Box of boxes

I have a lot of bubble mailers. I enjoy supporting small artists so I have ordered many items from various artists. Most would be clips, stickers, prints, and some larger items such as clothes. I am also a patreon subscriber for a few artists that ship out monthly items such as pins, prints, and stickers. Because of that I have ended up with a lot of shipping envelopes that I refuse to throw away. I have a specific box in my room that I put them in, it may be at capacity but I don’t do as much online shopping anymore! Yes I still have 8 active patreon memberships but most of them are now just digital and the one that still ships me pins, they only send every other month! I really like packaging material, tissue paper, holographic resealable bags, confetti, pretty envelopes, ziplock baggies and i will even keep those clear single use self adhesive bags if they are cute. Some people, especially my parents, may see this as a hoarding problem; but I know I will use it some day! I even actively use them now. It’s useful for organizing all of the stickers, prints, postcards and items I have gotten from those shops! I also am actively working on my own shop right now and have shipped 3 packages so far. Packing materials are verya box with an assortment of used packing materials. expensive to buy at the store and I have disdain towards Amazon (and other overconsumption online shops) so it makes sense to save the packages. It’s not like they are strewn across my room (anymore), they are in their own spot hidden away from view. I would probably cry if I had to throw them away because it is such a waste to do so. I mean that, thinking about my dad throwing away my packing materials while I am off at school makes my heart drop and dread begin to brew. If they go in the trash then I can’t use them and I will feel guilty. I hate that so much. So I will simply keep them until I use them. WHICH I WILL!!!

 

Pill Bottle Pile

How to Recycle Medicine Bottles – RecycleNation

(https://recyclenation.com/2014/08/recycle-medicine-bottles/)

An empty medicine bottle is considered waste. I take a lot of different medications daily so I end up with a lot of empty orange bottles that I don’t know what to do with. When I say a lot I mean multiple bags full of empty pill bottles over the years. My pharmacy does not have a take back program so I assume many people will simply throw them away after the course of 30 days where they get another bottle that will become empty and repeat that cycle. These are made of a nice plastic and could be reused and there are places to ship them to so they don’t end up in landfills but despite my collection (which includes my sister’s and parents) has been growing. I don’t have the energy or reminders to find a box, create a shipping label, potentially pay for it, print it out, then package it all, tape the box, and then ship it off. The amount of tasks it requires creates a stall in my brain. It fills with clutter and static, then I decide to simply deal with it later. There are also interesting crafts that they can be used for, I have seen people attach the individual bottles to the bulbs of Christmas lights to decorate dorms. My friend used to make earrings out of unconventional items so these could work too albeit a bit large (some do like bulky earrings and jewelry). I have seen them as storage of small objects, I bought a bag of jewelry making supplies a few years ago at a thrift store and some of the beads were inside of old medicine bottles. I have also seen the bottles used for geocache containers which is brilliant since they are generally waterproof.

Pill Bottle LED String Lights | Spirit Clouds

(https://spiritclouds.square.site/product/pill-bottle-led-string-lights/5)


An empty medicine bottle is considered waste as it has finished its original purpose, to hold medication in a uv resident enclosed space that keeps the medication fresh and safe to use. It contains a label which shows the ownership of the medication, the type, amount, how to take it, and when the pills inside expire. The medicine bottle’s life cycle is considered over once the medication runs out, not to be reused as it is considered “contaminated” , unable to be reused for its original purpose by the pharmacy.
While the original use is lost, there is potential for reuse; we just need to be creative.

Retrieving Trash Prompt

Though I haven’t physically gone into a waste bin/bag/dumpster, I do think glass containers would be something I’d retrieve from these containers. Glass is something that I personally reuse a lot in my family household and not something I automatically tie to waste/trash. For example, previous salsa containers can easily be cleaned and repurposed so many times that it’s not something that has a time limit to its value. Glass containers in particular could be seen as waste, due to this fear of the unknown and “using after someone” that we’ve been socialized to not be as resourceful in our communities. On the other hand, some states recycle glass and people are aware of it being reused for another purpose, but still it should be more encouraged to reuse your own containers, as it also saves time and money in the future.

Container From Hall Trash

I found this container in the bathroom trash of my hallway, it was a bit more towards the top on the side, so I did not have to do a lot of digging in order to find it and get it out. I am almost certain it was my friend who threw it out since we are the only two people living in our hall, which helped me feel better about taking it out of the trash and washing it for future use. I chose this object because a solid, closable container can be very useful, and I am currently using it to store loose hardware parts like nuts, washers, and screws. I think if I had found it in a more public trash container I would not have taken it out unless I was able to either see all of the contents inside or wash my hands immediatly after, since I don’t feel great about unknown germs. I do have an example of me going through a public trash bin from the past week, however, because at some point in the middle of the night my friend called me to tell me a mouse was trapped in the trash (the sides were too high to jump over and too smooth to climb), so I went to where they were, tipped the trash bin over, and helped them empty it so the mouse could get out. I felt ok going through this trash because there were only three things in it, all of which were mostly empty food containers. I also had the motivation of helping a friend feel better, which overpowered my unease of going through a trash bin.

