There are an estimated 20 million waste pickers across the world, an informal army of street cleaners whose work goes largely unrecognised. Yet to some they are environmental stewards, clearing away the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, often in countries where regular waste collection services are non-existent.
In 2018, when Cape Town residents stared into the abyss of the taps running dry, there was talk of towing an iceberg from Antarctica to provide much-needed water. Thankfully, entrepreneurs are coming up with less outlandish ideas to help tackle the global crisis of shrinking supplies of freshwater, which deprives more than 2 billion people of access to safe drinking water and threatens our planet’s life-support system.
The fight against climate change is a collective one. However, as pressures mount on individual countries to meet their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), flawed carbon registry infrastructure is making this goal far more difficult to achieve.