Judith Petts on Garbage Mining

So, to continue on, I just figured I had to better explain what GARBAGE MINING is because it's so amazing!!! For my one reader (Thanks for reading this, Jane):

"Management of MSW raises questions about the capacity of future generations to reduce some of the intergenerational risk sources. For example, will future generations be able to find more benign ways to treat waste, come up with methods to make land safe for any future use, or develop recycling technologies that can expand the range of materials treated? Landfill mining -- whereby waste is abstracted from closed landfills for recycling, usually to extend void space capacity -- is already a reality. If such an argument can be sustained, basic storage of present waste might become an acceptable option, although this does not prevent intragenerational risks in the even of storage failure, institutional failure, or both." (Petts 2000:825)

ACADEMIC CRUSH: Judith Petts

Alright, I know I'm a complete dork, but I think I'm in love with a new scholar in my field. Meet Judith Petts - she's a scholar in the field of risk management. I'm slowing becoming better acquainted with risk assessment as I do more and more readings. It's pretty interesting stuff.

In her article written in 2000 titled "Municipal Waste Management: Inequities and the Role of Deliberation" she discusses Environmental Justice and the process of siting a waste facility. She dips into optimising profitability, functionality, safety and legality, but doesn't even brush up against anything Robert Bullard would associate siting a landfill with. It's absolutely astounding! I'm so happy to have found contrasting ideas in this field. I was getting a little down about the social justice field, thinking it was so idealistic and cynical at the same time. Perhaps I'm just sick of Ro Bull. He's is actually kind of passe in this field!!! No disrespect thought because he did start the whole social justice movement in the eighties and nineties and he isn't white and bearded like the other civil rights folk that started it out (John Muir...etc.)

But back to Petts - she also talks about GARBAGE MINING in this 2000 article. When I visited New York a month ago, I started talking to a guy who lived with my friends that I was staying with. He suggested garbage mining as a feasible economic opportunity in the future. I kind of shrugged him off because the idea was completely new to me and I remember him looking at me saying "Kim, this has been studied, I didn't make this up." I was floored, I had been schooled in my own field. I thought he was the coolest and I had a big hate for the guy to. I am however incredibly proud to say that I have found an article that talks about garbage mining (for potentially recyclable resources) and I have to send all my love and praise towards the powerhouse garbage queen Judith Petts.

MORE FAB ACRONYMS!

AHP Analytic Hierarchy Process
ASSURRE Association for the Sustainable Use and Recovery of Resources in Europe
BANANA Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything
BPEO Best Practicable Environmental Option
CBA Cost Benefit Analysis
EIA Environmental Impact Assessment
EEWC European Energy from waste coalition
ELECTRE Elimination and Choice Translating Reality (multicriteria method)
EPA Environmental Protection Agency
ERRA European Recovery and Recycling Association
EUROPEN European Organisation for Packaging and the Environment

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I just found the article that has all the elements that I like about waste management. Trouble is my degree is a Masters in Geography, this seems a little more anthropological. I hope I can make this work. You can even read this article from where ever you are for free! It's ten years old, but I think it really tackles issues that are still of great interest to bringing people to recycle more often and better.

There are really two elements to recycling (of many!) that stick out to me:

1. Participation and Program Involvement (Getting people to recycle)
2. Recycling properly 

The second point I strongly believe is often abolished to make way for public participation. 

The article I just linked you to raises a really good point and that's "recylcing, as a structured activity, is undertaken on a more frequent basis than waste reuse or reduction." Plain and simple, perhaps that's where we need to devote more of our effort!!!

Robin Nagle on the "San Men" of New York

This is my first post as a Masters student. It's odd, as I put together all these brilliant ideas that I've held very close to me in the past year, I really struggle to articulate them in a scholarly way. I mean, there's just so much I could possibly touch on to make sense of waste in Toronto.

I just watched the most inspiring 20 minute lecture delivered by NYU Anthropologist Robin Nagle. If you've read anything on my blog so far, you'll understand my big love for this woman. She's studying an element of waste that I really wish I had the breadth to dive into - the role of the sanitation worker. This lecture touches on the role and presence of the sanitation worker. Nagle, a New York Anthropologist with her PhD, worked as "garbage man" for a brief period of time. This lecture touches on her experiences and learnings on this job.

Nagle departs with two sentiments. First, is a little something than a sanitation worker of seventeen years told her when she first started on the job. As she recited his words, she struggled to give the santitation worker a gender -

"If you're lucky you'll go your whole life and never have to call a cop. You're also, if you're lucky, will never have to call a fireman. You need a garbage man every single day."

The second thing she said is that the next time you see someone taking care of your trash, you very politely say Thanks.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/5842234?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="400" height="230" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/5842234%22%3ERobin Nagle at Gel 2009</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/gelconference%22%3EGel Conference</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com%22%3evimeo%3c/a%3E.%3C/p>

Waste Privatisation in Toronto: Good or Bad?

