I have spent the last 2 years focusing on waste management, especially that of Electronic Waste—from the mining of the resources to the discarding of the commodities, and while we are well aware of the pattern of disparity between the over-consumption in the Global North and overproduction in the Global Majority parts of the world, the problems largely still exists. Who to blame, somebody is surely making profits from this trade deal.
Anthropocene is a (Poubelle)ocene.
Certain headlines, like the one below, always make me feel disgusted, knowing that the patterns of dreadful and atrocious colonial practices are still prevalent. I am so perplexed as to what design thinking hat to put on or what circular economy principles to explain the exporting of trash to their previous colonies.
Not only that, but in a recent survey commissioned by the Repair Campaign (https://repaircampaign.org/), more than 2,000 people in the UK found that 85% did not know that more than 3 million people had been forcibly shipped from Africa to the Caribbean by British enslavers. It also found 89% were unaware British merchants had enslaved people in the Caribbean for more than 300 years.
As Dr. Shashi Tharoor has mentioned various times, "And LOOT, a Hindi word which the Britishers took into their dictionaries as well as their habit" (Link below of the talk of Dr. Shashi Tharoor - Looking Back at the British Raj in India at the University of Edinburgh)
Sources -
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c14jy2dd8jeo
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/25/most-britons-do-not-know-scale-of-uks-involvement-in-slavery-survey-finds?utm_source=instagram&utm_campaign=ig_gu
3. https://youtu.be/OB5ykS-_-CI?si=iczPAnaOR5j6E-K-&t=224
Le philosophe Glenn Albrecht propose le #Symbiocène : une nouvelle ère où l’humanité vivrait en symbiose avec le vivant, réduisant son empreinte et tissant des liens d’entraide avec toutes les espèces. #Symbiocène #Anthropocène #TransitionÉcologique Inventé par le philosophe australien Glenn Albrecht, le concept de Symbiocène désigne l’ère qui pourrait succéder à l’Anthropocène, cette période où…
Greg Cocks 
