Jonathan over at Wasted Food has posted part one of a two part story on food in college cafeterias. Some students at Virginia Tech have an interesting research question: if you remove the trays onto which kids pile more food than they could possibly eat, will students take less food and create less waste? Control week results are in. Check them out and stay tuned for the exciting finale.
Photo by Andy Sarjahani via Wasted Food.
A recent report from the Ocean Conservancy shows that volunteers around the world collected 6 million tons of beach debris in a single day. Wired.com has the full report and some downloadable spreadsheets for data geeks.
I read this in The Guardian on the plane back from Oslo, seems pretty cool. Apparently some English schools are buying fabric from the Chinese made from recycled coke bottles and having that fabric made into school uniforms. Though a bit more expensive than the old materials, the recycled material helps any school who uses it meet carbon footprint quotas set by the state. I guess the bigger question is, what do we think of these quotas?
Photo from Keetsa.com of plastic bottle hoodie.
“Hi hi” from Oslo. I’m here attending the opening of “Recycling the Looking Glass, Trash Art-Found Objects” a wonderful group show curated by the incomparable Samir M’kadmi. Much, much more will be posted here about the show, the contributors and organizers. At the moment, I’ll throw up a couple photos from the opening seminar and the piece I submitted to the catalog (my talk was basically a longer version of what’s below). Other panalists included a feminist art critic, an economist and an ecologist who uses trash art projects to teach kids about the environment. Two artists also gave talks. Stay tuned for less Leila-centric posts very soon, I have met amazing artists and art world peeps from all over the World this weekend and can’t wait to share the virtual booty with all of you!
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A Short History of Garblogging
My obsession with trash began when, as a journalism student in New York City, I started researching the unimaginable number of tax dollars spent each year transferring garbage from my hometown to places as far away as the middle of the country.
New York closed it’s only landfill in 2001 with no immediate plans for what to do with all the trash created by the millions of local residents and businesses. The immediate solution was to export the waste to other states, an expensive venture involving enormous contracts with private waste haulers. Previously, the city had evacuated the majority of its trash on barges pulled by tugboats. This new plan created a billion-dollar-a-year industry and added significantly to the number of trucks circling the already congested city streets.
Not surprisingly, the poorest neighborhoods bore the brunt of these changes. In order for the garbage to be moved long distances, it had to be emptied from local dump trucks and packed up again into larger vehicles. This transfer of trash—a smelly process that attracts rats—continues to take place in several of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
While the story I was writing focused on local politics, my fascination with garbage extended far beyond the United States. I started to see trash as everything from an indicator of poverty to a medium for art. Before long, everyone I knew associated me with trash and when they came across related factoids, I would receive an email. So I started a blog. The Internet seemed to be the perfect outlet for these tidbits and the perfect venue to start a larger conversation.
(French economist Gérard Bertolini, me, Panama-based American artist Donna Conlon)
The wonderful thing about the World Wide Web is that if you have a pet interest, it is easy to locate whole communities of people who share that interest. And so it was for me with trash. Soon after launching everydaytrash.com, over two years ago now, I discovered a universe of other sites dealing with interrelated themes. Because my interest in the subject had grown from local politics, it took me some time to think of everytrash.com as an environmental or “green” blog.
My audience had no such doubts. I quickly realized that the majority of people interested in trash are interested in reducing waste and approach the issue in terms of saving the planet. I came across people keeping track of their own waste online, weighing their garbage each day and trying hard to make less the next. And there were sales sites, marketing niche environmentally-friendly products to those willing to pay a bit more for a clear conscience. There appears to be a huge market out there for reusable tote bags, organic baby clothes and business card holders made from recycled gasoline.
It doesn’t take much exploration into the world of trash to see that, fundamentally, trash is an economic and class issue. Only those less fortunate ever have to worry about what happens to what society discards. The rest of society, on the other hand, sleepwalks through life believing that trash disappears the moment it hits the bottom of a trash can.
Early on in the life of the blog, I became interested in trash pickers, communities of people who go through the trash and find new uses for what others have chucked. In Argentina, China and Egypt and probably many other places, there are words for these people and the practice is associated with very particular ethnic groups. In many other places, people supplement their income by collecting and redeeming cans or hunting for and selling scrap metal. Sifting through the smattering of articles that pop up each year on trash pickers, I am constantly reminded of the wastefulness of the era I live in.
(”Garblogging” translated in the English/Norweigan catalog–love it!)