Hot news in Garbage in Toronto these days is the privitisation of waste management in Toronto.

I'm not completely swayed that this is a bad thing, but with Rob Ford's records on issues concerning the environment, I'm getting a little wry.

Maybe another strike's on the way...

This is a fabulous article put together by the The Environmental Alliance (TEA) for a digestible summary of what's been going on in the last few weeks.

Waste Management - Frederick Kaufman

This is a brilliant article I stumbled upon while looking into waste management in New York.

Steve Askew, the man being interviewed, is clearly one who is absolutely very knowledgeable and well-versed in the ethics and purpose of waste management. I adore the final bit where he states his job and the functions of human waste treatment plants as returning the environment to the way God intended. Bold.

2008 / New York City

Waste Management

TAGS:

 

disease,

 

garbage,

 

journalism,

 

New York,

 

parasites,

 

science

For thousands of years, Homo sapiens flocked across continents in pursuit of bird, beast, and fresh water, leaving behind him a trail of gnawed bones and steaming waste. The moment we stopped removing ourselves from that waste, it had to be removed from us. Thus the origins of civilization, thus the glories of Rome, Paris, and Philadelphia. A civilization that cannot escape its own fecal matter is a civilization in trouble—unless, of course, the uneasy relationship between man and his effluents can evolve.

“The first regulations with respect to waste go back to the code of Hammurabi,” said Steve Askew, superintendent of New York’s North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the world’s largest. “You have to bury your waste far from where you sleep.” And he gave me the look. Steve Askew never finished college, but that look had seen to the bottom of things. It was both spooky and intimidating, that particular look of pity and loathing the wise bestow upon the ignorant. He knew something I wanted to know: the ultimate fate of our waste.

“People wake up in the morning, they brush their teeth, flush the toilet,” said Askew. “They think it goes to the center of the earth.”

If you happen to live within one particular 5,100-acre patch of the West Side of Manhattan, instead of going to the center of the earth, your waste flows to Askew’s extraordinary concrete cesspit: twenty-eight concrete acres suspended above more than two thousand concrete caissons sunk into the shallows between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. Constructed in the 1970s, topped by three swimming pools, a skating rink, and a carousel, North River cost the city a billion dollars, 100 million of which went straight into odor control.

North River is just one of New York City’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants, the first of which opened in 1886, along with the Statue of Liberty. These plants handle every conceivable kind of sewerable waste from the city’s eight million permanent residents, not to mention anything a commuter or a tourist might care to add. They separate the material that comes their way into solid, liquid, and gaseous parts, which they further subdivide into that which must be discarded, that which may be consumed, and that which someone, somewhere, might eventually be able to sell.

The substance that enters North River is mostly water, and the vast majority of that water leaves the plant after not much more than six hours, disinfected to the extent that it can merge inoffensively with the Hudson River. One flush on the Upper West Side at seven in the morning, and by three in the afternoon the water is back on the street, so to speak. What’s left over is a half-million gallons of concentrated daily waste, now known as sludge.

I followed Askew into an enormous room of computers, controls, workstations, and switches. Behind us flashed a wall-size diagrammatic panel, the great computerized brain of waste. Next to us stood the oiler, who had been at North River twenty years.

“Right now we’re at 135 million gallons per day,” said the oiler.

The greatest increase occurs between eight and nine in the morning, when the city’s output swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as the big flush. Now it was eleven A.M., and in a few hours the circadian flow of biology en masse would begin to diminish, eventually bottoming out around four in the morning, at 68 million gallons per day. The rhythm is as steady as the tides. “The Super Bowl halftime surge is a myth,” said Askew.

He led me across the concrete floor, through a concrete warehouse, and to the concrete screening room, where he began to extol the virtue and beauty of his eleven-mile-long sewage interceptor. By the time the morning flush finally rolls into North River, it has joined the downstream flow of all the other morning flushes from all the other sewage lines from Bank Street to the Upper West Side, and sunk fifty-four feet below sea level. It is here, at the extreme low point of this immense underground current, that North River gets to work. In the Stygian depths, its mighty diameter swollen to sixteen feet, the dark torrent branches into six channels, each of which must be pumped to the top floor of the plant, where gravity can once again take hold and set the outcast on a new journey.

Askew gazed into the inky pool of untreated wastewater and began to describe some of the marvels the interceptor had disclosed. Aside from the daily take of leaves, sticks, cans, and paper, the great rake had brought up quite a few vials of cocaine. When cops bang on the door, the toilet is a drug dealer’s best friend. Ditto for the professional forger: a good deal of counterfeit money has floated into Steve Askew’s hands. Twenty years ago a dog showed up, a living dog that became the mascot of a Brooklyn plant.

