By Max Liboiron. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers released their report on Global Food trends in anticipation of massive human population growth in the next 50 years. The trend that mattered most was the acute waste of nearly half the global food supply: Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. […]
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Call for Papers: Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, August 11-15, 2013 Special Session: Waste and indeterminacy Waste foments a lively conversation in geography, the social sciences, engineering, and the humanities. Specific topics proliferate – plastic bags and bottles, ocean waste, shipbreaking, e-waste, (in)formal economization, household recycling, landfilling, and sewage to name only a few – but a recurrent theme in what […]
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While we often post article alerts about new scholarship on garbage matters, I wanted to take a moment to re-visit Ellen Handy’s 1995 essay, “Dust Piles and Damp Pavements: Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature.” First of all, thank you Ellen Handy for introducing readers to Thomas Annan’s enduring work (see “Dust […]
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By Max Liboiron One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Waste is inherently ambivalent. It is both worthless and the basis for a billion dollar, recession-proof industry, complete with cartels and multinational companies. Disgust with filth both reaffirms our identities and troubles us. But a plethora of contradictory terms and values is not what makes […]
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Last night’s presentation of Surveying Waste and Capital at Trade School (NYC), lead by CUNY doctoral candidate Jesse Goldstein included a historical narrative starting in England during the enclosure movement and how the “wasteland,” originally referring to productive pasture and foraging land on the outskirts of a village’s agricultural fields, was reframed as “wasted spaces” […]
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Our friends at the Material World Blog have a new post about a special edition of Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture focused entirely on second hand clothing. In her book Recycling Reconsidered, Samantha MacBride discusses the “hidden” nature of discarded textiles, which “have quietly escalated as a fraction of municipal solid waste with […]
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