Once you notice trash, it’s hard to ignore. Around the time I was pouring through New York’s solid waste management plans, my job at a public health nonprofit began taking me to Africa. There, I encountered a relationship with material goods entirely foreign to me. Terms like recycling and zero waste have no place in these societies where value and lifespan of any given product are given their full respect. In places where people have very little, these concepts are organic.
I met a roadside tailor in Malawi who spent his days mending the worn clothing of local villagers, squeezing extra days, weeks and months out of the worn fabric. In Uganda, women from the North, an area burdened by enduring violence and high rates of HIV/AIDS, form beads out of old magazine pages that they then shellac to create brightly colored bracelets and necklaces. Women in Kenya collect floating flip flops from the ocean to refashion into crafts to sell; one project has even created a giant whale out of the discarded plastic shoes to raise awareness about the dangers of plastic waste to marine life. Plastic bags in Burkina Faso are twisted into small dolls and sold to tourists. While the African cultures I visited varied dramatically, the unmistakable smell of burning garbage welcomed me the moment I stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac in a new city.
In fact, many of the news articles I read while traveling focused the depletion of Africa’s resources and the threat of disease. The contrast between the joyful and hopeful efforts of the beaders and doll makers and the overall pessimism of news coverage on Africa fed my enthusiasm for blogging. I was glad to have a forum to highlight positive, homegrown responses to seemingly overwhelming problems.
Of course many positive approaches to the subject of trash come from the artistic community. Through everydaytrash.com, I have discovered “trashion” designers who create fantastical outfits from discarded items as well as countless artists who use trash as a dynamic medium with which to create provocative pieces. What I love most about these works is their effortless incorporation of an often dense political topic. Trashtastic!
Last month, I attended a lecture on the history of sanitation in New York City given by Robin Nagle, a professor of anthropology at NYU co-teaching a class on making a museum AND holder of the supercool title “Anthropologist in Residence” for New York City’s Department of Sanitation. Today, Professor Nagle has been kind enough to answer some follow-up questions for the very exciting revivial of Trashtastic Tuesdays, everyone’s favorite irregular weekly blog feature!
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everydaytrash: As an anthropologist, what drew you to the subject of trash?
Nagle: I was originally drawn to the subject of trash through one central question that continues to inspire and confound me. How is it that we are content to “throw” “away” our garbage with little or no regard for what happens to it next? Subsidiary questions grow from that. Just what does happen next? Who picks it up? What’s it like to pick it up? Where does it go? How does it get there? Then what happens?
Luckily for me, each answer opens a new bundle of fascinating questions.
everydaytrash: How does one become the anthropologist-in-residence for the city’s sanitation department and what does that job entail?
Nagle: One bombs as a sanitation worker but wants to maintain a title within the DSNY, so one proposes “anthropologist-in-residence” to enable one to draw on one’s training, one’s experience within the DSNY, and one’s larger goals within the context of the Department.
The job entails good old-fashioned fieldwork — taking part in parade clean-ups, snow storm responses, hanging with people on their rounds, interviewing current and retired employees. It also entails putting together the nuts and bolts that will one day be the DSNY Museum. And it entails writing about the DSNY — its work, its mission its history.
everydaytrash: I visited the student exhibit, Loaded Out: Making a Museum. In your ideal world, what would a full-fledged sanitation museum look like?
Nagle: A full-fledged DSNY Museum will have permanent and revolving exhibitions that reveal the fascinating history of sanitation and public health in the context of urban America and especially in the context of New York City. At least one exhibit will always focus on some aspect of the work involved in keeping New York alive by keeping the city’s streets clean. And the DSNY Museum will house the Wall of Honor, which lists all employees who have been killed in the line of duty since the Department came into being in 1881.
The museum will have educational initiatives that will appeal to school children, scholars, and everyone in between. It will include historic and contemporary equipment, trucks, carts, sweepers, mechanical brooms, flushers, wreckers, uniforms, tools. There will archives in digital and hardcopy form that will hold all sanitation-related material we can collect from within New York City, and that will point to related resources in other places.
The museum space itself, which will be vibrant, colorful, and welcoming, will be used for community and DSNY-related events, including meetings of the DSNY benevolent societies and DSNY pipe-and-drum band rehearsals.
Phew! It’s a big dream. But you gotta start somewhere.
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Photos ripped from the Slate.com and DSNY Web sites.
This week in trash news:
My friend Joe and his girlfriend moved to San Francisco last year. At first, I didn’t understand how ANYONE could leave New York, but every now and again Joe sends an email that makes it all make sense. For example, this morning he sent me some West Coast garbage links including this one to the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. It started as a supply-exchange set up by a couple of teachers and looks like it has blossomed into a community center with all kinds of reuse projects and resources, including a store How cool is that? Pardon me while I go mining the Depot links page for story ideas…thanks, Joe!
