“Actually, the landscape was no landscape, but ‘a particular kind of heliotypy,’ a kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur.”

– Robert Smithson,
“A Tour of Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” 1967​​ (72)

 

(1/6) My Personal Trash

 

I hate looking into my trash can. When I lived alone, I was usually the only one filling that trash bag, and it made me very aware of the physicality of my existence. It felt absolutely deplorable, how quickly I would restock my trash can, as if I were capitalism itself’s most dutiful employee. I had never realized I was such a consumerist! But every crumpled up plastic wrapper, every wasted scrap of food, every clump of dust from my vacuum cleaner, every ragged paper towel and each of the mysterious and numerous spills and the unnaturally blue cleaning substances soaked into them — I was the one who had put all of it in there. I don’t like to see how quickly it piles up, and I don’t like to think about all of that garbage touching each other, mingling, conglomerating. Once my trash bag has been taken out to the curb and closed away in its bin, I hope never to see it again.

The remnants of my days, all of the food scraps that I didn’t finish and the ripped disposable packaging that I used all week, archive the materialism of my own recent history. “Our refuse,” writes anthropologist Robin Nagle in “The History and Future of Fresh Kills,” an essay about New York City’s largest landfill, “reflects our simplest, most mundane behaviors as well as our more celebrated moments.” ¹ Your trash can is a detailed personal archive of your recent endeavors, right up to the moment you relinquish its contents to the communal garbage in the blender of a garbage truck. Every time I see one of these trucks, regardless of whether it actually holds my garbage, I’m forced to note the sentimentality I somehow still hold for these sad little things, things which are already used and discarded.  Even though I never want to see what happens to my personal waste, I can’t help picturing my trash joining the landfill, mixing in and becoming indistinguishable from the trash of my neighbors and everyone else in this great modern melting pot.

The remnants that constitute a landfill “are enigmatic, but they are enigmas without resolution, let alone redemption”² — the ambiguity of this intimate garbage collage “imposes technical, environmental, social, and cognitive challenges that [have the potential to] unite and commemorate the culture that creates it,” if only we are willing to examine it thusly.³ When we must consider them at all, we tend to view landfills just as “an unfortunate answer to solid-waste disposal problems” rather than any sort of public commons, much less as our own communal creation, because contributing the materials of our lives like that, forming this place together, is just too intimate for public social convention.⁴ Most of us are much more comfortable with an imagined but decisive boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world. The landfill sees something different in the conglomerate archive, something interconnected and interpersonal. 

 

 

(2/6) The Origins of Abjection

 

To talk about discard and its systemic tyranny, we must also talk about dirtiness itself and the ways we distinguish between trash and things worth saving.

In her landmark 1966 work Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas formulated an analogy between notions of dirt and social systems of otherization and taboo which have come to be widely considered the basis of Discard Studies, a field that evaluates not only the efficacy of our discarding systems but the social otherization which is too often a direct result of our unbalanced waste dialectics. She opens the work by stating that “there is no such thing as dirt” (wherein ‘dirt’ is akin to ‘uncleanliness’ rather than simple ‘soil’) and that the concept of ‘dirtiness’ is in actuality about the limits of social norms and the urge to conform our world to the social expectations which we are still developing.⁵ Furthermore, Douglas continues to insist that “no single item is dirty,” or even can be, “apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit.”⁶ We tend to think of dirtiness as an interior trait, an essential characteristic of the subject, but in this framework, dirtiness and even taboo are states imposed upon subjects as a result of their non-conformity to strict social norms. Dirt, then, (or filth, or grime, or whichever ambiguous name you prefer) is not really a ‘thing-in-itself’ but rather “is produced through its ambiguity and its subsequent inability to be assimilated into existing socio-cultural categories and systems,” and “the constant process of keeping the unclassifiable at bay” is viewed as a beneficial act, necessarily performed by proponents of contemporary social norms.⁷

In this way, a society’s relationship to the concept of filth itself quickly becomes the psychological frame for the creation and perpetuation of any ‘undesirable’ social status. It should not come as a shock to discover that modern society discards not only objects it deems useless, but people as well. “We denounce [things or groups] by calling [them] dirty and dangerous” — and that ‘we’ certainly includes myself and you as well, reader, because everyone is implicated in issues of social control, as all of us are inevitably shaped by our cultural surroundings.⁸ Adults tend to approach dirtiness and especially ‘dirty people’ (often poor and unwell, which often has contributed directly to their presently lowered circumstances) cautiously, as if its proximity alone is hazardous, often not realizing that we may actually be practicing prejudice under the guise of safety. The first negative reaction to the initial ‘micro-taboo’ of dirt and dirtiness serves as a performance of standards and thus sets a cultural precedent for similar abject reactions to similar taboos;⁹ as the hierarchy of power relations continues and evolves, power-seeking social agents will apply that precedent to groups of people they want labeled as ‘dangerous.’ The concept of dirtiness, which is of course the foundation of discard, is itself a powerful social agent, and has too often been weaponized against already marginalized populations.

