Conceptualizing Waste

The waste object I am going to examine is paper. I will be taking this object and applying it to the following three categories of waste that Moore identifies: archive, matter out of place, and resource. For starters, I frequently view paper as being archival material. I scrapbook often and all of the contents included are paper. Some examples include concert tickets or birthday cards. However, I do sometimes scrapbook with paper materials that would be considered waste. Some of these examples include straw wrappers from dinner with friends or streamers from holiday celebrations. It is thought-provoking to see how with concert tickets, there is more of an expectation for hanging onto them. But, with straw wrappers, even friends who have been present more than once when I take them home still ask questions about why I do it. My experience with this comes from a desire to create sentimentality around things that wouldn’t always be the first things chosen to do so. Now moving into paper being matter out of place. Once in elementary school, we did this lesson on recycling that involved each student being given a sheet of paper to crumple up. Some had words on them while others were plain. Once they were all crumpled, everyone threw their paper ball into a box to be mixed around. Then, we went around the room choosing a paper ball from the box. You had to decide whether or not you were going to throw away your ball. Everyone threw away their balls solely because they were crumpled up. I think it is interesting that whether or not the paper was crumpled superseded whether or not there were words already written on it. In the end, the whole idea was about not making assumptions and seeing how we could use paper in multiple ways. Now going into seeing paper as a resource. Even with paper being a commonly used resource for a plethora of things, I feel we as a society don’t reuse paper enough. I have recently started to cut up my paper scraps and color them to make confetti for decoration in my room. In conclusion, this reading allowed me to think about more waste categories and how they can be applied to a specific material and my thinking around what is waste.