Two resources for the garcurious:
This week on Trashtastic Tuesday, we take a moment to examine the word choice of trash talk. In discussing our respective passions for the narrow yet highly bloggable subjects of chocolate and trash, my friend Emily Stone and I decided to dedicate a post each to language. Below is a compilation of links to what the experts have to say about garbology, the concept of zero waste, sustainability and solid waste. These are terms essential to the understanding of broader trash issues. [Editor's note: In fact, if everydaytrash were a European blog, I would long ago have been kicked off the Internet for failing to define the key terms up front before marching on to present a solid argument in outline form. Aplogies to any Europeans I may have confused in the past, consider this a new leaf.]
Check out Chocolate in Context for a parellel glossery (with far more original reporting, I might add). And while you’re over there, vote for Emily. She’s <this> close to a free trip to California from some contest called “Grill Me.”
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Clip art from higheredcenter.org
This week on Trashtastic Tuesday, we check in with some Middle Schoolers at the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies. This year, the students are taking part in a “Cafeteria Expedition,” an interactive project to improve and better understand school cafeterias. Alex Perez, Stephanie Rodriguez, Steven Ruiz, Grabriella Bobe and T.J. Bodden—members of the 8th grade composting crew—were nice enough to take the time to answer a few questions for everydaytrash.
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everydaytrash: Why should a school like yours have a composting program?
Composting Crew: The reason why all schools should have a composting program is because we generate a lot of waste and composting can reduce that amount.
everydaytrash: How does reducing waste help your school?
Composting Crew: Because we are making it into something useful.
everydaytrash: How did you choose what kind of composting system to use?
Composting Crew: We went to the Botanic Gardens and saw what different kinds of composting bins that they had and choose which one we liked and would be best for our needs.
everydaytrash: What kinds of materials did you need to get started?
Composting Crew: We needed pallets, screws, nails, buckets, and waste. We had the pallets donated by Lowe’s and we carried them back to school.
everydaytrash: Who uses the composting soil you create?
Composting Crew: Every single person in our school will be able to use it. The first will be the grade school kids who will use it for their planters. After that we will donate it to locals for their gardens. Thank you for showing interest in our project. We learned a lot from this Cafeteria Expedition.
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Photos courtesy of the incomparable Peter Hoppmann—friend, neighbor and middle school teacher extraordinaire.
This week, Trashtastic Tuesday features trash professor Joshua Goldstein whose research focuses on waste management and garbage pickers in China throughout radically different political periods. Josh was nice enough to share his insight on everything from the upcoming Beijing Olympics to the pros and cons of modern garbage collection. Fascinating stuff.
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everydaytrash: How many “garbage pickers” currently work in the Beijing area?
Professor Joshua Goldstein: There are no definitive statistics on the number of pickers, and to some extent it also depends on how you define “pickers.” If you define pickers as folks working in landfills picking, then the number is probably just a couple thousand; if you include street pickers and folks who purchase post-consumer scrap from residents and businesses and then sell that scrap at recycling markets, the number is probably between 200,000-300,000. If you include garbage collectors and street sweepers who pick and sell on the side as well as residents (often the elderly) who regularly pick scrap from their neighborhoods for some extra cash, the number would easily exceed 350,000.
everydaytrash: How has the role of migrant garbage pickers evolved in recent Chinese history?
Goldstein: The migrant recyclers are the heart of the recycling sector in Beijing and have taken over the sector from the municipal state-owned recycling bureau. Over the last several years the state has stopped violently repressing and detaining most of these peasant migrants. Instead the Beijing government is using different indirect methods to formalize migrant recycling activities, such as more strictly regulating scrap markets, restricting the use of bicycle carts (the recycler’s main method of moving goods), and restricting the opening of collection points. The state has essentially given up on competing with the migrants and has moved to trying to regulate them effectively.
everydaytrash: How is China’s preparation for the upcoming Olympics affecting their livelihood?
Goldstein: It’s hard to say, and that’s part of what I hope to do some research into. My sense is, it hasn’t had a huge effect in any straight–forward way. the plan had been, it seemed back around 2000, that the municipal government would take over the sector, displace most of the migrant bosses and radically reduce the migrant involvement in the trade and replace them with unemployed Beijing residents or with state-allied and more easily managed companies. But these efforts to curtail, reduce, and coopt migrants in this sector seems to have failed and the state appears to have given up on this goal. Now it seems trying to regulate what exists is their main goal, and then probably in Summer 2008 there will be massive controls put on all recycling activity…as well as upon almost every other activity in Beijing.
everydaytrash: Is the informal garbage collection system in China corrupt, crime-filled and run by gangs?