Shit

We see shit as filthy and unsanitary, and in the past, the disposal of it was used as a way to show class status and create a separation between the classes. Having a clean and sanitary home made you better than those who didn’t, and cleanliness was seen as being closer to God. In the present, if we see an area of a town with visible waste it would often be attributed to people not having a lot of money. People would then go on to think of it as the “bad” part of town, and it would then be associated with crime, and in turn, people of color and marginalized groups. This goes back to what we read in Gerling’s writing, where it discusses how people of higher class status and social status were the first to have access to sanitation resources like plumbing, sewage, toilets, etc, which made the wealthier areas of towns and cities cleaner, and seen as better.

Paperless

As we chop down thousands of trees to use paper, we don’t realize how much it gets wasted. We tend to lose paper, crumble it, or throw it away after it is written or drawn on.Individually I feel like it would be best if we recycle it. If we have bins for paper we can get rid of all our loose pages that are wandering in our backpacks, brief cases, desks and more. Paper can be reused to create another peice of paper. There’s a process that it undergoes so it won’t end in a land fill. It becomes someone else’s responsibility when it gets thrown away. Whether it’s trashed or recycled, we have no opinion or say on where it will move next. Once it’s discarded, it’s no longer our issues. We should save the trees and allow them to produce cleaner oxygen that we breathe. Lets go paperless!

Reclaiming Waste

From my trash, I have taken out an old iphone charger block. It stopped working two months ago but I didn’t have the nerve to throw it away. It threw it out because in my life it was no longer useful. What I should have done with it is recycled it in an electronics recycling center. To me, I will decide something is trash when something is broken enough to not be used again and I can’t find any other useful perpetual value in it. 

The environmental problems that face our world are our own faults. We have created a social environmental foundation that is insane in my mind. We have taken so many resources from this planet and in return have made it less inhabitable to animals. We have made living in cities the majority of where people live because of the accessibility. People really like quick and easy access to anything and everything. The individual impact that we have on the work is small but when multiplied by how many humans live on this earth we then create the problem. The large institutions that make so much waste on a day to day practice get shielded by legislation and political parties that want to stay in power and make money. People love to control and have control over people. It is a fundamental fact about humans. We like power! Such a shame, when the effects of our mistakes are being taken out on the planet we call home.


Responsibility and waste workers – prompt

The readings for the last week and a half connect issues of personal responsibility for environmental issues (like waste) with who does the work with dealing with it (you, waste haulers, sorters, etc). This week, choose a specific form of waste. (This could build off of one of your previous posts, or it could be something new.) When dealing with this waste, what do you consider to be your responsibility? What/where/when is the point where it becomes someone else’s responsibility? Do you believe this is an appropriate point to mark this division of labor, and why? Do you know who deals with this waste next, and what their work is like? If you do, briefly describe it, and if you don’t know, what do you imagine their work to be like?

Readings from this and last week:

Maniates, Michael F. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics 1, no. 3 (2001): 31–52.

Royte, Elizabeth. “Dark Angels of Detritus.” In Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. First edition. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005, 19-31.

Nagle, Robin. “You are a San Man” and “We Eat Our Own.” In Picking up: On the Streets and behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, 105-112, 143-154.

Tupelo, Ethan. “Revaluing Capitalist Waste Through Worker Ownership.” In Debris of Progress: A Political Ethnography of Critical Infrastructure. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2022.

Reclaiming “Waste”

The object that I reclaimed is a piece of film that was at one point in the hands of an artist. The film has some markings that are seen in the light. This was “waste” that had been put into the trash bin in the arts village. I decided to take this piece because it is beautiful to me and I wanted to put it on my wall. I know that this was at one point something that someone had made, yet thrown away. I do not know why, but it is now able to bring me joy by adorning my room. The process of going through the trash was a pretty comfortable experience, I knew that there would be no food waste that I would feel gross touching. It was interesting to see the amount of thrown-out art, and objects that artists had deemed unimportant. I saw many sketches and scraped projects, and it made me think of the number of times I had given up on projects because they did not go the way that I wanted them to. I wonder if anyone would have found beauty in things I did not.

Shit Prompt

I worked in a daycare for all of my high school years. Something that comes with the job is to change diapers, and generally help children in the bathroom, and I have become very desensitized to baby shit. I have been thinking about recently, with our conversations around shit, how all of my coworkers and I talked about shit. Normal conversations in the daycare would center around how a certain child was eating and how they were feeling based on their shit. We could tell if one child was not feeling well, or if they were not eating enough fiber or fruits, we could also gauge their levels of stress based on how often they went to the bathroom. It is interesting that we can pick up on subtle changes in a child’s mood or health based on something so ostracized in other settings. This mindset around shit is something that is not seen in many other settings and it makes me wonder what it would be like if everyone shared this mindset.