 

 

(3/6) The Geographical Shapes of Systemic Waste

 

Within this framework, then, some amount of waste is purposefully generated to maintain the balance — or perhaps more accurately, the imbalance — of power which necessitates the wasting of people. What counts as ‘waste’ is in part decided and constructed “through relations between centers and peripheries,” where the preservation and cleanliness of the center zone is completely dependent on the subjugation of the ‘far-away’ periphery zones “in the interests of the more powerful center.”¹⁰ (Periphery zones, as well, have not historically had much of a say in being made periphery.) Even within these privileged, centralized zones, though, exist marginalized, periphery people. Most people, in fact, embody an ambiguous medium role as both perpetrators and victims of the overarching system. 

On top of that, it is impossible to deny the specter of colonialism with which ‘waste import’ countries are chosen to become the new landfills of the Western world. This discard system will surely exasperate the archaeologists of the distant future, who will find the remnants of the lives of random Westerners scattered widely across the planet, perhaps preserved in the underground capsule of a sanitary landfill, or sorted and scavenged by the people who actually knew that land. Perhaps it is fitting, though, for the ‘social sculpture’ of the landfill to be a hybridized body, a perfect representation of the unprecedented interconnection of the modern world, complete with all of its problematic undertones.¹¹ Even in these cases where the landfill scavengers across the world have no concrete connection to the archivists of that foreign waste, “the artificial geography of the landfill is created by all [and] shared by all,” a layered, cooperative art process which serves as a reminder of not just everyone’s individual implication in our encompassing systems, but our connections to each other and the fortitude of human-centric networks.¹² 

“Dialectics of this type,” relating natural subjects across time and space while acknowledging the nuances of human involvement, allow us to see things as they truly are, at the nuanced intersections of “a manifold of relations”¹³ — after all, “to be is to be related.”¹⁴ This theory of constant interconnection is referred to by Elizabeth Roberts, a historian of science and current professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, as ‘entanglement.’ It “allows us to understand how outsides and insides are constantly co-constituted across different lifeworlds,” mingling the products of both centers and peripheries in order that we comprehend “how linear boundaries restrict our ability to know the world better,” or arguably at all.¹⁵ Landfills, then, become an overwhelming canvas of entanglement, connecting us materially through the literal conglomeration of my trash with my partner’s, and with my neighbor’s and with the discard collages of similar and dissimilar strangers, only to be sorted through, taken apart, and compositionally changed by the landfill’s local scavengers. Even after all these transformations, landfills “hold startlingly accurate records of the people who form them,” both on the interiors and exteriors of centralized zones, documenting and archiving modern relationships from the scale of a single kitchen trash bag to the massive complexities of international power relations, revealing our dependencies on corporations and on each other.¹⁶

A landfill could be an incredible and unrecognized resource, developed “through mutations of connection and disconnection” that show us exactly who we are by examining what we’ve given up¹⁷  – “and unlike the people, [landfills] endure” for centuries upon centuries, a tangible archive of humanity’s obsessions with materialism and exploitation.¹⁸

Though it has become eminently clear that landfills are not the out-of-sight, out-of-mind solid waste solution we once thought they could be, if we could rhetorically redefine landfills as social conglomerate landscapes, a massive and artistic coalescence of the archives of hundreds of thousands of individual days in millions of lives, there may be a path forward that transfigures the way that people approach discard itself, rather than launching any more doomed attempts to improve a misdirected system.

 

 

(4/6) Our Systems of Discarding

 

We as individuals are inextricable from our situation, much like rancid yogurt is inextricable from a retired, hole-y towel in the trash bin. Our situation, though — our collective conceptualization of trash itself and all of the systems we currently rely on to quietly deal with our discard — has turned out to be not just unsustainable but counter-productive on all scales. Discard dialectics can provide critical insight into the ways we approach valuation itself, especially as we interact with and judge other people. If the act of disposal can be transformed into an act of communal respect, no longer a shameful necessity but a constructive cycle, perhaps the shift will carry its repercussions to every scale of the waste-value dialectic, from climate change to individual bias.

