By Ashwini Srinivasamoha. Chennai, the Indian state capital of Tamil Nadu, is the sixth most populous city in India, and is located on the southeast coast of India. One of the most severe environmental and public health issues facing Chennai is waste, and is currently managed through two refuse dumps, receiving over 5,000 tons of […]
Read More »
*This is an edited transcript from the IDEAS City lecture on waste by Max Liboiron. Modern waste—that is, mid-20th to 21st century waste—is characterized by a few things. First, there is its tonnage– there is a lot of it, mostly industrial. About 98 percent of waste produced in the United States is industrial solid waste, […]
Read More »
This post originally appeared on Wired Opinion 06.18.13. Madison Sheffield cracks open a toaster oven, jams her hand inside, then turns on the power. It looks like she’s about to electrocute herself, but she seems unfazed. “Thermostat or heating element?” Sheffield mutters, yanking on wires and poking around with a multimeter. “Why isn’t this working?” […]
Read More »
Via Reid Lifset, editor of Journal of Industrial Ecology (JIE): Over the past two decades governments around the world have been experimenting with a new strategy for managing waste. By making producers responsible for their products when they become wastes, policy makers seek to significantly increase the recycling-and recyclability-of computers, packaging, automobiles, and household hazardous […]
Read More »
This is Dutch photographer Bas Princen’s staggering panorama of the Zabaleen settlement in Cairo, Egypt’s capital. These residents, living in an area known as garbage city, store, sort and recycle trash to earn their living. The photograph was included in the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and an exhibition at Storefront Art and Architecture in New […]
Read More »
RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) is a young yet accomplished project located within a construction waste recycling center in Philadelphia. They have twelve hours left in a fundraising campaign to open the trash-stream residency program to applications from artists in the Spring of 2013. They hope to hire staff with the money and become a […]
Read More »
This article was originally published by Max Liboiron in eTOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2010. In laymen’s terms, recycling is “good for the environment.” It involves “doing your bit” to help “save the Earth.” Yet recycling requires high expenditures of energy and virgin materials, and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste; it creates […]
Read More »
Publication Deadline: 2012-07-18 (in 18 days) Boundaries introduces a call for papers on the following subject: «Re-Cycle Architecture». Recycle has to be intended here not as a new vague for aesthetic or marketing trends, but as re-use, “life cycle extension” for materials and objects. This new cycle affect the materiality of the existing, its functions […]
Read More »
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, […]
Read More »
My good friend Dan Fenellon, known to many in the digital design world as “Wavedog” (http://www.wavedog.com), needed to build a wheelchair ramp at his home for his son, Brooks. Brooks has a disability that required him to be in a wheelchair for some time; however, due to his own efforts and the help of a […]
Read More »
Discard Studies 