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In 2010 the city of Shanghai hosted the largest, most spectacular and most expensive World’s Fair ever. The Shanghai Expo attracted a staggering 73 million visitors, ensuring China and the host city remained in the global spotlight for the six-month duration of the event.

Cities are generators of prodigious amounts of waste. This increasingly applies as much in Asia as it does to western contexts. With more cities and more urban-dwellers than any other region of the world, the generation and disposal of waste in the rapidly-developing consumer societies of Asia matter at a planetary scale.

Last week I wrote a satirical piece on a failed attempt by some people to organize a riot via Facebook in my home town in south west England (http://ccr.uws.edu.au/2011/08/15/they-arranged-a-riot-on-facebook-but-nobody-turned-up/). I reported that two people were arrested for incitement to riot and made a little sport with xenophobic, anti-government rioting wannabes who can’t spell.

In the middle of the riots in London, the Midlands and the North of England, someone in my home town tried to organise a South Western version via Facebook. The…