As we walked away from the pool, I asked about the wind. No matter what the weather is outside, no matter where we traveled inside, the thick concrete walls of North River generated bracing gusts. Askew explained that every minute, titanic blowing machines inhaled 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air and exhaled 750,000 cubic feet of carbon-filtered, bleach-scrubbed exhaust—six to twelve complete air changes per hour.
But the scouring of North River’s halitosis, while essential to community relations, has nothing to do with the plant’s core mission. The alchemy of purgative transformation starts in the warmth and humidity of the next chamber we visited, where submerged chemical mixers combine the waste with custom-made bacteria. “It’s volatizing off!” Askew yelled above the din of engines and bubbling brown water. Undeterred by the general uproar, Askew detailed the technical intricacies of fecal breakdown and development, but I’m afraid the cacophony blunted the nuances. So Askew dumbed down the lecture. “This looks really good!” he hollered. “Tan water! Light brown froth! Small bubbles! Musty smell! If the foam looks like chocolate mousse, that’s an indication of a bacteriological process!”

We headed to a low-ceilinged room so huge it did not appear to have walls. Here were the settling tanks, the final stop before the water returned to the world. Peace held sway among these last lagoons, and indistinct reservoirs misted into a concrete vanishing point hundreds of yards away. “On a cold morning, you will see the water vaporing off,” Askew said. “And it will rain inside the plant.”

He gave me the look. “When it is really cold, it snows inside the plant.”

At that moment, two square football fields of submerged jets spumed into the shadows and the bronze liquid arced, more sublime and terrifying than the fountains of Trevi or Versailles. Soon these waters would sluice down concrete courses to mix with the mighty Hudson. As for the remaining sludge, it also would depart, but by an altogether different route.

When the froth finally settled back into silence, Steve Askew backtracked through the concrete dungeons until we arrived at a perfectly normal conference room and a nice surprise—someone had ordered pizza!

Despite the skating rink and swimming pool, despite the bleach, the carbon filters, the white hard hats and the spotless lab coats of the technicians, despite the banks of UNIX computers and the sober talk of asymptotes and oxygen demand, despite the boardroom-size wood-veneer table and the well-upholstered ergonomic chairs and the rush of twenty thousand cubic feet of air per second, and despite, to put it bluntly, one of the most extraordinary concealments in all of human history, North River still managed to evoke unappetizing associations. But as I gazed at the cheese and red sauce and blackened crust, I recalled the words of one of the many wastewater professionals I had met that morning. “One of the things about the job—you still have to eat.”

So I sat down to lunch and learned about the glorious future of waste. Now that biochemists could scour the particles on the atomic level, the plant could recover ibuprofen, acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix, and I had a hunch the citizens of New York excreted boatloads of stimulant. Perhaps Starbucks would be interested. The technology was there.

“Twenty years from now we will be removing things we have no idea about,” said Askew. “Penicillin, mercury, heroin. Will this be a pharm business? An energy business? An agribusiness?”

He took another bite and delivered the look.

“A bear goes in the woods and it takes two years to decompose. We do it in six hours. In six hours, we imitate all of nature—from the big bang to the big chill. We’re trying to put it back the way that God intended.”

© 2008 by Frederick Kaufman. Used with permission of Frederick Kaufman.

"It's far easier to save a dollar than it is to make one."

- Christine Terhune Herrick, Good Housekeeping Late 1800s.

Taken from Susan Strasser's Waste and Want

Waste Resolution #3: Only Buy Food That You Know You'll Use

Only Buy Food That You Know You'll Use

Easier said than done. Someone told me ages ago that grocery stores are strategically laid out so you get enticed. That always stuck with me. I think the best move would be to live near a grocery store, so you buy things as you need them.

I sort of addressed the idea that my roommate never waste because her food was all frozen. But there are all sorts of awful things that go along with preservation, packaging and keeping food cold. So, maybe that isn't the best option!

Compost, Buying too much and Dumpster Diving

A little late on this one, but I found a terrific article in Toronto Star on waste in Ontario. A huge problem I am dealing with is over buying. I like her intro line to her article -

"Food is so plentiful in Canada that even our garbage cans are full of it." ("Waste Land," Jennifer Bain, Toronto Star, January 15, 2011)

Waste, and over wasting is a huge issue that the government is struggling to grapple with. Toronto I was most astonished to find keeps absolutely no garbage in the walls of the city. I really wanted to craft an article to argued that Toronto Should Keep Their Own Garbage In The Walls Of Their City. You explore my ideas further in a little brief I wrote when the new year rolled around, big changes in the city.

My TA at the time kept trying to tease ideas out of me, I simply couldn't argue the space issue (there simply is not any!) It's really easy to defend the social issues, but then you struggle with the monetary benefits for the recipients of the waste. So, I am a little stuck and hope to have the good opportunity to explore this further.

