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Climate Corner: If we sunset trash, nobody will miss it
- Jacquelyn Francis
- Jun 30
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 1
One of my favorite annual traditions is to ride my electric mountain bike up Aspen Mountain on the summer solstice. There at the summit, I’ll watch the longest day of the year end in a dramatic sunset near Mount Sopris.
I had to miss that ritual entirely this year, but for a different equally interesting summit: I was invited to present at the TED Countdown Summit Nairobi, a climate conference in Kenya.
Among the many highlights were a virtual, deep geothermal-drilling experience (very educational); sharing a chat in the backstage green room with climate legend Al Gore; and getting the opportunity to announce the 2025 winners of the Keeling Curve Prize onstage before an enthusiastic crowd of hundreds of climate leaders.
On the actual day of the solstice, rather than e-biking up a mountain, I journeyed to an artist collaborative in Kibera, the largest slum in Africa and third-largest on the planet. I was invited by an Aspen High School friend who is now living in Nairobi. On our way to the gallery, we became trapped in three hours of traffic caused by a torrential downpour that flooded Kibera’s dirt and potholed streets. While the storm and the traffic were horrible, the experience in Kibera was as breathtaking as the view from Ajax. As you can probably imagine, Kibera is teeming with activity, movement and human vibrancy. The population is estimated to be roughly one million people, living in an area less than one-third the size of Aspen’s city limits. While there was laughter and the feeling of community everywhere, the difficult living conditions were impossible to ignore. There are no modern conveniences like air conditioning, plumbing or even reliable electricity. Everywhere you looked, people were selling, repurposing or revitalizing what we in the West would consider trash. Our discarded, unusable clothing fabric scraps, plastic toys and knick-knacks are all shipped by the tons to Africa, Asia and South America.
Why do Americans or Europeans think communities like Kibera want our trash? We may feel benevolent by “gifting” them our discarded material, or believe that the recipients might value these resources, but in reality, we are drowning them in our junk.
So we should ask ourselves, do we need to create so much trash?
My first experience coming home was an awful reminder of our consistent ignorance. While volunteering for the Aspen Ideas Festival, I was assigned to help with the “art” installation. Turns out the immersive artistic experience includes 15,000 plastic flowers — each one something you might inflate and use to decorate your pool — too small to use as a floaty. Each of these flowers was individually wrapped in plastic, within small boxes likely ordered from overseas (China?) and placed in a natural field to create an immersive experience as a tribute to Aspen’s own wildflower lover, Elizabeth Paepcke. Now to be fair, the Aspen Institute plans to mold the flowers that guests leave behind into some type of furniture, but this doesn’t take into account the entire climate story of this wasteful concept. Petroleum is transported to make the virgin plastic into the original product. Manufacturing, packaging and shipping all create carbon footprints. If guests take these flowers home, how long until they become discarded?
Maybe the artist could have considered using materials already here, like thrift shop clothing or construction waste to create the flowers. Certainly biodegradable options were possible. The artists in Kibera — whose work was quite good — were certainly less wasteful.
Leaders in the climate space think about life-cycle analysis and creating a circular economy all the time. We see carbon footprints in our dreams (or actually nightmares) and we know humans can do better. If we create less trash, nobody will miss it.
