I put some leftovers in my common room fridge a few weeks back. Last weekend, I threw out a tupperware full of moldy food. It wasn’t that bad, I could have cleaned it out if I had the patience and stomach to do so and gone on with the rest of my life. Moore describes 13 ways of conceptualizing waste, but the three that fit this waste item best in my opinion are hazard, filth, and abject. As a hazard, this item poses a health risk to myself if I eat it, and if it spills, potentially contaminates an entire floor’s worth of food. If I try to clean out the box, then I run the risk of leaving even a grain of moldy rice in an already overflowing and foul-smelling common room sink. Thinking about this object as abject, I threw out the still functional Tupperware because no matter how many times I wash it out, its still going to be tainted by the mold, I’m not eating out of that thing, I’m not gonna be the Mold Girl. However, I think the most accurate way to conceptualize my reaction would be filth. The thing looked gross, food isn’t supposed to be a fuzzy shape of pale blue, and I knew that opening the box had a fifty/fifty chance of me puking at the smell if there was one. This wasn’t a logical reaction, I could have put on a mask put in a bare minimum of elbow grease and not thrown out a perfectly good Tupperware, but I’m not messing with decomposed food slime if I can help it.
Author Archives: Moss Thieler
Delaying
I will fidget with anything not nailed down if you let me. Just in front of me as I write this I have a few beech tree seeds, a folded up piece of foil, and some paper straw wrappers I’ve rolled into spirals. While the seeds serve an actual function in nature, the foil and straw wrappers are just repurposed “waste” of various meals. To me, these objects aren’t waste, at least not yet. They’re still being used, even if not in their intended manner. The line is very thin though, I accumulate them at a rapid pace, and they wear out easily, generally disintegrating within a month, so even a fully functional fidget becomes waste very quickly when I realize I need to trim the herd. I haven’t “saved from the dumpster” any of the wrappers in my fidget repertoire, the all end up there eventually, just not on the same day they things they contain are eaten or used. In this way, they are waste waiting to happen, I’m just delaying the inevitable trip to the dumpster.
Examples of the straw wrapper/paper spirals I fidget with.
The Pile
I have so many bike parts. Just in my dorm room alone, I have several pairs of pedals, a few handlebars, and a spare wheel just to name a few, and that’s before counting the stuff I actually need on my bike when I’m out on a ride. Back at home, I probably have enough parts lying around my basement to assemble two whole new bikes now I think about it. According to DSM-V, this isn’t a symptom of a hoarding disorder, as it is best explained by “restricted interests in autism spectrum disorder.” I think the clutter in the basement is a result of a lack of cleaning; I get so fixated on wrenching on whatever project I’m working on that the cleaning just gets left for later, leading to all my tools, parts, and consumables getting churned into The Pile, making it look like there’s a lot more stuff than there actually is. I did a big round of cleaning at the end of the summer, and its amazing how little space things take up when they’re packed in an organized manner. I also try to offer parts to people who need them for their projects, even if I just give them away for free. I feel guilty for every cool cheap vintage component I have floating around the basement; I didn’t buy them for paperweights, these components are meant to be used.
A sampling of the various spare parts in my dorm
One mans shit is another ones soil
Biomass is biomass, doesn’t really matter where it comes from. My family is huge into composting, so I’m used to dealing with large amounts of the slimy detritus of what used to be food. It doesn’t smell good, and might make you throw up if you eat it, but just wash your hands if you get any on you and you’ll be fine. While theoretically I should feel the same way about digested food as I do decomposed food, I still have a higher level of suspicion around shit than compost. I think this, at least to me, has to do with the way each one is produced. The experience of generating a banana peel is a lot more pleasant than generating a nasty shit. One of these is a joyous, nutritious, flavorful experience, whereas the other one is a chore at best and a soul-destroying, painful, and messy process at worst. In our tour of the Kern, our guide (whose name I am completely blanking on right now) told us that while we can use the products of the composting toilets for planting decorative plants, we can’t plant anything edible. This makes some sense, there isn’t a lot of science out there about what exactly bioaccumulates in human shit and if/how that gets transferred to plants grown in it, but our guide also mentioned that there were some people suggesting the composted shit be allowed to cure even longer before they start planting. To me, this comes from a seed of legitimate fear, but peoples projection of bad memories of how shit is created leads to these fears being overblown, leading to less interest in studying how to best use this untapped resource.