 | Kate Deckhand United Kingdom |
I am the garbologist on board. Those of you that know me from my previous life as a photographer may consider this to be an odd kind of career move. Clearly you have never worked with garbage like I have.
I too was a little skeptical when I was first assigned the task of tending to the rubbish on the ship, but once I realised that to truly understand the needs of the rubbish, the garbologist has to become one with the garbage, everything changed for me. Now I live for the moments where I can sort through the daily detritus, discovering unwashed Tetra packs in the general waste bins, ripping the foil out of cigarette packets so that they can become cardboard again and delighting in the multitude of ways that people can interpret simple words like "paper" and "cardboard" and "only".
It is scandalous that something as lethal as nuclear waste gets shipped back and forth between Britain and Japan. That nuclear energy has re-entered political rhetoric as "clean energy" - when it is known that people die and are made ill from it is effects - is desperate. That I have the opportunity to work for an organisation that has campaigned against the folly of nuclear proliferation for thirty years makes me proud...but then so does a neat pile of folded cardboard.
