Road to Zerophoria: Journal entry from the future #8

I am spending 10 days in the future, and this is what my daily life like in the year 2033, where zero-waste laws are strictly enforced, and no one comes to pick up the trash anymore.

You can read more about this imagined future scenario here.

Roaming inside a city with strict zero-waste laws makes it hard to believe how it used to be littered with bits of trash here and there ten years ago. Now, the streets look so clean you would feel grateful to be part of this community. The way we live has revolutionized too. If you like to brew coffee in the morning, you can exchange a 2kg used ground coffee to a nearby coffee shop in exchange for a half kilo of coffee beans. In return, they would sell the used ground coffee beans to a local fertilizer shop. It’s really a win-win! The way we do things around the city has changed a lot, too, thanks to public support and startups that provided avenues to encourage people to use less, which results in throwing less. 

However, there are things we never really think about, such as the street dwellers who used to roam around our city streets. They were also the same people who used to throw trash everywhere. And no matter how the social welfare tried educating them, throwing more seems like a hard habit to break. And with the strict implementation of zero-waste laws in our city, charging fines to those who don’t submit to it, these street dwellers were forced to relocate to the next city, which opted out of adopting the said law. And because the landfills have long ceased operating, the next city looked the opposite of ours. So you can only imagine how they live through all the smell of the decaying garbage piling up on their main street. 

I heard from the news the other day that the mayor of our neighboring city used to receive seed money from the international government, to address their waste problem. But the same money just fell into corruption. Hence they only spiraled down to inaction and chaos. Neighboring cities have also complained and rallied against them since the nearest ports were located there. 

Riots were starting to brew hot there, and I wondered how this zero-waste law becomes a two-edged sword; bringing good in others while bringing out the worst of some.

I generated these photos using BlueWillow, an AI image generating tool.
The text prompt used to generate this image is “ZERO-WASTE ZONE(written word)::10 photograph of street dwellers outside a zero-waste zone city::5, photorealistic, high definition, fujifilm digital, realistic lighting, 35mm film –uplight –ar 16:9 -“