Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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Colored chips of plastic, collected, washed and sorted by hand, dry on the banks of the Buriganga River. Families wash shredded plastic for profit organizing it by color for recycling in Bangladesh’s informal plastic waste industry. Their hand labor is more accurate than highly industrialized recycling in the USA and the labor costs $2-$4 a day. Blue bottle caps are sorted from red bottle caps and they are sorted from the green bottle caps. A huge overburden of plastic is thrown away landing in the river and washing out into the Bay of Bengal.

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RANDY OLSON
Image Size
6000x3963 / 158.8MB
olsonfarlow.com
Keywords
Contained in galleries
Plastics National Geographic magazine MM8515
Colored chips of plastic, collected, washed and sorted by hand, dry on the banks of the Buriganga River. Families wash shredded plastic for profit organizing it by color for recycling in Bangladesh’s informal plastic waste industry. Their hand labor is more accurate than highly industrialized recycling in the USA and the labor costs $2-$4 a day. Blue bottle caps are sorted from red bottle caps and they are sorted from the green bottle caps. A huge overburden of plastic is thrown away landing in the river and washing out into the Bay of Bengal.