Tag Archives: New York City Department of Sanitation

Trash, debris, or neither? The Nature of Waste During Disaster

Not only do natural (and unnatural) disasters produce a lot of waste, they are also extreme but oddly quintessential events where practices, behavior, and cultures around waste and wasting, as well as their inverse–repairing, fixing, rebuilding–move to the fore. In the weeks proceeding and following the one year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy making landfall in New York City and surrounding area, Discard Studies will feature a series of articles about the complexities of disaster and waste, broadly defined. This article looks at the material and emotional nature of waste during disaster.

“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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