In the face of popular demands for regulation, major producers and manufacturers of the West have “convinc[ed] the public that litter has [its own proper] place” as a side effect of technological progress — notably, a niche under the responsibility of the consumer of the product, and not the producer.¹⁹ Our recycling infrastructures, under the economic influence of conglomerate producers, “create a framework where disposables become naturalized commodities” rather than unnecessary by-products, “giving [them] a managed place in commodity flows that allows them to be produced at massive scales” without any efforts towards ecological redesign or waste reduction.²⁰ ‘Littering,’ the abandonment of the mundane trash of ordinary lives, is really a fairly petty crime, punishable by fees and the scorn of children, and can only be committed by individuals. When a person throws an empty soda can into a river, it’s littering; when a corporation dumps metric tons of hazardous waste into a river, it’s either pollution or entirely swept under the radar, but never ‘litter.’ 

Modern discard systems, set up separately from the productive systems of said discard but with the influence of their same investors, place the blame for pollution and its many effects on the individual and how much they do or don’t recycle, subtly but completely removing producers from the discussion. The existence of recycling programs, for many people, acts as a satisfying enough placebo for neutralizing the environmental costs of capitalistic production. In reality, a ‘recyclable’ symbol on a hybridized plastic bottle does little else than promote “a green reputation [for the producer] that makes [their] disposables appear sustainable as a genre of waste, regardless of whether people actually recycle [them], whether recycling processes create pollution,” or even how much material is actually reused compared to how much ends up in the landfill anyway.²¹ This logic, “the logic of industrial modernism,” provides an extremely convenient and apparently autonomous mindset which “divorce[s] objects from their surroundings” and encourages us to act freely, as if without consequence, so that industries can do the same.²² 

This sort of separation, however, is completely fictionalized, as is its apparent convenience. The United States (the second largest global producer of plastic after China) has been exporting (and continues to offload) most of its waste overseas to developing countries in Asia and Africa.²³ The recipient countries of much ‘first-world’ global waste (from places like China, Western Europe, and, most notably, the United States, which refused to fully join the U.N.’s Basel agreement, a set of international standards for exporting plastic discard) include nations like Turkey, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Mexico, transforming their natural environments into Western landfills, contributing to their international disadvantage, as well as creating hazardous working conditions more often than not, and effectively pushing their citizens further into the global periphery.²⁴ International policies are under development in an attempt to recognize and restrict these kinds of subjugation, including the U.N.’s Basel Convention, which “doesn’t ban the production, transport or dumping of waste,” but requires all nations involved in passing around exported waste (including the importer, the exporter, and any nations the garbage passes through) to “agree in writing in advance on what can be shipped, whether for recycling or disposal. Recipient nations can [also] refuse to take waste they deem contaminated,” providing a legal basis of agency for marginalized countries in an effort to avoid coercion of smaller nations into becoming sacrificial periphery zones.²⁵ Legislation like the Basel Convention which attempt to “[decenter] systems that rely on externalization” demonstrate the critical necessities of “interrogating the power to create centers and peripheries in the first place” and restoring autonomy to disempowered peoples.²⁶ Solutions like these do very little or even absolutely nothing to limit production of disposables and pollution, but rather focus on human protection and attempt to transfer power from the self-centralized industrial giants to their maleficiaries.

A social norm is already a complicated thing for these powers to set up, but it is much harder to destroy. When any system becomes dominant, the things that it “devalue[s] and discard[s become] widespread, normalized, and systematic,” even in the face of popular social opposition.²⁷ The strength of a system that is already in place is exponentially more than any theoretical alternative, simply because it is already there. When any system is large enough, it can easily swallow those who do not wish to participate; i.e., no matter how much you believe in recycling and religiously sort your plastics, the recycling plant is still going to send most of it — by some estimations, as much as 92.3% of it — to landfills, and from there likely overseas to pollute someone else’s resources.²⁸ The bare, underlying, terrifying truth is that “solid-waste policy and practice geared around the recycling and reuse of certain fractions of municipal solid waste… isn’t working to reduce tonnage, toxicity, and continued growth of materials extractions and transformations,” both for individual nations like the United States and for the collective international community.²⁹

 

 

(5/6) Staring Down Into Your Kitchen Trash Can

 

