The house next to my parent’s house is in the process of being demolished and rebuilt, and when they knocked down the old house, there was a huge pile of rubble that was then hauled away. I think that in the case of the house-rubble, viewing that waste as archive makes a lot of sense. That house, and the people who lived there, had a history. The people were part of our community, the house was part of our neighborhood, and I grew up with those things as a given, along with the other kids in my neighborhood. From an outsider’s perspective, viewing the scraps of wood and concrete, they wouldn’t know where the house had been or who had lived there, but it still has that history nonetheless. It could also easily be viewed as hazard, since most of the houses in my neighborhood were built during a time when asbestos was being used in construction, as well as the simple fact that there were pokey shards of wood and other potentially unknown hazards in the pile of debris. The construction and waste workers who were dealing with this debris wore PPE and took lots of precautionary measures to protect themselves from harm due to the nature of this waste, which seemed like a good call and made a lot of sense. This waste was also, in a lot of ways, a governable object, in that the house had been condemned by the government (deemed waste by the government even when it was still standing) and ordered to be demolished. It was under government supervision and following government regulations that the house was destroyed, the materials disposed of, and that the plans for the new house have started to be executed. The state had deemed the house either an eyesore or a hazard or both in its prior condition, and took steps to come in and change that. I think all three of these designations make a lot of sense when thinking about this house, but apply to different aspects of its existence and demolition process.

When we think about Hoarding a lot of thoughts come up. Yes, it’s gross, hazardous, filthy, out of place, disgusting, ect. Just thinking of it makes me image clutters of items that eventually takes over someones home. A house with a persons with a hoarding disorder, is definitely living and breathing in a filthy bubble. Based on the reading, there is many ways that Moore’s conceptualizing  of waste can be applied to hoarding. Although it give a mixture of positive and negative words about it, people who think it’s not a problem to hoard would use words like disorganized versus people who are against it that would use filthy.

An Object that I see often is the Plastic utensil, the one I will be using to day is a plastic fork. The fork is supposed to be single use and it is shown by not only the material it is made out of that is a brittle and flimsy plastic. The waste can be seen as an archive on a way how we eat and how we eat food now as this object is for eating on the go and one can assume when eating with a plastic fork it is for less fancy foods like meals stored in plastic containers for on the go eating. The waste is out of place due to being on the ground and not with a meal. It is also a commodity for the way we eat our meals for without it the meals would be messy. It is also a fetish for disorder as it is used as a sign of dignified eating but they seem to be found everywhere they are not “supposed” to be. Out of the readings I learned that an object as simple as a plastic fork can have a lot more behind it from its creation to what it is supposed to be used for and the amount of effort is put into this way of eating and after we are done with the fork we just dispose of it. The Amount of effort put into making shipping and selling into these forks just for them to be thrown away after one meal. This reading helped me digest the thought that our waste was important before being used.

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. 

In the reading this week, Moore maps out several different ways of conceptualizing waste, many of which we have already tacitly been using. Choose a waste object, and use at least three of her conceptualizations of waste to explain how this waste object can be understood differently from these perspectives. Does one of these conceptualization seem to make more sense for understanding why your object is considered to be waste? This can be a waste object you’ve already written about, or something new.

A four quadrant plot of different conceptualizations of waste from Moore 2012

Readings from this week:

Moore, S. A. “Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Waste.” Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 6 (December 1, 2012): 780–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512437077.