But something I have been really struggling to address is overbuying food. Last year, I lived with a girl who bought largely frozen food - something I am hesitant to do. I however, week after week found myself throwing out tons and tons of fresh food that didn't make my belly! Still, even more so living with my Grandpa now I find myself wasting far too much.

Bain explores some really valid points that need serious evaluation -

1. Food waste is the "Elephant in the Room," The Green bin is a guilt eraser!

She calls it the "elephant in the room" because it's something we know is there but don't know how to address. She states:

"In Ontario, there are multiple fees for everyone from manufacturers to consumers to handle the disposal of e-waste. But how do you handle that with a head of lettuce?"

2. What should we do with the waste? How do we save it before it becomes garbage?

Who has kitchen staff to transport bruised apples into apple sauce? Who can hand out yogurt before it expires? Who would best appreciate milk, coffee creamers or green energy smoothies?

These are questions that I drew from Bain's article. She claims these are problems that Second Harvest drivers face daily. Second Harvest is a brilliant service that collects unused, leftover food from restaurants, bakeries and shops. They can actually take food that is one year past their expiration date, providing it is frozen. Blayne Walker, a Second Harvest Driver states that "If you won't eat is, don't pick it up."

3. North American portions

I wish I was raised in a culture that is comfortable with small portions. I come from a family and environment that finds satisfaction in larger portions of lousy (but ever so delicious) food. She touches on a great group called Love Food Hate Waste, a campaign encouraging portioning and conscious food shopping.

I'm a little crossed on the doggie bag debate. My coworkers and I often get a sick chuckle out of what people will take home. It was less obvious at the last place because we would just toss the customers the boxes. The restaurant I work at is slightly upper class, I have to see and package everything people wish to eat later on. Bain's article harps on the good merits of doggie bagging everything. She states -

"Blame it on the "all-you-can-eat" culture that Bloom has renamed "all-you-can waste." Or the fact that asking a restaurant for a doggie bag is sometimes seen as gauche."

We do judge you that way. Sometimes packing up every little fry is tedious, but I agree with Bain's stance. However, every styrofoam container I have to use to package up every chip left is painfully hard for me. I am the first to love a leftover meal, (especially one I didn't make!) but it just gets to the point where you know people will absolutely not eat their soggy chips later on!

I wish all restaurants, including my own would use more ecofriendly containers. Another serious issue that we're all struggling with. I will touch on this in the future! Paper dishes, or green, compostable plates and cutlery are not always welcomed to the compost stream. At least I can speak for the research I've done in Toronto. Mixed up. Will feature this in the upcoming weeks!

4. Gleaning

"Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they've been harvested or deemed unprofitable to harvest. Gleaners eat the free food or pass it on to those who are hungry."

Meet the Ontario Association of Food Bank's Community Harvest program - They collected 12,635 pounds of corn, potatoes, eggplants and bell peppers for the association to hand out at food banks for Thanksgiving.

Meet Not Far From the Tree - Seven hundred volunteers harvested nearly 20,000 pounds of fruit from 228 Toronto trees on private property this year. The fruit is then transported on foot (or bike) and evenly divded amongst property owners, volunteers, food banks and shelters.

I read this terrific book called Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by a British chap named Tristam Stuart. He talked about his experience dumpster diving. A concept you absolutely must dive (pun!) into.

Further reading and consideration:

American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of It's Food (and What We Can Do About It) by Martin Gooch

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristam Stuart

Reuse, Toilet Paper Rolls

Who says toilet paper rolls are rubbish?

Meet Anastassia Elias, talented and completely original artist.

Waste Resolution #2: Buy Less, Keep Less

Buy Less, Keep Less

I grew up lost in stuff. This is a result of a vicious combination of my Mother's love of shopping and my Dad's immense sentimental value for stuff.

Something that has really made me aware of the potential to change is living with others as well as moving frequently. I have moved four times in three years.

Three things that I buy very effortlessly is music, movies and books. Great things, but I have to find a healthy medium.

I'm hoping in a big move across the country I can really sever my ties with my stuff.

I will make a few more comments on stuff in the days to come. It's a real rich untouched field that I don't think is properly addressed in the Reality TV Drama Hoarders.

This is the den I grew up in. I am puckering up to my Grandfather and my bro is looking quite pensive.

Sturla Gunnarsson: 'Force of Nature'

Force of Nature is a film directed by Sturla Gunnarsson, an individual born in Iceland raised in Vancouver. He hasn't done too much that I've really connected with, but his repertoire is out there.

I really appreciated this film. Gunnarsson's Force of Nature gave focus to Activist/Scholar David Suzuki. Interestingly, Suzuki is the main character that lets his life unfold in front of the viewer without coming off as an educational seminar entirely.

