The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [69]
In 1995 my friends and I took the train from vibrant Delhi to the hot, dry, and dusty town of Ankleshwar, which is just one of about two hundred “industrial estates” in the Gujarat region. There, hundreds of factories crowded the area as far as the eye could see, sharing the same roads, power plants, and, as an afterthought, the same inadequate waste disposal sites. The air was thick with a stinky toxic stew from the plastics, petrochemicals, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals being manufactured. And in every free space between the factories, workers had built makeshift homes out of scraps of metal and wood. I tried not to think the about how these homes would fare during the annual monsoons.
Running right alongside the shacks and the roads were small ditches filled with foul-smelling reddish-brown liquid waste. From the look and smell of it alone we could tell this gunk was toxic—and my colleagues’ tests would reveal that the wastewater contained mercury, lead, and many other chemicals that cause reproductive disorders and liver, brain, and kidney damage. Life went on around these ditches with no precautions— I watched barefoot children leap back and forth over them as they played, and women in bright saris squatted and cooked nearby. I followed the ditches to where they ended in a gigantic holding pond. There the young man who managed the pond’s pump emerged from a utility shed to greet us, proud to explain his work to a group of curious foreigners.
What we learned was that he actually lived with the pump. Night and day without a break, he monitored the level of liquid in the holding pond. When it neared capacity, his job was to turn on the pump. This drained some of the waste liquid out of the pond, from where it was transported by more open-air ditches to a local river, then to the sacred Narmada River, and eventually to the Gulf of Cambay (now known as the Gulf of Khambhat) where the local fishermen fished. Everything—the pump operator’s T-shirt, his thin cotton sleeping mat, and the walls of the tiny five-foot by six-foot space in which he coexisted with the deafening pump machinery—was splattered with the gunk. A dark flood mark lined the walls: the place had been flooded knee-deep with the waste at least once.
Then, in front of my very eyes, he turned on the pump and, finding it wasn’t running smoothly, he casually reached his bare arm up into the hose and pulled out a fistful of twigs and other debris drenched in the toxic liquid. The pump sputtered and started working. As he smiled, pleased with his successful repair, my friends and I were hit by the sickening realization that the problem went way beyond toxic waste and pollution: this was also clearly a human rights violation, a health threat, a tragedy of poverty, and an outrageous injustice. It was a scene no consumer ever imagines when he or she takes a product off the shelf in a Wal-Mart or Target thousands of miles away.
Fence-line Communities
In addition to the people who buy Stuff (consumers) and those who make Stuff (workers), there is one more group of people deeply affected by production processes: the people who live, work, and play near factories. These communities, whose children grow up in the shadows of giant factory smokestacks, are often called host communities or fence-line communities. They are virtually never consulted or informed when faraway CEOs make decisions about how and where dirty facilities will be operated. Rampant rates of cancers, birth defects, respiratory diseases like asthma, lowered attention and IQ, and radically shortened life spans plague these communities, no matter where in the world they are. And there’s something else these communities have in common: they are usually poor, and the people in them are usually