In some beaches across the world trash from all over wash up on their shore. Beaches are meant for swimming and having a nice fun day In the sun. With the overload of trash, there is no way to enjoy the sand and the water may be filled with a bunch of contaminates. Since most of the trash washes up in countries across the world, the USA places trash in the ocean to get rid of it. By doing that, they are making it someone else’s problem. Just because its placed in the ocean doesn’t mean it will stay there forever. Water flows and trash happens to float a shore and also trap and kill animals in the sea. Image living in those areas, that causes frustrations and distress among citizens because they didn’t ask for it to come to their homeland so why don’t other countries dispose their trash properly.
Waste disruption – prompt
Write about something you’ve observed where waste disrupts your perception of how things should ‘normally’ function. What does this disruption reveal about the forms of domination and violence in ‘normal’ everyday social systems? Think about examples from the readings this week, such as waste being used as a resistance tactic in social movements, or police using waste to justify aggression against social groups, or the utopian imaginings of waste in future societies, but feel free to go beyond these.
Readings for this week:
Moore, Sarah A. (2009) “The excess of modernity: Garbage politics in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Professional Geographer 61: 426–437.
“Lebanese Say #YouStink to Government’s Garbage Crisis and Corruption.” PBS NewsHour, August 31, 2015. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/lebanon-trash.
Kohn, Alice. “Trash Crisis Forces Lebanon’s Environmental Awakening.” Deutsche Welle, December 27, 2016. http://www.dw.com/en/trash-crisis-forces-lebanons-environmental-awakening/a-36765579.
Liboiron, Max. “Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement.” Social Movement Studies 11, nos. 3-4 (2012): 393-401.
Asimov, Isaac. “Strikebreaker.” In Robot Dreams. New York: Ace, 1986, 127-138.
Morris, William. News from Nowhere. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918. (Chapters 6,7,15; pages 45-62, 117-126.)
Matter out of Place
I’ve been thinking about this common waste object since Halloween: candy wrappers.
In the weeks following Halloween, it’s tough to walk around any semi-residential area without spotting lollipop wrappers, squished chocolates, and tiny cardboard Nerds boxes.
One of the simplest ways Douglas frames the concept of dirt is “matter out of place” (pg. 36). When the candy is eaten, the empty wrapper belongs in its designated place, which is an appropriate garbage receptacle. Leaving it anywhere else is disrupting the order of the universe! Seeing this wrapper on the ground in the center of a sidewalk is wrong, but seeing it on the ground in a dumpster or landfill would be acceptable.
Another interpretation of dirt could be matter that may pose hygienic or pathological harm to us. This wrapper itself is seemingly innocuous, as someone trusted its manufacturing process and food cleanliness standards enough to consume its contents. If this wrapper were handed to me alongside a crumpled ball of printer paper, I would most likely trust the cleanliness of the paper before this wrapper. Maybe it’s the knowledge that food once existed in it, or that someone’s mouth may have been pressed against it to lick out the last crumbs. Why is my mind brought to food again in this example? I’m absolutely certain that, of the 500 inorganic lab-synthesized chemicals compromising the candy’s ingredients, 499 of them are high-strength preservatives that would render the candy sterile even after a nuclear meltdown at the Nerds WonderFactory. Any type of food just seems to carry this aura of potential disease.
DSNY
When dealing with syringes you need to be very careful how you dispose of them, I personally make sure every needle is bent after use, and then i put them in the sharps container. It becomes someone else’s responsibility to take care of it when I sneak my sharps container into the hospital. I drop off all of my needles in their containers because there isn’t an safe/easy way for me to dispose of them. I have no idea what happens next to be completely honest, but I assume it has something to do with melting the needles down and dumping the rest.
Individual Responsibility
I rescued an Omen magazine the Dakin living room’s trash bin, finding it in good condition. This retrieval sheds light on our throwaway culture, as discussed in our readings on consumerism. Objects are often discarded prematurely, contributing to unnecessary waste.
The decision to discard the magazine likely stemmed from a mindset assuming its exhaustion of utility, neglecting the enduring value it might hold for others. Our discussions on sustainable practices underscore the importance of reevaluating such attitudes.
Leaving the magazine for someone else to find could have extended its life cycle, aligning with a more sustainable perspective that values reuse and repurposing. This experience prompts reflection on the discrepancy between an item’s perceived value by its original owner and its potential usefulness to others, advocating for a more mindful and sustainable approach to possessions.
