By Max Liboiron. One of the most popular search phrases that leads people to the Discard Studies blog is “pile of tires.” Perhaps the terrible charisma of piles of tires is why people search for the term on Google with such regularity? Is it the smell, the orderly stacking as the tidier version of hoarding, […]
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By Max Liboiron One topic we rarely post about on Discard Studies is the connection between power and forced acts of waste. Robert Moses’s aggressive eviction-based freeways in the 1960s, landlord sponsored arson in Harlem and the Bronx in the 1970s, and, as of Monday, the forcible eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park […]
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By Max Liboiron. A new article in Scientific American by John Maston, “On the Trail of Space Trash,”shows that our most exotic garbage has a lot in common with other forms of waste. His article explains one of the newer problems with space debris: it is multiplying. A September report by the National Research Council […]
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By Max Liboiron. In 1990, a sudden storm knocked twenty-one containers from a cargo vessel into the sea. Five contained 78,932 Nike shoes. The event was kept quiet by both the shipping company and Nike, but when hundreds of shoes began washing up on the shores of Vancouver Island in Canada, eight months later, beachcombers, […]
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