Category Archives: Environment

‘Detritivore’ Design: How to Use Trash to Create Scalable Tech Solutions- Mathew Lippincott

Guest post by Mathew Lippincott. Originally posted on Mediashift’s Idea Lab. Detritivores are creatures that consume decaying matter. Detritivore designs use abundant waste products to make scalable technology solutions. Unlike loftier concepts of zero-waste design such as Cradle to Cradle, Detritivore design accepts that the world is already loaded with discarded and broken technology. Detritivore designers need […]
Read More »

Tsunami Debris and the Hope of Return

Guest post by Kim DeWolff via her blog Plasticized. On a sunny spring morning we walk the Arahama coast near Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region that experienced the March 2011 tsunami. Two years and a few days later, yellowed grass stands in cracked concrete outlines of houses, bathroom tiles still recognizable. A […]
Read More »

Scientists Call to Classify Plastic Waste as Hazardous Waste

By Max Liboiron. An international group of scientists, including the young Chelsea Rochman and Mark Anthony Browne from California, with the support of the veteran marine scientist Richard Thompson from the UK and a host of others from the USA and Japan, has called on policy-makers to classify plastic waste as hazardous waste. Their argument, published in the latest issue of […]
Read More »

The space/time of modern waste: disaster trash

By Max Liboiron. As Samantha MacBride notes, modern waste–that is, postindustrial waste and particularly waste developed after 1945 when consumerism came into full swing in the United States– is synthetic, unpredictable, and heterogenous. Additionally, it has unique spatial and temporal characteristics compared to its predecessors. First, longevity: I’ve written elsewhere about the staggering longevity of plastics; […]
Read More »

One million years of isolation: an interview with Abraham Van Luik

Edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, has many entries on waste. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many of what Samantha MacBride calls “modern wastes,” characterized by their synthetic nature, unpredictability, and heterogeneity, are also permanent. From plastics to e-waste, industrially-generated waste now lasts in geological time rather than evolutionary […]
Read More »

Article Alert- Dispossession by Accumulation

Antipode has published Tom Perreault’s “Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano.” The article is noteworthy not only because it discusses some of the objects of discard studies–namely, pollution– but also because it figures industrial discards as a form of accumulation. The accumulation in question is capitalistic primitive accumulation […]
Read More »

Trash is a Wicked Problem

By Max Liboiron One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Waste is inherently ambivalent. It is both worthless and the basis for a billion dollar, recession-proof industry, complete with cartels and multinational companies. Disgust with filth both reaffirms our identities and troubles us. But a plethora of contradictory terms and values is not what makes […]
Read More »

Discard Studies and the Nonhuman

Guest post by Josh Lepawsky Have we students of discard studies given sufficient thought to the nonhuman? The nonhuman in the form of materiality and the agencies of things is certainly a prevalent theme in the multiplying and ramifying work constituting discard studies. But there is, of course, more to the nonhuman than ‘stuff’ and […]
Read More »

A Companion for Sewer Catastrophes

By Max Liboiron Sewers are the most expensive and expansive urban infrastructures in North America. They are underground. They are made of inflexible pipes.They are difficult to access. And increasingly unpredictable acts of nature, from earthquakes to climate disruption, are making the probability of their spectacular, large-scale failure something to take note of. A couple […]
Read More »

Wasted opportunities? Waste-to-Energy in the United States. Guest post by Jordan Howell

Since the American Association of Geographers (AAG) held a unprecedented number of sessions on waste in February of this year, the Discard Studies blog has invited participants from the AAG to post their work. This post is by Jordan Howell, a PhD student in the Department of Geography at Michigan State University. One of the […]
Read More »