David Suzuki is so significant because of a ream of things, his ethnicity, advanced thinking and effort filled activism bundled together with a great ounce of hope.

He touches on a few major problems that I really identify with environmentally -

The Population Issue

Addressed by Thomas Malthus over two hundred years ago, the population crunch is a major issue. In my fourth year of university, I was completely fixated on addressing the population problem. There are simply too many people on the earth. My perspective sought to address the issue ethically, unfortunately my approach was tremendously flawed. I made the argument that humans are living on land that is unsustainable, thus humans should not be living there. I was originally trying to address famine and access to water, naturally my focus was funneled to the poorer nations struggling with these issues. This was obviously not a realistic response but it really resonated with me.

People usually responded with the argument that it is flourishing nations like Canada are unsustainable. OK, fair. I left this argument to rest.

Suzuki tackled this significantly less directly, although a very tactful approach. He addressed major issues that are affecting an exponential population growth:

Life Longevity

Growing eco footprints

He also claimed that we're all fruit flies. He explained, we're leading a suicidal pattern which could be explained in a mathematical ceremony. Steady growth = exponential, or doubling growth cycle. Consider bacteria in a sample, at 59 minutes it is half full, in one minute, if each bit of bacteria duplicates itself, in just one minute the sample is completely full of bacteria. Leaving it to the last minute means we're too late to address these issues. He asks: How much is enough?

Forces of Nature give humans limitations

Limitations is another point that recently interested me. His point in the film stated that it was these natural forces that limit humans - ozone, oxygen. A co-worker at work last night commented about how sunscreen is actually not helping us. She made the point that it is by burn that humans think to move away from the sun, less time exposure. But with the invention of sunscreen, humans are spending extended hours in the sun, far worse than we did before.

When will these limitations halt our dangerous actions.

Human constructs

He specifically tackles the words Enterprise and Capitalism. These are words that have grown to dramatically affect how we look at things. They're just words. I wish it was that easy to reduce it to just words.

He states: "When we measure everything in economic value, those things that mean most to us are worthless"

Stuff wealth vs. things that we did (what matters?)

He also name drops Margaret Mead.

I was happy to hear the very uplifting tune "Neighbourhood #1" by The Arcade Fire. And peppered throughout the film Bob Dyland's "A Hard Rain" and Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In." Paul Desmond also made the soundtrack.

Waste Resolution #1

Use less toilet paper.

'These Come From Trees' strike an agreement with the University of Toronto

Scroll down on the page of the following link: These Come From Trees have struck up a deal with the University of Toronto. It's official, it's not vandalism if it's OK'd by the school.

Not to toot my own horn, but I tried to bring these into effect with the University of Toronto, but I didn't think to approach the administration about it. Hats off to whoever did.

Now, who gets the fun job of stickering everything?

'These Come From Trees'

You've seen it before! I know you have. This is an image of the infectious little sticker, that is available for purchase online, to evoke further thought and thinking. I originally didn't know how I really felt about it because I am very against public defacing and vandalism, but what is the real harm in these little tabs. They're not as trashy as tagging and they almost look as though they were a part of the bathroom. People normally insert them on a paper dispenser of some sort, toilet paper, paper towel etc. Look out!

I feel no inclination to buy them myself, just because I do see the value in 20 stickers for five bucks. But if these puppies are really doing what they say they are, then maybe five bones isn't that bad. It sort of reminds me of the 'Where's Willy?' stamps you see on dollar bills. Again, not sure if I agree with defacing money...

Waste ethics: Further thought/University of Toronto

I went to print one sheet of paper today and as I was pressing the print button I thought to myself, Do I Really Need This? Following that I quickly went to double check the document if it was something I really needed.

I strongly believe that if everyone gave this much thought to all their consumption and disposal practices, we'd have a much more functioning system. Trouble is getting people to think this much.

Last year I observed a lot of on-campus waste ethics and practices with the intention of improving how people look at and understand waste. The moment I really adored was when people would approach the school's four sectioned waste bin and find themselves confused as to where to place their coffee cup (or other good, but usually a coffee cup!). I loved this moment because their was a great hesitation, which means they were considering a wee bit further as to where it should properly go. Nothing rattles me more than when someone just chucks something, giving no consideration, further thought or interest in doing the right thing.

And why my emphasis on the coffee cup? Well, a major issue is properly educating people on what is accepted for proper conduct. A huge conundrum I reached on campus was that it was so different from Toronto's system, and that's a huge problem! The school, located right in the heart of Toronto should have some kind of regularity and uniformity with the city of Toronto.

Beyond that, the school struggled to find regularity between colleges. The campus-based waste initiatives were all umbrellaed by Facilities and Services but their methods of conduct would vary slightly. For instance, Victoria College (east of Queen's Park) would use reusable fabric towels in their bathrooms, while sidney smith would use paper towels that were allegedly* recycled.

