By Max Liboiron. When visiting National Parks, be sure to note the location of the nearest “1st Amendment Rights Area.” As a reminder, this is the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or […]
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A guest post by Sebastian Abrahamsson and Katja de Vries. This is the fourth post in a series of guest posts by participants of the Association of American Geographers conference series on waste. Dumpsters, Muffins, Waste and Law Sebastian Abrahamsson and Katja de Vries I. This is a bag of muffins. Muffins are edible breads that […]
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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 […]
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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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What happened to Journal Square? Once known as a lively hub of cultural and political activity in the heart of Jersey City, NJ, Journal Square experienced what Hutchison (1992) once called the ““the almost incomprehensible…process of spatial restructuring” that effectively decentralized many central cities’ populations and economic activities to the suburbs during the second half of the twentieth […]
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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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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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It started because of injuries. About fifty years ago, a group of municipal solid waste management folks — that is, the men and women in charge of publicly- organized garbage collection and street cleaning — were having a lunch meeting when one of them mentioned that sanitation workers under his supervision were getting hurt when […]
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