
Anyhow, a number of times i've been saddened about the lack of worker safety happening in China. A pair of ear plugs'd cost you 30cents and could save your hearing for life. Why isn't somebody making this available? Isn't somebody responsible for worker health somewhere?
And while they're at it, could they please also get those welders to put on some sunglasses? Geez, i pity those guys' retinas.
Anyhow, I can only assume that there's people who are better positioned than i who can (and are?) working to make these changes. Really there's little excuse not to get some cheap ass pieces of cotton or something into these dudes' ears, or some cheap ass shades onto the faces.
No comment on bike helmets today. Maybe for a later post.
No comments:
Post a Comment