Category Archives: Waste

The Politics of Recycling vs. Reusing

Calling reuse “recycling” a common and seemingly simple mistake, yet it is extremely important to differentiate between the two for political and environmental reasons.

Toxic Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance: A Summary in Tweets

Toxics: A Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance was heralded as “the most important conversation on body burdens yet.” See the Twitter version of that conversation here.

How to do a household waste audit–and why

A waste audit is an analysis of a localized waste stream from your building, household, classroom, town or business. It can identify what types of waste that local generates, and how much. How do you conduct an audit? What can you learn from one?

Trading on distortion

The lead researcher on a seminal work mapping the international traffic of e-waste responds to criticism of his research on material flows.

Criminal Negligence? (Part 2)

There is little evidence that transnational shipments of “e-waste” derive from attempts by exporters to elude strict environmental regulations and indicate rather that global flows are mainly driven by the quest for working or repairable secondhand devices, spare parts and recyclable materials.

Give the Gift of Waste this Christmas

As part of the European Week for Waste Reduction, Hubbub and the North London Waste Authority (NLWA) are hosting a range of £5 cooking session across seven North London boroughs to encourage people to turn their food waste into gifts.

Roundtable reviews of “Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology”

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.

CFP: The Wastes of Governance (AAG 2016)

This session picks up on work that posits an understanding of waste as emergent, or as co-emerging alongside certain configurations of governance.

CFP: Who will queer political ecology? or Cute goners, (in)human thinkers, and queer wastoids. Oct 2 deadline

Ecological science, invited as queer tactic, can transfigure political ecology’s relations to and interchanges within the Anthropocene. Political ecology shares with queer theory an interest in the boundaries around ‘nature’; both sets of discourses challenge the naturalness of such categories as heterosexuality, hierarchy, and wilderness.

Dumpsters, difference, and illiberal embodiment

Food Not Bombs and endeavors like it, I would argue, also create the conditions to queer categories of embodiment like race, class, and sex and interrogate their privileged incorporation by prevailing markets, publics, and institutions, cultivating emergent spaces of embodiment, contact, and collaboration across difference.