Looping back to the coffee cup, my initial point - the coffee cup is not a recognised recyclable product in the City of Toronto. So how do they expect students to know this? The average person, doesn't know that the University of Toronto uses a different recycling system than the city. So, what I am getting at is that the University should be more consistent, both internally, between the Colleges and with the City of Toronto.

*I use the word allegedly because although the company may recycle and the sticker may indicate to people that it is recycling. It really depends on how contaminated the contents of the bin is. Some companies accept a higher level of contamination than others. Or, another skeptical point is, they say the do and don't! Very complex.

I love ethics. Actually, I just love waste ethics.

And just if you didn't believe me, this is a photo of my friend Michelle and I:

Ryerson Free Press

Toronto, New Year, New Landfill

Landfill and waste removal is such a perplexing topic. The whole issue of siting waste is a serious problem that tight urban cities like Toronto really struggle with. The barebones of the issue here is that:

Toronto has no room for their garbage, thus they have to outsource their waste to areas outside the borders of the city.

I tried to write a paper in my last year of university that focused on this statement and also on the premiss that it was not okay to do so. But it started to get sticky because let's all be honest here, what other options are there for Toronto's trash?

This was a question that David Miller had to address many years ago, when they were probably just half way through their contract with Carleton Farms Landfill in Michigan. January 1, 2011, all of Toronto's solid waste was redirected to Green Lane Landfill, which is located in between St. Thomas and London, ON. April 7, 2007, the City of Toronto purchased the 129.7 ha space, with only 71.2 ha approved for landfilling at this time. The reality of this situation is that:

Toronto has purchased land outside of the city to throw out your solid waste.

The article that I posted yesterday raised a fabulous argument on the colour of our waste bags. Black is for garbage, clear is for recycling. We are hauling around some kind of shame for our refuse, or solid waste that we don't want to share with other people.

In reporting this to my cheeky London living Aunt, she challenged me by asking me: "now, is that really a good thing?"

I replied, with hesitation: "No, I suppose it isn't"

She had won.

'Why We Love to Hate San Men" by Robin Nagle

I have been won over by Robin Nagle. It's so comforting to find others that are as interested in waste as I am. Stigma and presence in society is a huge obstacle that "garbage men" have to deal with. It's funny because it boils down to a simple language construction for a misunderstanding to come up (i.e. the term "Garbage Man") So, with that being said, open your eyes and read up:

Why We Love to Hate San Men

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San men and their work suggest that anything, any object, no matter how laden with what kinds of meaning, can become trash.

Robin Nagle

Issue #55, May 2001

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Give 'em Your Agita

New York City hosts the largest force of sanitation workers in the world. Though significantly reduced from its former strength of about 15,000 men (and they were almost exclusively male) to today's smaller operation of approximately 6,000 workers, the city depends on them more than ever to haul trash and recycling and to clear the streets of snow. This past New Year's Day, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani met them in Times Square and gave them cookies to show his appreciation for their herculean efforts in cleaning up after the excesses of the previous night's festivities.

The cookies were a small but appreciated gesture. New York's sanitation workers, or san men (they are still mostly men, though now include some women), are like most people whose responsibilities include taking away the debris of their culture, whether material or human. Neither they nor their work are much celebrated. In fact, both are usually ignored, or when that's not possible, scorned.

There are three distinct reasons for this, all connected to the troubling social space that san men occupy. First, they mediate between private and public, though without the public's blessing. Second, they betray the fantasy of the "away" while insisting on the uncomfortable reality of the here-and-now. And finally, san men and their work suggest that anything, any object, no matter how laden with what kinds of meaning, can become trash.

This last is the most difficult to accept. The very need for san men, garbage trucks, landfills, and incinerators seems to mock the idea that material traces of humankind can have real permanence. While economic forces and lifestyle choices, among other factors, helped create the quantity and quality of waste now moldering in the monumental landfills of the twentieth century, such causes are impersonal. If contemporary western culture must have a scapegoat for its extravagant garbage practices and for the existential terror that those practices inspire, it's more practical (if less logical) to heap disdain upon the individuals who mediate between us and our dross.

Scapegoating, of course, serves a purpose: a convenient victim can be blamed for a problem that is actually rooted in much larger and more distant causes. Using san men as scapegoats by ignoring or sneering at their work gives them an expiatory role for a world choking on immoderate material consumption. Here's how.

Falling under Casual Gazes

Many of today's major urban centers, with economic bases resting on consumption more than on manufacturing for the first time in history, rely on sanitation workers as bedrock guarantors of an ever-faster pace of commodity consumption. If we could not discard that which we consume, we could not continue to consume and so the prime engines of global capitalism would sputter. More intimately, if we could not discard that which we consume, we could not maintain our most elemental sense of self. "Only by throwing something away," insists Italo Calvino in his essay "La Poubelle Agréé," "can I be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future."