Traveling Pollutants
Humans love for taveling releases many fumes and Carbon dioxide in the air that harms the Earth. Whether it’s traveling from a to b in your nearby cities close to home or traveling across the globe, our transportation is polluting the air. When you fly from New York to France or wherever you’re flying to, How do you’re think you’re flying? What is the planes intake to fly and what is it releasing? Well, planes release carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. As we easily flying in the air these harmful pollutants are closer to the atmosphere than the frames we release from are vehicles. To create less pollutants we should normalizes electric cars and make them more affordable. For fly we should explore ways to fly speeding less fumes.
Pollution- Cars!!
I think a very common daily activity for most people, including myself, that produces a lot of pollution, is driving. Vehicles that run on fossil fuels obviously produce carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change. There have been a lot of recent efforts to move towards electric cars, but I see multiple issues with this, too. First of all, those cars are pretty unaffordable for most people, and are something that, at the moment, is only accessible to the elite class in the US. Also, except under the circumstance that a person with an electric car has solar panels or another form of green energy to charge their car off of (also only available to the elite), electric cars are powered by the grid, which is powered, at least in large part, by coal. This, although maybe less wasteful than gas or diesel, still has a significant environmental impact. I don’t know a whole lot about cars and the pollution they produce, but what I’ve gathered is that the only real way to eliminate pollution entirely from the practice of driving is to have exclusively electric cars powered by solar panels. Most of America struggles to afford to get our basic needs met, and, on top of that, all of our cities are designed to only be accessible by car, and are not walkable at all. People have to drive to work, to the grocery store, to bring their kids to school. We are a long ways away from being able to achieve this vision of pollution-less driving, and it is entirely unfair to expect most individual people to take responsibility for enacting it. What we need to do first is eliminate economic inequality, switch over on a country-wide scale to more sustainable energy practices, make our cities more accessible, place stricter regulations (at the very least) on the practices of large corporations, and put our money and resources, as a country, towards the people and the environment rather than whatever the hell we are putting them towards right now- all of these things will then set us up to be able to make lasting changes in our rates of pollution and c02 emissions. Making more Teslas is not going to cut it.
Pollution Practice
Sometimes when I’m anxious I go for car drives. Especially when I’m home and I can drive for miles without seeing a single car and I can escape deep into the music and my own internal monologue. I feel as though people do talk about the pollution from cars as a whole yet not as a singular person. I know that if we got rid of cars, or cars that run on gasoline, functioning in Maine would be much harder. We don’t have a public transport system that runs like in Amherst with the buses. Going to work is a 20 minute drive, and going to Walmart is a 45-60 minute drive. I do believe that doing that would ruin everyday functionality, unless a safer available alternative was given to the general public.
Conceptualizing Waste
Using the different ways to conceptualize waste, Moore has presented many concepts that collectively give a wider view of what waste means and represents. The object that I chose is a compostable plastic cup that we get from the dining commons or the Kern on Hampshire campus. The first concept is matter out of place. The fact that the cuts say compostable on them makes it more confusing when throwing the cups away. Inside of the Kern Cafe there are trash containers that are labeled ‘Compostable’. This is really great while you’re sitting and drinking in the Kern but if you haven’t finished your drink and you want to leave, by the time you are done with it the compostable trash containers are nowhere in sight. A solution is to put a couple more of those trash cans around campus. I believe that people would be good at throwing away scraps of compostable things in them. Inside the dining commons there is also a compostable section but there is no recycling. The matter out of place in this case is that there is not a readily available place to dispose of them around campus. This also gets wrapped up in commodities. The school uses so many of these cups. It is easier to have these cups around than to have reusable ones because people take them out of the places they get them from. It also goes along with filth and risk. The bacteria in the cups days after use has grown on the cup and using it again might be dangerous or ‘gross’ in some people’s minds. Seeing these cups around campus makes me realize how much waste just this one very small campus makes and how much more UMass makes.
Water Pollution
In Abington Massachusetts and almost every other place on planet Earth drinking water is a very regular activity. The ignorance of pollution within water is a privilege that most people don’t understand they have. The idea that you must accept that the simple act of drinking water is inherently polluted. The US government has limits to how much pollution is allowed in drinking water but that means that there is still pollutants in our drinking water. In my town we have received several notices of unsafe drinking water over the last few years as limits of PFAS change in Mass. Our drinking water is just over the limit of pollution but the reason we got notices recently isn’t because the levels have risen in the last few years but because the limits have changed. Why is the water not okay now when it was the day before they sent the notice? Why is any amount of pollution a safe amount of pollution? If we decided one day that any pollution is unacceptable then there is no viable drinking water in my area until they install new filters and improve our water treatment facility. For a while we would need to use bottled water which requires more pollution to be produced. Until then I will be drinking water with PFAS in it and waiting for us to figure our shit out.
https://abingtonnews.org/2023/10/11/ahs-ap-bio-class-tests-for-pfas-in-abington-streams-ponds/