A waste site is like a clustered antique store, various things that seem like garbage, other pieces that seem perfectly fine and fairly new so why would it be there to begin with? Some items aren’t even out of their packaging, but they’re still discarded. A strange smelling treasure trove that has the best thing with it: junk. Junk is just wonderful, so many interesting things that tell stories about the people who had them previously, some part of their tale. In Idaho, waste sites were a decent drive away from the big city and other city clusters sometimes by 45 minutes if downtown or a bit further out that feel a bit more industrial and more company lead, versus the small local areas that also works with the state but seems much more hands on instead of machine lead and corporal based. It speaks a lot about funding, location, and community discussion. One talk was some waste sites are just dumping trash and leaving, others you can strike up a conversation and all of a sudden you are learning stories about the old sailboat that was thrown out with a broken mermaid statues and a large Halloween spider decoration. Some areas seem more person based, hans on instead of machine. Though I am not suggesting those who work in more industrial aren’t as friendly, I think they have a much stricter schedule that doesn’t allow for those types of conversations a lot of the time.

The Merrill dumpsters are going to be the focus of my blog post today. I am not exactly sure how these operate, but I would guess they are the final destination for all the waste produced from the Merrill common rooms/kitchens, the smaller trash/recycling cans outside in the front, waste from the bathrooms, and students rooms. Definitely a core reason my dorm stays as clean as it is. Their location I believe is very specific for quick disposal and keeping it hidden. There are two ways for one to see the trash and recycling dumpsters, one is that they are doing laundry in the basement or if they walk to the back of Merril, which for the most part is very unlikely unless your maintenance. This location I feel is very much designed to be kept out of sight and out of mind, they are also surrounded on three sides by a wooden and metal fence, which further cements the idea of wanting them to be hidden from people. In addition there is a road that goes right up to it, designed for efficient disposal. I am not sure whether that road was always there for taking our waste away, but it does go right up to it, giving the impression that it was made for that. In addition to it being out of sight of the majority of the Hampshire population it is the closest they can have it to the woods, a place that we don’t consider to be our living space. We don’t bat an eye with them being in such a secluded location, but it would be much different if we put them in front of Merrill by the entrance where the smaller trash and recycling are currently. Even if it did not smell, people would still be questioning why it is placed there. However I do believe the current placement of the dumpsters is symbolic of what we as a society view waste as. Being pushed to the sidelines and further being hidden, kept just far enough away from our living space, but not really that far. Kind of like how there are dumps not far outside of towns/cities and most people would not know. Either because it’s blocked by barriers like trees or it looks like a hill covered in grass (I can think of several in Massachusetts that I didn’t know were dumps). 

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my family has several pets, and two of those pets, a guinea pig and a rabbit, have a litter box and a cage that need to be emptied on a regular basis. Because of the volume of material (primarily wood shavings) that needs to be disposed of, we do not put it in the trash, instead, we dump it in a kind of compost pile that has formed behind our barn. Our house and barn are surrounded by forest, and behind the barn, at the edge of the treeline, is a steep hill. The compost/litter pile is at that edge. 

Some of the aspects that make it ‘appropriate’ for this purpose are its distance from our house and the fact that it cannot be seen from the house or the road. A non-human aspect of the space is that it is on the edge of the steep drop and the woods. I think if that edge weren’t there, we would not use that spot because it would be like leaving a pile of stuff in the middle of a space. Somehow having the pile at the edge (the margins) of a space feels less disruptive and wrong than having it in the middle of the space. Perhaps this is because having material waste collect somewhere that is not an edge or a margin could be thought of as a waste of space.

The three readings this week are diverse, but all share a common theme of how material waste is pushed to marginal places, spaces that are typically understood as having lower value (in multiple senses of the word).  This can start from where bins are placed, to the larger containers where they are aggregated, town sorting facilities, and eventually outside cities where most humans live.  This week, examine one of these marginal spaces, broadly defined.  This can be a space either on or off campus.  What aspects of this space (human or non-human constructed) seem to make it ‘appropriate’ for waste?  

Readings:

Engler, Mira. “Dumps.” In Designing America’s Waste Landscapes.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, 75-123.

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

Locke, John. “On Property.” In Second Treatise on Government. 285-302