Wishcycling is the process of placing discards into the recycling bin even when there’s little to no chance for their recovery. The term entered common use over the last six or so years. But its usage and meaning have changed over time.
Recycling was never just a solution to a disposal crisis, and it did not uniformly reduce total waste management costs. Rather, it addresses a range of other concerns which are equally valid but nearly impossible to quantify.
There are two new waste-related articles in the latest issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Despite San Francisco’s 80% diversion rate, the average person sends about 2.7 pounds per day to landfills. On a per person basis, it would seem that record-setting San Franciscans send roughly the same quantities to the dump as their friends in other places in the US. Samantha MacBride explains the logics behind these statistics.
*This is an edited transcript from the IDEAS City lecture on waste by Max Liboiron. Modern waste—that is, mid-20th to 21st century waste—is characterized by a few things. First, there is its tonnage– there is a lot of it, mostly industrial. About 98 percent of waste produced in the United States is industrial solid waste, […]
Read More »
In May, the IDEAS City festival hosted a panel on waste. A recording of the event, mysteriously retitled as World Waste: Recycling Cities and Saving the Planet, even though recycling was fairly trounced as a way to save the planet, is now available online. Be forewarned: you can’t fast forward to skip around within the […]
Read More »
The Recycling of Building Materials in Late Antiquity: Practice and Ideology Saturday 9th March, 10.00-4.00 pm The Birley Room, D203, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK Schedule: 10.00 am Coffee I: 10.30-11.15 Managing Spolia: Legislation and Economy Legislation and Architectural Reuse in the Roman Empire (100 BC – AD 500) By Yuri Marano, yuri_marano@hotmail.com In […]
Read More »
This article was originally published by Max Liboiron in eTOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2010. In laymen’s terms, recycling is “good for the environment.” It involves “doing your bit” to help “save the Earth.” Yet recycling requires high expenditures of energy and virgin materials, and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste; it creates […]
Read More »
By Max Liboiron The “universal” recycling symbol was designed in 1970 for a competition during America’s first Earth Day. A large producer of recycled paperboard, the Container Corporation of America, sponsored the competition. The winner was Gary Anderson, an urban design student in California, who said that he designed the symbol as a Mobius strip, […]
Read More »
It’s a film by Lucy Walker, who chronicled the work of Braziian artist Vic Muniz as he collaborated with “catadores,” or scavengers, on a landfill in Rio de Janeiro. “Waste Land” won’t have national release until October, but it deserves wide attention.