It sounds so simple, just to look at trash differently, but it’s actually very hard to get anyone to look at trash at all. Garbage “invites a willing ignorance that is nicely revealed in our vehemently vague language of discard,” down to the instability of the very subject’s name: trash, garbage, discard, waste, rubbish, litter, refuse, and so many other euphemistic titles that refuse to tell us precisely what they describe.³⁰ Aside from the systems of convenience which exist to hide our discard systems (such as the early timing of garbage routes for certain neighborhoods, the large distances between even local landfills and the constituents they serve, etc.), there are very many “tactics of avoidance” that we, as supposedly uninvolved individuals, utilize to separate our identities from the waste we all amass.³¹ We have forced garbage into liminality, barring it from the social realm up to the point of absolute necessity, perhaps because we are ashamed to be associated with and contributing to the flawed system in which we are entrenched, or perhaps because we have spent too long associating that kind of dirtiness and abjection with political enemies. 

Whatever the reason behind our shame, we all perpetrate the social segregation of those we see as ‘clean’ and those we call ‘dirty.’ Who can claim to have greeted every sanitation worker they’ve ever seen, stepped aside for every janitor’s broom, or enjoyed the sight of a familiar garbage truck? Everyone is complicit in the systems which segregate us, especially those of us with the privilege to overlook them. All of these systems — the sanitation department, a two-party political structure, industrial capitalism itself — with their subtle ideologies “about separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions” are intended to impose order upon “an inherently untidy experience” at nearly any cost, be it a degraded quality of life for the masses, losses in individual rights and privacy, environmental catastrophe, and even the loss of millions of human lives.³² As long as the power imbalance provides for those at the top, they will dedicate themselves to upholding it and spreading their miserly gospel. 

On the simplest community levels, it makes no sense. A person’s fate, their entire life determined by their place of birth and the numbers in their parents’ bank accounts… truly, “it is only by exaggerating [our] difference… that a semblance of order is created.”³³ Our austere social structures work to keep matter in ‘its proper place,’ creating a regimented, controllable world with distinct thresholds that allow us to utilize simplistic, high contrast logic that sorts actions and people into reductive moral categories. But simple logic does not translate so cleanly to a world of ambiguity and nuance such as ours, and thus the difficult topic of waste is forced into liminal purgatory. We assume, in its quiet liminality, that garbage is for the most part gone and defeated, but “those who work closely with trash,” whom we have also come to ignore as liminal by association, “understand it as an object that exists in liminal spaces of utmost importance, namely, the body, the household, the city, and the nation” — its liminality, in fact, those incorporeal margins to which we’ve shoved it, is what makes it so significant.³⁴

Trash is the uncomfortable evidence of our system’s shortcomings, objects whose usefulness is trapped in flux, and thus requires an individual in touch with their own liminality to engage with it. The peripheries of our social dynamics, where things do not quite fit, are the front lines in defense of ambiguity, and that is why the subject of garbage/litter/trash is so vital to effective, far-reaching social revolution — and precisely why existing systems and their benefactors have vested interest in the peoples’ ignorance.

Abjection is the repellent result of all of this social turmoil, just as Mary Douglas had theorized; it is “caught up in the production of the boundaries of peoples’ bodies, societal norms, and the self,” and it adapts to many scales, from the degradation of a single unhoused person to the global subjugation of the working class.³⁵ Distress and abjection are the byproducts of social control, and they must be waded through in order to recognize the failings of the authoritarian logic which constructs them. We tend to think of abject subjects as innately disgusting or horrible, but according to their place in the construction of social boundaries, “the defining quality of the abject [is the way that it] muddles normative borders and divisions, …thus threaten[ing] a breakdown in [the] conventional or dichotomous ways of making meaning of the world” on which we rely to secure our own niche within the brutalities of our social structures.³⁶ After all, you are only less disgusting than anyone else if you are better able to hide your gross practices from public perception. 

When we become willing to explore our “uneasy relationship” with abjection, the breakdown of its logic is inevitable, “[exposing] the fragility of normative orders” and thus indicating the possibility of an alternative system, one that does not operate at the cost of its constituents.³⁷ Had the guiding interests of our society been different, if humanity in general had continually chosen to prioritize each other above luxury, community rather than competition, there’s no saying the heights we might have reached by now, or the different infrastructures we might maintain (not to mention how nice it probably would be to be liberated from overwhelming climate disaster). Even in the tragic state of our convoluted reality, there is still a thread of “human creativity and desire to change society for the better that runs through the history of social movements,” especially as they relate to waste;³⁸ “notions of guilt, …stigma, and embarrassment attend solid waste as a problem [while] other notions of creativity, excitement, community solidarity, and satisfaction attend its solutions” in a dialectical coexistence that “present[s itself] sensually in the visibility and tangibility of trash” and reveals to us the suddenly obvious means of improvement.³⁹ This is, of course, positive engagement with human-centric values — we should be systematically taking care of each other instead of systematically shaming our peers into subjugation for outside interests. It seems obvious, and in the mindset which afflicts and supports our current system, we should be ashamed that it is not already the case. Therefore change for us, for now, naturally begins within abjection, at the muddled margins where “the boundaries between art and trash, the sublime and the disgusting” are permeable, and ripe with possibility.⁴⁰

