Category Archives: Waste

…But Where Do We Put It?

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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Debut Guest Post! Friedman’s “Washing Up”

I extend a warm welcome to Eric Friedman, Discard Studies’ newest contributor.  A sociologist, Friedman’s work focuses on the forces behind urban decay, renewal, and stasis. The example he explores in most depth concerns Journal Square, the formerly vibrant commercial and cultural hub of Jersey City, NJ, that is now a desolate place scarred by […]
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Debut Guest Post! Liboiron on Andy Hughes’ “Dominant Wave Theory”

Max Liboiron contributes this post about a specific and luminously beautiful garbage-art — and its devastating implications. Liboiron is a scholar, activist, and artist engaged in work that is deeply relevant to the themes of the Discard Studies project. She is joining the blog as a regular author, so will soon be posting under her […]
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‘Garbage’ measures human nature?

Prolific Canadian artist Max Liboiron has a new show at the AC Institute in New York through October 16. Called The New York Trash Exchange, it creates a tiny world from cast-offs, then invites viewers to take it away piece at a time — so long as they replace what they take with something of […]
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SWANA

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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“Chasing Sanitation”

It’s a website, it’s a book-in-progress, it’s an extraordinary work about the men and women of New York’s Department of Sanitation. Lisa Dowda and Liz Ligon have spent two years hanging with, interviewing, photographing, and learning the ways and lives of the men and women who pick up the Big Apple. The images and stories […]
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Collecting? or Hoarding?

    Collections of Nothing, a book by William Davies King, is part memoir, part philosophical rumination about the meaning of collecting. King looks at the legacy of a life spent amassing…junk? random bits of debris? worthless trash? and wonders what it says about himself as an individual and about humanness more generally. Plenty of […]
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