Gernot Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, argues in this New York Times Op-Ed that our individual efforts to recycle, use less water, or replace plastic bags with cloth sacks are merely token gestures. “The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action,” he writes. […]
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Wednesday, May 11 • 12:00 to 2:00 • 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor • New York City Samantha MacBride has written eloquently and in-depth about the networks and relationships that keep an international flow of materials moving across the globe, particularly as these pertain to waste. In this talk, she focuses on the connection between […]
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This is a quick post to share two remarkable photo essays. One looks at North Brother Island, while the second considers Admiral’s Row. Both are long-abandoned spaces in New York City. The images bring to mind Tim Edensor‘s work about how meanings are imagined, inscribed, forgotten, rewritten, and reclaimed in such haunted places. (Edensor’s themes […]
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On April 7, the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion called “Trash Talk: Options for Converting Our Solid Waste to Energy.” Nickolas Themelis of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University spoke about the many benefits of waste-to-energy, or WTE technologies. David Demme, with a company called SAIC Energy, Environment & Infrastructure, […]
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Tuesday, March 22, marked the tenth anniversary of the closing of Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island (this piece from the New York Times describes the day the landfill closed). Its transformation into a park is well under way, but the scale of the project — 2200 acres across four massive hills — means that […]
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The Wellcome Collection in London, part of the Wellcome Trust, opens an exhibit this Thursday, March 24, that explores changing attitudes toward dirt and cleanliness from the seventeenth century to the mid-21st. The show is built around specific examples in six different places — Delft, London, Glasgow, Dresden, New Delhi, and New York. It runs […]
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Material for the Arts in New York has been an inspiration and catalyst for creative reuse across more than three decades. A collaboration between the city’s Departments of Cultural Affairs and Sanitation,* MFTA connects unwanted stuff with eager arts and education organizations. Under the savvy leadership of Harriet Taub, objects that would otherwise become part […]
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We’ve mentioned Lisa Dowda and Liz Ligon before; they are the creative force behind Chasing Sanitation, a website about the lives and labors of New York City’s sanitation workers. This weekend they move beyond the web, into an exhibition opening Saturday in New York. Their work deserves a wide audience. Ligon’s photographs are lush and […]
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It’s always been a doozy of a discard problem: where to put radioactive waste? How to make it inert — and keep it that way? It exemplifies the essential dilemma created by so many categories of our discards: how can it be contained? Recent developments at the Hanford Site, which covers 586 square miles in […]
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Here is a post on Journal Square by Eric Friedman. He illustrates how places can become discards. Eric focuses on the phenomenology of place in his ongoing ethnography of Jersey City’s central square.
Discard Studies