Snorkeling in Their Own Plastic

Dave Ford was 28 years old and killing it in ad-tech sales but found the work unfulfilling. So, like legions of young people before him, Ford quit his job to see the world. Unlike most starry-eyed travelers, his adventures led him to the Ghazipur landfill outside Delhi, India—a smoldering garbage heap 70 acres in size and almost as tall as the Taj Mahal, dotted with people picking plastic to sell to local recyclers.

For Ford, bearing witness to this dystopic wasteland—a direct result of our single-use-plastic global economy—sparked an idea: If he couldn’t bring this mountain of garbage to Mohammad, he could certainly bring Mohammad to the mountain.

One of the biggest packaged-goods companies found one of their toothbrushes.

All this trash, most of it plastic, is not just unsightly, it’s a crisis, Ford says. “The Western world ships their waste to the Global South, so beaches there have knee-high garbage. Two billion people don’t have trash collection, so they’re burning it in their backyard or illegally dumping it next to rivers and monsoon areas.” Plastics get washed out to sea and are eaten by ocean animals or degrade into microparticles that enter our food systems, to in their bodies, with unknown long-term health impacts.