Our open spaces are littered with contaminated sites; we have dumps full of so many kinds of hazardous waste that nobody is quite sure what they contain; deluges of domestic waste pour out of our cities and towns ... it would be easy to add to the list of examples. Clearly, our senses are not deceiving us this time: unless we in the industrialized countries do something very soon, we will be engulfed in our own waste.

It's all so easy, of course: we simply tip all our rubbish into the dustbin. The bin is emptied once a week and that's the last we see of our waste. And we're not usually all that interested in what happens to it afterwards.

For many of us it's too much effort even to throw away old paper and glass separately. Even now, at the end of the 20th century, when we can hardly fail to have heard of recycling. But whether we practice it or not - an, well, that depends on whether or not it makes economic sense: as long as recycling waste is still more expensive than throwing it away not much will change here in our industrial world. The politicians can hold as many speeches as they like: until the basic, underlying conditions are changed the mountains of rubbish will go on growing.

In some respects the waste problem in the Third World is similar to our own; but in others it is quite different. In this issue of "gate" we can offer our readers, at best, no more than a glimpse of it. The authors and articles were chosen by GATE in close cooperation with Division 414 of GTZ.

As you will see, there are many and varied aspects of waste; but one thing is certain: for many people in the Third World, it is "the stuff of life !"

Beate Wörner