Farming a Waste-less World

The farm is structured around waste in an interesting way because there are real uses for most of the waste it produces. Some of the waste at the farm includes food scraps and animal waste. I think this is interesting because in most places waste is waste but in this case, waste is actually useful. The term waste implies that there are no further uses for the item but in this case the waste never actually becomes waste. The pigs will eat food scraps which eliminates the waste that they would become. The animals produce waste in the form of feces which becomes manure which helps to produce more food. Then the food scraps can be used to feed the animals and the animals produce manure which is used to produce food then the food scraps become food for the animals who produce manure which is used to produce food and on and on it goes. It is the perfect cycle that does not produce any real waste. Of course, I am not positive that this is how things work here on our farm, but it is in theory one of the perfect and natural cycles that help to avoid waste when used.  

Lost Clothes

In the Dakin laundry room there is a large bin where donated clothes can go. It’s no a “waste bin” but if you would like to get rid of clothes you don’t want, that’s the place to put them. Also if you leave your laundry on the floor or couch for numerous of days, it may end up in there as well. By having that bin, it stops people from throwing their clothes in the dumpster. Although it may not serve a purpose to them, someone else can take it. by avoiding throwing clothes away, we can donate or give it away so we can either reuse the fabric or pass down a piece of clothing. Some idiots like to throw trash and lint in there. Being oblivious that there’s a photo of a clothing item, they still find a way to put things that don’t belong. People’s waste getting mixed with clothes would make the staff probably want to throw the clothes away. Nobody want to pick trash out of clothes.

Marine Life isn’t a Waste Site

The physical structure around waste infrastructure is the ocean in general because 1) it’s not considered a wasteland, and 2) people throw waste into the ocean putting wildlife in danger. Penguins getting caught by a soda can plastic thing that wraps around their necks or broken fishing nets getting caught by turtles and other creatures in the environment. The coral is dying due to climate change and other causes.

Recycling Responsibility

My mother majored in environmental studies in college and made sure to teach me and my brother how to recycle. When it comes to recycling as waste, I would consider that my responsibility. My responsibility to make sure that everything I am recycling is actually recyclable and making sure that I am recycling everything that I can. I also extend that responsibility to my surroundings and the people who surround me. I make it my responsibility that my friends and family also recycle properly and as much as possible. I have even extended this responsibility to my community. My high school doesn’t actually recycle. The bins are all there, they teach us how to do it properly, and that it is the right thing to do and then all the bins get dumped in the trash. For most of my childhood I wasn’t aware of this so my responsibility ended when the correct recycling went in the bin, but when I realized this it started to extend to where the bin went. I tried for years to figure out how to get my school to recycle and I was never able to. I still want to try to solve this problem but when I was in high school the problem felt bigger than me and it didn’t help that all of the adults were telling me there was nothing I could do. It feels like my responsibility is to make sure that all possible recycling gets recycled properly but the problem is just too big for one person.  

After the recycling leaves in the recycling truck it could go to a recycling plant but there aren’t many or it could get shipped over to malasia where it will simply be burned. There is really no way of knowing whether my recycling is going to actually be recycled it is a scary idea. But lets say that it does get recycled. Then the single stream recycling will be run through this super interesting machine with magnets and air jets and all kinds of cool things to separate all of it into its respective types. The small pieces will fall throught at the beginning and then the cans and other metals will be caught by magnets. Then the plastic and paper get separated by a sorting machine that sucks the plastic up. Then the paper and plastics get packaged into bales and sent on to the next stage of recycling. The paper is recycled by adding water and turning it into a pulp. Some glass is broken down into a sand to be used on beaches and during natural disasters. I assume the plastic and aluminum are melted but unfortunatly this is where my knowledge of recycling ends. 

Distancing infrastructures – prompt

Choose a place on campus or in the immediate region.  Describe how this space is physically structured around waste infrastructures, broadly understood, especially if they are structured around distancing people from waste.  Try to choose a space that isn’t obviously a waste site, like not a local waste transfer station, but one where we wouldn’t normally think of waste.  Include photos of the space in your description.  

Readings from this week:

Rathje, William L., and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. (Chapter 4 and 5; pages 81-132)

Calvino, Italo. “Continuous Cities I.” In Invisible Cities. 1st Harvest/HBJ ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, 114-6.