Throwing out the trash, then, represents a rite of clarification. It also represents the subtle but continuous rhythm by which we assign and re-assign value or worthlessness to the commodities we bring into our homes. This is particularly true of the categories of things we purchase at supermarkets, convenience stores, and drugstores, places that provide us with many of the intimately mundane objects of daily life. Shifting assignments of value for this category of material culture point to the sometimes nebulous divide between private and public.

Though the owner of a supermarket or grocery or drugstore may argue that his store is a private place into which the public is allowed, such shops are used as if they are public. Commodities on a supermarket shelf are in the public domain, even though their brand names are copyrighted and the contents unavailable to a shopper until they are purchased. The process of buying groceries, while carried out in the public space of the store, begins the transformation of those products from public signs of well-being and success — at least according to advertisements on their behalf — to private attempts at transferring those alleged qualities to the user.

Trying to understand and predict what brands attract which shoppers in what volume and price and pattern of repetition has long occupied marketing analysts, behaviorial psychologists, and more recently, corporate anthropologists, but no one can yet predict these variables with any consistent accuracy. In fact, there are only two sources of insight about the exact nature of a supermarket shopper's purchases over time: the shopper herself, and the sanitation worker who takes away the leftovers of those purchases.

A legal battle erupted in the 1970s when a voyeur obsessed with Bob Dylan absconded with the singer's curbside garbage, inspiring a rash of other celebrity trash-nabbings. Many of those whose trash was swiped sued, asserting privacy violation. The suits were resolved differently in different states. In New York, the city argued that once it was on the curb, garbage belonged to the city and was the purview of no one but the Department of Sanitation. It did not belong to the curious garbage comber, but it also no longer belonged to the person who created it and who put it on the curb for pick-up. The ruling confirmed that san men, almost uniquely, have the right to know what products a household consumes and discards, what food is brought into the house and not eaten, what hygiene products address what collection of physical woes or wants. San men, then, have implicit legal permission to know the business of a household better than anyone but the household members.

There has never been explicit public approval of this. San men comprise an anonymous presence that punctuates the rhythms of a city block, yet there is no acknowledgement of them in their accidental role as observers of purchase choices, medical conditions, eating disorders, sexual habits, and other intimate knowledge. It's no accident that garbage bags are opaque, but the plastic is not impermeable. One can consider san men inadvertant anthropologists watching the early creation of future archaeological deposits. This may not delight the residents whose trash passes under the casual gaze of the san worker. Our garbage must be anonymous to be safe. San men might know that it's not anonymous. That makes them dangerous.

Here or Away, Bad Garbage

San men trouble us for other reasons. Inherent in trash as a category of material culture and as a problematic in our cultural imagination is our need to separate it from ourselves, preferably without having to think too much about where it goes, how it gets there, or what happens to it next. It is paradoxical: there are few activities in which we engage during a 24-hour period, except perhaps sleeping, that do not generate trash, so trash is an intimate category of material object. But it is simultaneously refused. Consider that we have had to invent a non-existent place for trash so that we can comfortably not deal with it. We throw garbage away or out. What does this mean, exactly? Where is the "away"? The "throwing" is emphatic, making even more adamant our insistence on the "out." Out where? Out of immediate circulation or confrontation, out of the house, out of the city. Literally out of sight and so, mostly, out of mind. If we find garbage bad to smell and bad to look at, it is most importantly bad to think about.

The discomfort with and vagueness about garbage extends to those who confront trash for their daily living. They are also bad to think about, a fact not lost on the men. Some san men will not hang their uniforms on their backyard clotheslines to dry because they don't want their neighbors to know what they do for a living. Some teach their children to say merely that their father works for the city or handles recycling, avoiding any job description that reflects daily dealings with rubbish.

San men are also difficult to think in part because they give time to things we have decided do not merit time. Garbage can only be generated on the scale it is today because we don't have time for an extended relationship with the stuff of our daily life. Either we would have to become ascetics, or we would go mad with the details of shepherding and relating to it all. The structure of time in social life is such that we have a finite, and perhaps ever-shrinking, capacity for material responsibility, even as the volume of our material life continues to escalate. It is a signature characteristic of the twentieth century. Alvin Toffler wrote thirty years ago in Future Shock, "We face a rising flood of throw-away items, impermanent architecture, mobile and modular products, rented goods and commodities designed for instant death. From all these directions, strong pressures converge toward the same end: the inescapable ephemeralization of the man-thing relationship." Such ephemeralization is felt most acutely in what geographer and historian David Harvey, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity, labels "time-space compression," which, he notes, "always exacts its toll on our capacity to grapple with the realities unfolding around us."

