As we worked more on our research project focusing on the “Wasteocene” the majority of our original findings have held true. We aimed to focus on how the neglect of waste and resource management in the development of countries can end up effecting them. As we did more research it became clear that waste management is an issue that is often set aside when countries are developing. This leads to poor environmental standards as well as poor environmental health. This also related us to the Kuznet curve which we had addressed in earlier capitaloscene labs where, less developed and low income countries tend to have a lower EPI score which, according to the Kuznet curve, may be due to industrialization. Our framing question is aiming to look at how countries deal with waste effectively in order to minimize their environmental impact in the long run, as well as examining reasons for large waste and pollution during development.

One of the larger issues we identified through our research so far is solid waste. As a country develops, their population grows and their becomes are very large need for effective solid waste management as this directly affects human health. Another interesting thing we found is that more developed countries have the resources to effectively control and plan for waste management as it can be quite expensive. While less developed, or currently developing countries struggle with this because they are still developing their economy.

In terms of Chile, one of the bigger issues they have is properly recycling and managing electronic waste. Chileans each produce 9.9 kilos of e-waste annually, according to a recent United Nations report. This is twice the global average, so Chile is beginning to launch specific initiatives to formalize the recycling of electronic products. Their main focus is products of telecommunication as these are the most prominent and are extremely harmful to the environment. As we do more research it will be interesting to look at how other countries have started to launch environmental initiatives, or lack thereof, based on how important their environmental standards are to them.

We have also created a concept map of important points so far which can be found, along with updates of progress on our Wasteocene project, on my Wasteocene summary page. 

Featured Image Link: https://sites.sph.harvard.edu/hoffman-program/2016/08/26/formal-e-recycling-the-complexity-of-solving-the-e-waste-problem-worldwide/