Goldstein: There is certainly a lot of crime and corruption; this is a tricky question in a Socialist Market economy that in itself is oxymoronic and riddled with contradictions and “grey market” activities. Everyday gang activity and violence around the scrap yards seem to have lessened over the last several years. For example, it was common that gangs would charge fees on any truck entering a scrap yard; but the yards are far more organized, with weigh-scales and guards etc., and that sort of blatant threatening activity has dwindled. But certainly bosses all have experience with corruption, insider information, etc. I am quite ignorant about this side of things still…folks don’t talk about it at all openly.
everydaytrash: Are garbage pickers more efficient/better for the environment than government-run national recycling programs?
Certainly migrants are much more efficient, and the migrant sector is huge and laborers come from relatively poor parts of the countryside, so the social value of having migrants doing this work is quite great. Environmentally…there are so many aspects to that question. Overall, my sense is that between the migrant system and the state’s there is hardly any meaningful difference environmentally speaking. Whether the scrap is state or migrant collected, it generally gets trucked out to second tier cities where environmental regulations are not enforced and the secondary processing factories do major damage.
everydaytrash: Are there laws in place to protect the rights of migrant workers in China?
Goldstein: There are beginning to be, and there are some social services being developed as well; but these are all very recent, weak, and not very highly publicized. Migrants have far more freedom than even just a few years ago. Up to around 2000 they were still basically like illegal aliens in cities such as Beijing where household registration laws were quite strictly enforced. Now they are free to settle in the city, send their kids to schools, etc, but they still face many administrative and economic barriers.
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Photo by Jan Egil Kirkebo.
This week in trash news:
From the president of Columbia University:
Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:
On Wednesday, Oct. 25, Columbia joins other colleges and universities around the country in marking Campus Sustainability Day–an event designed to spark discussion and action to reduce the environmental footprint of college campuses. Columbia’s students, faculty, and staff have a long-standing commitment to responsible environmental stewardship–and this day is an opportunity not only to reflect on our accomplishments to date, but to build on them for the future.
The event will take place from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Low Plaza and will feature information tables, sustainability kits, and a live Webcast from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. linking us with campuses nationwide.
Columbia researchers have led the way on environmental issues worldwide–from El Nino to asthma in urban neighborhoods, climate change, and environmental policy making. Locally, Mayor Bloomberg recently announced an expansion of Columbia’s efforts to advance environmental protection–New York City’s engagement of the Earth Institute to advise its new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.
This semester, working together as a community, we are taking a fresh approach to thinking about and managing our own environmental impact, with the establishment of the Office of Environmental Stewardship, under the direction of Nilda Mesa. We have a number of new initiatives getting underway. Among these are:
* Examining ways to reduce our energy consumption, limit our greenhouse gas emissions, and obtain power from renewable energy sources in the future;
* Incorporating environmental and energy enhancements in new construction projects at Columbia;
* Improving our recycling practices and establishing composting programs;
* Launching a Sustainability Advisory Council that will include academic, administrative, and student members;
* Expanding the Environmental Stewardship Web site to serve as a virtual forum for exchanging ideas and tips related to the environment and our daily lives.
The address of the site is www.columbia.edu/cu/environment. I invite you to join our celebration of Campus Sustainability Day. It is a good step toward working together as a University to help preserve and enhance the environment of our campus, our community, and our planet.
Sincerely, Lee C. Bollinger
This is a blog about Oscar the Grouch. It’s about the smoke of burning trash piles wafting through every developing country in the world. It’s about the billions of dollars a year spent exporting garbage from one state to another. It’s about diving into a dumpster and coming up with a still-warm burger and three packets of mustard. It’s about detonating landmines with old truck tires and building bookshelves out of milk crates. It’s about barges. It’s about battery acid. It’s about paying sixty bucks for a change purse made of soda can tabs because the label says a women’s group in Latin America glued them together. It’s about sorting plastics. It’s about beaches built on landfills and landfills built on beaches. It’s about the “away” in throw away and the “out” in toss out and the “rid” in get rid of it. This is a blog about the art, money, power, politics, people and literature of garbage. It’s a subject that shocks and amuses me nearly every day, which is about how often I imagine I’ll be posting. I hope you’ll share in the fascination.
