Fig 1: A collection of HDPE thermoplastics by OpenCo., photo by Giulio Laura
Family connections are not chosen, they are given to us by chance. You don't choose who your mother or uncle is. Family is not always good so how do you navigate a good relationship with bad kin? Do you destroy the relationship or make it work all though it's tough? Rubbish is like Bad kin in a way, at a personal level we have not chosen to be in a consumerist society. Annihilation vs support comes to mind. 'Plastics' for example are not inherently evil, their use for packaging might be thought of as terrible design but I wouldn't go as far as to must villainies the material. What would a positive relationship with plastic or any other material that is often found in rubbish be?
Indeterminacy of hazard in waste also plays a big role in framing the problem. In Risk Management and Hazardous Waste, Brian Wynne suggests that a waste free universe is unattainable, not because it is unreachable representation, but because of its uncountability. Hazard and waste, he goes on to add, are:
“ fundamentally ambiguous. Their intrinsic physical meaning is not given and objectively predetermined in nature.” - Brian Wynne [3]
There is nothing in material that makes them either ‘hazardous’ or ‘waste’, it's a tangle of human ideas and the material consequences it has to humans, animals and landscape. There is nothing in nature that is defining ‘hazardousness’. What many countries called ‘electronic scrap’ in 1970 and where seen as a recoverable resource are now [2002] deemed ‘electronic scrap’ and are classified as a hazardous substance. [3] The same underlying things have two different ‘wordings’ or groups treating them in different ways at different times. [1] To the same flavour, badness is a fundamentally indeterminate fenomener, there is nothing in a material that is defining plastic or any other material be bad or good. There is a Non-Coherence when it comes to valuing discard. The proverb: ‘One person's trash is another person's treasure’ hints at this dislocation and lack of coherence. There is nothing in discard or rubbish that makes it valuable or not, bad or good toxic or non toxic.
Works Cited:
Lepawsky Josh, Reassembling Rubbish & Worlding Electronic Waste. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.[1]
Liboiron, Max. “The what and the why of Discard Studies.” Discard Studies (01/09/2018) https://discardstudies.com/2018/09/01/the-what-and-the-why-of-discard-studies/. [2]
Wynne, Brian. Risk Management and Hazardous Waste. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1987. [3]
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