"Wilbur Ramirez, a London binman, has travelled 7,000 miles [to Jakarta] to spend 10 days working with Imam and experience the harsh reality of Imam's working life - from dragging his rubbish cart by hand through the sweltering streets to cleaning out the open drains."
Apart from the horrible toil that Imam has to endure everyday to support his lovely family who lives in slums next to a pile of rubbish it was really shocking when Wilbur Ramirez visited the rubbish dump. This was a colossal mountain with rubbish stretching to the horizon. A large community of destitute people, even poorer than Imam, live by the dump and swarm dangerously close to the trucks and diggers to collect valuable plastic and other recyclables they can to sell them for a few pennies.
There was also an extended article about this on the BBC news website
This story puts in stark contrast the horrible human and environmental costs of the excesses of consumption and inconsiderate waste (right next to Imam's slum there are very rich apartments, inhabited by the people who pay him a pittance for his heroic rubbish round). And it is not just local wealthy people that are to blame. Let's not forget that foreign investment into manufacturing with dirt cheap labour is what is making some people in Jakarta very rich and million others, very, very, poor.
You can watch the whole program on the iPlayer (not available legally outside the UK)
