Write about one of your regular activities in which some amount of pollution is an assumed component, but perhaps rarely directly discussed. (This can be a waste practice you have already written about that you want to reexamine from this perspective, or something new.) If we moved from accepting some amount of this kind of pollution to prohibiting this pollution entirely, would your actions be possible?  How would they change?

Readings this week:

(May also be worth revisiting Moore’s conceptualizing waste chart from a few weeks ago, especially the concept that treat waste as something that can be managed and contained, versus avoided at all costs.)

Liboiron, Max. “Land, Nature, Resource, Property.” In Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, 39-79.

National Association for PET Container Resources. “Report on Postconsumer PET Container Recycling Activity in 2017,” November 15, 2018. https://napcor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/NAPCOR_2017RateReport_FINAL_rev.pdf. (Focus primarily on the graphs on pages 4 and 13)

MacBride, Samantha. “Does Recycling Actually Conserve or Preserve Things?” Discard Studies (blog), February 11, 2019. https://discardstudies.com/2019/02/11/12755/.

Katz, Cheryl. “Piling Up: How China’s Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling.” Yale E360. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling.

Schlossberg, Tala, and Nayeema Raza. “Opinion | The Great Recycling Con.” The New York Times , December 9, 2019, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/recycling-myths.html

John Oliver on plastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E