Most of us have to work in one way or another to earn a decent living. As they say, there is no free lunch in this world. But some have to work harder than others, toiling in unbearable, life-threatening conditions for just a few cents a day, enough to buy a bowl of rice. Under a burning sun, the polluted air hanging like a dense fog, the young people I met in early October 2022, fifteen kilometers southeast of Sulaymaniah, Kurdistan, Iraq, belong to an industry recycling the world’s garbage. Protected only by worn-out sneakers, they separate trash from the Sulaymaniah region, an area with a population of about two million, at a huge dump site where the garbage extends to the horizon. Here, plastic, wood, and metal are divided by hand, then sold to local companies by a work force barely surviving at the bottom rung of the value chain. – Munich, December 2022