One of those realities with which it is difficult to grapple is the illusory nature of the "away" of throw-away culture. We have created this space in our imaginations and it is a necessary fantasy if we are to continue our current consumption habits. But a san worker on the job contradicts the fantasy. Instead of an "away," there are only specific geographies — rural counties, small municipalities, ghetto neighborhoods — that are becoming the new and often ambivalent hosts to the New York City's trash.

Nothing Lasts Forever

A san man can have intimate knowledge about us as individuals and as households, even though we shudder at the thought. His work mocks our desire for a safe, fantasy non-place for our garbage. But we resent him for a deeper reason. He betrays the possibility of permanent existence for every and any material object ever created, and thus he betrays the illusion that we can impose enduring meaning on our material lives. San men reverse a category of object that anthropologist Annette Weiner called "inalienable possessions," in a book by the same title. Something qualifies as inalienable, she argues, through "its exclusive and cumulative identity with a particular series of owners through time. ... In this way, inalienable possessions are transcendent treasures to be guarded against all the exigencies that might force their loss." Inalienable possessions stand against the ravages of time and change. They are meant to endure.

Central to inalienability is an object's transferability, since it must succeed its original owners across time. Younger family members learn songs, stories, and other forms of oral history. Particular pieces of jewelry are passed down, as are land, family legends, and sometimes furniture, often for generations. Weiner calls this transferability "keeping-while-giving." An inalienable possession may leave the hand of the original owner, but that owner's claim to it is not diminished. Thus, even though it is given away, it is simultaneously kept. She argues that keeping-while-giving is key to understanding everything from the exchange of women in small-scale societies, the construction of lineage and power in places as diverse as pre-contact Samoa and feudal Europe, and the basic structure of any effort to guard history against change, time, and decay.

If an inalienable possession stands against time and for constancy in the face of continual change, then the ultimate socially alienable possession is garbage, though it is more accidentally inalienable as a category of material object than any purposefully inalienable good. The debris strewn about ancient Troy, renaissance Paris, or colonial New York becomes archaeological artifact and speaks, even if sometimes only in whispers, about the lives of those who did the strewing. A contemporary landfill reveals precise and surprising information about the town or city that creates it, as William Rathje, an Arizona archaeologist, has spent a career demonstrating. While our relationship with most of our material life is ephemeral, the discards of that life will last forever.

Just as garbage turns the notion of inalienability inside-out, it also reverses the movement of keeping-while-giving. Garbage is given-while-kept. An object classified as trash must be removed by the san men who take it to the "away," a very specific place where it will endure, albeit buried and anonymous. We give it away, but it never really goes away. On the contrary: it is kept for generations.

The paradox is more than just the durability of our trash. An inalienable possession that is kept-while-given authenticates the position, history, and future of its owner. It validates family, creates heritage, and anchors people in a place and across a time. An alienable possession that is given-while-kept does the opposite. If, as many claim, consumption has become our primary marker of identity, then the objects we consume and discard represent more than merely the loss of a thing; they also represent the dispossession of some element of ourselves. Calvino defines himself by taking stock of what's still with him after he takes out the trash, but what self-definitions has he denied by assigning them to the rubbish? What pieces of our identities are so malleable that we can toss them and, presumably, replace them at will?

Alienable possessions and the process of giving-while-keeping speak to the inevitability of decay, the absurdity of endurance, the lie of continuity. Our consumption patterns and garbage creation habits mock the possibility that being can endure, particularly when consumption is equated with identity. In that equation, being becomes just one more category of disposability.

How, then, can we be comfortable with the men who make this disposability possible? The men who take away of that which we feel we must shed? The very existence of the san man betrays the difficulty of establishing the inalienable against the seeming infinity of contemporary disposability. In a culture that segregates human death to final resting places on the margins of built space, we are taught not to contemplate the possibility that all being is ephemeral — including our own. But san men remind us of it every day: as our trash goes, so, one day, go we. No wonder we need to hate them.

Robin Nagle is an anthropologist at New York University who dreams of riding garbage trucks.

Copyright © 2001 by Robin Nagle. Drawing 2001 by Mike Mosher. All rights reserved.

New Year's Resolutions

Nothing shy of ambitious, the majority of my New Year's resolutions are to do with my day to day waste practices.

1. No more water bottles.
2. No more take out drink cups.
3. No more hamburgers (that's more of a health issue, opposed to an environmental one)

Some nifty, good alternatives to your usual bad practices. If you have a really great suggestion for a light, reusable coffee mug, I'd love you forever.

Beverage sleeve

Sandwich bag

Tap Water, a trademarked brand that I thought was a little ridiculous. My friend loves it.

Vapur, the compressible water bottle that I now swear by!

Robin Nagle

"Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything."

Robin Nagle is a brilliant minded anthropologist that works for New York University.

A recent article in the Believer got me interested in her work.

If only more people mirrored her ideas.