Grassroots Communities Mining Mini-Grant Program
In acknowledgement of growing literature and projects on mining waste, and the extreme longevity and toxicity of their legacies, here is a grant opportunity for people working in those areas:
Category Archives: Environment
The Decompository at the Arnold Arboretum
Most Arboretums don’t put their dirt, waste, and decomposition on visitor maps. In July, via a workshop on Digital STS at Boston’s Arnold Arboretum, we fixed that. We created “The Decompository” for the Arboretum. The Decompository cataloged the entire, often dirty, frequently smelly, certainly decomposing urban ecology of the park could be made more apparent for visitors and researchers.
Chennai Waste, Part 1: Informally tracking the trash in Mylapore
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 […]
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Ruin Memories Portfolio online
Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts, is less spoken about. Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement […]
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Litterati: A Digital Landfill of Good-Looking Trash
By Max Liboiron. I suspect, that like me, urban followers of the Discard Studies blog spend a lot of time looking down. There is a lot of interesting trash on sidewalks, roads, and gutters, and now there is a place to share your awareness with the world (provided you have a smart phone): Litterati, the […]
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The Plastisphere and other 21st century waste ecosystems
By Max Liboiron. You’ve probably heard of “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “The Gyre,” or other names given to the phenomenon of ocean plastics. You may have asked yourself why we just don’t clean it all up with a giant sea-vacuum. You may have even seen inventions meant to do just that. But perhaps […]
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Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic
The newly published edited collection Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic explores the material politics of plastics. From food packaging to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily lives, and stars a central role in discard debates. Universalised and abstracted, it is often treated as the passive object of political deliberations, or a […]
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Detritus from Historic Deadhorse Bay: Trash Meant to be Left Behind
By Max Liboiron A long, long time ago, a younger, grubbier New York City dumped its trash on Barren Island off the south shores of Brooklyn. Barren Island was its own self-contained community and had a one-room school house, four saloons, and five factories boiling garbage all day, everyday. The buildings and island inhabitants–mostly immigrant […]
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Waste as Profit & Alternative Economies
*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, […]
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Methodologies: How to Read a Landscape
Discard studies are often entwined with landscapes. Ruins, environmental contamination, xenogarbology (the study of trash in space), ocean plastics, global e-waste flows, and urban waste are all place or space contingent. Thus, reading landscapes can be a valuable methodology for us. A fantastic example is the landscape ethnography Beyond Passaic: Contamination, security threats, hobo encampments. A […]
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