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, […]
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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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By Max Liboiron. In 1990, a sudden storm knocked twenty-one containers from a cargo vessel into the sea. Five contained 78,932 Nike shoes. The event was kept quiet by both the shipping company and Nike, but when hundreds of shoes began washing up on the shores of Vancouver Island in Canada, eight months later, beachcombers, […]
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A new themed volume on ‘Disease avoidance: from animals to culture‘ in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences provides some food for through when read against Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. Douglas insists that we not read food taboos and other cleanliness rituals as medical-materialistic (ie, Jews don’t eat pork because of […]
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Film Screening at the Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, (70th Street), New York, NY 10021 WANG Jiuliang 王久良 2011. China. 72 min. Digibeta. Saturday, October 29, 2011, 3:00 pm Click Here for Tickets and More Information With a population of about 20 million, the growing city of Beijing produces 30,000 tons of waste each […]
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I thought the journal Invisible Culture might be interesting to those of us who deal with some of the less visible aspects of cultural/social infrastructure like trash, hoarding, or sanitation work. The journal has just put out a call for reviews for an edition called “making sense of visual culture.” They’re specifically “soliciting reviews that […]
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Two environmental research and advocacy centers, 5 Gyres Institute and the Algalita Marine Research Institute, are offering nine places on a 72-foot research yacht for $13,500 to $15,500 per person to view– and research– the ocean debris fields of Japan’s tsunami. The expedition’s first leg will sail from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands through the area […]
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Antipode, A Radical Journal of Geography, has just published a special three-article section on the Socio-spatial dialectics of “waste.” The articles follow a Marxist analytical framework and are nestled in a larger discussion of humans and/as “surplus.” Readers will find that authors are not experts of waste and its materialities, stocks and flows, but are […]
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On Nov. 17 and 18 the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) and the Hagley Museum and Library will sponsor the conference, “The Life of New Materials.” Conference sessions will explore the ways in which the development, use, and re-use of new materials is an embedded feature of our industrial society. The conference takes the biographies of […]
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Tucked away in the corner of September 30th’s editorial page in The New York Times rests a short letter to the editor sent in by Claudia Couch of Florham Park, New Jersey. In the letter she refers us to an article about the disappearing practice of offering a condemned man or woman a last meal […]
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