A walk down this little street in Peru’s capital provides a glimpse into an understated network that quietly plays a critical role in reducing the environmental impacts of our global production and consumption patterns of electronic devices.
When reflecting on these intertwined day-to-day, multi-decade, centurial, and multi-millennial horizons of nuclear waste risk all at the same time, a different set of sensibilities emerges. Namely, it becomes evident how relatively short-term events like unanticipated deaths, retirements of key experts, obsolescence of information storage technologies, and surprise career-changes can potentially shake nuclear waste management projects’ stabilities.
Since ecological metaphors, systems, and thinking are implicit to much of discard studies, we’re happy to share this crowdsourced bibliography on critical perspectives of ecology.
This is where the creative process foundational to science, fixing, and hacking come together. Rather than making more of the same, whether it’s in science or technology, the scientists, artists, and engineers at GOSH push boundaries, exceed norms, and open up possibilities. Trash is one avenue towards that goal.
We’ve been working on the problem of making tiny, often invisible marine plastics visible through do-it-yourself (DIY) technologies. You can build your own and investigate your local environment.
If you’re interested in the history of pesticides and toxicology, Banned provides a detail-oriented, close reading of key 20th century experiments, legislative hearings, events, and texts to investigate how scientific facts and legislative decisions about pesticides were made.
The global economy produces pervasive contaminants, harmful pollutants, damaging particles, and poisonous atmospheres, which are inescapably part of everyday life, though the harms and benefits are unevenly distributed. In the face of these conditions and challenges, people have been creating new forms of politics. The following collection of abstracts highlights research projects on toxic politics, providing a snapshot of the state of the field from around the world.
Representations are the basis of human knowledge both in terms of how knowledge is made as well as how it is reproduced and circulated. They are the way reality is interpreted and conveyed for others. Our discussions about how to best convey what we’ve been researching have focused on being as clear, charismatic, and accurate as possible. We don’t want to give up accuracy to be more sensational. But we don’t want to make accurate statements that fall flat. Our goal is to do and describe science in a way that launches action that mitigates plastic pollution. How you describe a problem determines what kind of solutions make sense or not.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Ocean Cleanup array, designed to clean plastics from the ocean like a baleen whale, is one of these good intentions: experts in marine plastics, including myself, say it’s a bad idea.Technological fixes like the Array do harm to the larger project of ending plastic pollution, which is a complex social, environmental, and economic problem. It is also going to damage and kill marine life.
“All this actually works. I mean there was so much that we didn’t know, that we still don’t know. There were so many mistakes that the industry made at the beginning. Look at Vienna, where there were some really, really bad mistakes in the 1980s. There was so much planning and preparation and calculation that went into this – and it really just works. My wish is simply for it to just be able to keep working as it has been.”
Discard Studies 