Clapp, Jennifer. “The Distancing of Waste: Overconsumption in a Global Economy.” In Confronting Consumption, edited by Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002, 155–76.

Empty Vessel Filled with a New Purpose

I have been sick for a while, so I have been going through a lot of ibuprofen for my sore throat. After I finished the bottle, I threw it in the trash can in my dorm room. Then I noticed the yarn scraps on my desk and realized that the ibuprofen bottle is the perfect size to store small scraps of yarn. I grabbed the bottle from my trash. I wasn’t very worried about retrieving it because I knew everything that was in there already. Generally, when something has served its purpose, it is trash, it no longer has a use unless you give it one. For this bottle its main purpose was to hold medicine, when the medicine was gone it became an empty vessel until I decided to fill it with yarn scraps and then it had a purpose again. Things are only trash when you can’t imagine any more uses for them. That is why the three Rs are so important: before something becomes trash it should be reduced, reused, and then recycled, that way it continues to serve a purpose even after the original one is complete.

Matter out of place

A big discussion point this week was the concept of dirty and dirt, the idea that as long as it’s in its designated space it’s not noticed. In class we discussed for example how if you were to find dirt in your house you would be unhappy and complain about how dirty it is, and then clean it by tossing the dirt. Stepping outside there is dirt everywhere but we wouldn’t call it dirty in the same way. It shows that the idea of trash and “being dirty” is a concept that we as a society created. It’s a system of unspoken rules that tell us exactly what is considered dirty and disgusting and what is considered clean and proper that seems to fluctuate based on the person and place.

Responsibility: Plastics

In my house back home my mom had our towns recycling key sheet up in the kitchen so you could check not only the type of plastic but also the different ways you could dispose of them. Already with our campus having compost and recycling bins I have been trying to be more conscious of sorting my food/compost, recycling and trash. In an ideal world I believe that this should be common, a good 50/50 between consumer and corporation. The creators of the product should have recycling and the environment in mind when creating and packaging their product, the community should have easy access to different levels of waste and it should be on the person consuming said product to then bring it to the necessary places it needs to go. Not a flawless system but with tweaking and work from all sides I do feel that we could easily solve the plastics problem. Reading about waste workers especially the garbageman’s stories really put it into perspective how one sided  the concept of waste removal is in our country. It depends entirely on overworked, underappreciated people trying to keep up with entire towns and cities worth of waste. A basically impossible task. So in the end I think it’s a much more simple issue that we have made extremely complicated, like trying to untangle string we have somehow created a knot.

Thrown away finds

I am someone who is constantly on the lookout for lost objects and a firm believer in the saying “ones man’s trash, another man’s treasure”. I have rescued many an Item from the side of the road or trash cans; old magazines, cigar displays, chairs, plants etc. While this item itself didn’t come from me it represents that mindset.  I was told by my parents who were on vacation going through the national parks in the west that I should check my mailbox on Monday. It arrived later than expected of course but one day when checking for mail I discovered the weirdest lumpy package stuffed in my mailbox. Opening it up I found this duck my family had found either on the road or in the trash at one of the rest stops and mailed to me. It is the creepiest weirdest looking duck I think I’ve ever seen but is also apparently a vintage item?? I feel very blessed but also cursed…

Responsibility

I have chosen to talk about cardboard. A lot of the time it’s a hassle to keep around the broken down boxes, so my family and I often recycle them. My responsibility is to break down the box, so it fits better in the bin, and to make sure that I am putting the right waste products in the correct location. After they are in the bin or wherever they belong, I don’t think it is my responsibility anymore. It is on the laborers job to take it to its next location. I know at my old job at a consignment shop, I would break down the boxes and when the store was slow bring them out back and put them in the recycling dumpster. I often saw that other people weren’t breaking them down or anything else, just throwing in complete boxes which is a waste of space. I don’t know who took those specific dumpsters because we opened after they came, if I remember properly, but I think it was a big truck that would load it in the back and then go to other recycling dumpsters in town and take them. I know that we also had a regular trash dumpster too, so maybe for all I know the garbage people threw it all into the same truck!