 

 

(6/6) Ruins in Reverse

 

Finally, we return to the landfill, too disorderly to be a part of society and yet composed entirely of it. The collected, archived, and collaged trash of nearly every contemporary society “has created thousands of acres of shared space that would not otherwise exist,” a disregarded public commons among massive swaths of privatized and commodified land, segregated by arbitrary figures in inconceivable dollar amounts and parceled out in diminutive servings.⁴¹ Robert Smithson wrote in 1966: “I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs…”⁴²

This conviction is based in materiality (for there is little else we can assume is true) and saturated with ambiguity; in trash, this tangible evidence of lives lived, thousands of experiences collected and quietly amalgamating in a landfill, perhaps we see the antithesis of loneliness and yearn for that path. What if landfills were not just “an unfortunate answer to solid-waste disposal problems,” but a sort of “ruins in reverse,” a pile of raw social material that represented “all the new construction that would eventually be built” in its rampant entanglement?⁴³ In the same sense that a dump is an archive of personal and international social relationships as dictated by economic requisites, in the same way that one person’s trash can is an archive of their pedestrian comings and goings, perhaps “all these archival objects” of discard “serve as found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future,” suggestive of real, systematic change in its potential to transform the way we approach discarding itself, cascading this knowledge into the creation of new systems, new solutions of a type as of yet unimagined.⁴⁴ 

If trash should be uncomfortable at all, it should be for the difficult smell or the knowledge that it will not be yours forever. It shouldn’t bother me to recognize my own trash in the heterogenous and compiled conglomerations of the landfill, because garbage does not have to be shameful and discard does not have to be damaging. It is undeniable that we need systematic change when it comes to waste management, even if only to escape the unsustainability of our current systems. There must be a better way “to live in mutuality with each other on and with this planet: tracing out and acknowledging the messy and entangled relations that produce existence” and define our experience.⁴⁵ Why should it not be the landfill, the overwhelming embodiment of our failures and of the resilience and inevitability of human entanglement, that shows us the way ahead?

In the conglomeration of our trash with that of the rest of the world, we must directly face our most intimate anxieties and embrace our connection. Entanglement, though cast as the frightening antagonist to the capitalistic individuality which validates our disregard for the repercussions of our choices and actions, is the solution that stares us in the face. It appears in the peripheries of our socioeconomic systems, at the liminal moments which foster revolutions, and resides at the very core of our humanity. Perhaps all of “the ‘secrets of the universe’ are just as pedestrian,” and the answers to all of our questions lie waiting in the face of the situation.⁴⁶

Discard dialectics are able to reveal this answer which we already knew but could not recognize because they embrace ambiguities and they notice the fearless conglomeration of the material world through a system reliant on our willing ignorance. As much as we may dislike them, we are complicit in the systems and structures that form our societies and we reinforce their terms by accepting the security, the peaceful unconsciousness, the self-serving privilege that the system affords us; it is only by denying these systems, by making the effort to look outside of them and to notice and analyze their structural flaws, that we can hope to construct a world as dedicated to service as our dearly beloved household trash cans.

 

1. Nagle, R. (2011). In Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (pp. 190). “The History and Future of Fresh Kills.” Profile Books.
2. Foster, H. (2004). An Archival Impulse. October, 110, pp. 16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397555/.
3. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 190.
4. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 187.
5. Douglas, M. (2015). In Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, with a new preface by the author (pp. xvii). Preface and Introduction, Routledge.
6. Douglas, M. (2015). In Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, with a new preface by the author, xvii.
7. Arefin, M. R. (2015, February 27). Abjection: A definition for discard studies [web log]. Retrieved from https://discardstudies.com/2015/02/27/abjection-a-definition-for-discard-studies/.
8. Douglas, M. (2015). In Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, with a new preface by the author, xi.
9. Douglas, M. (2015). In Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, with a new preface by the author, xii.
10. Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power (pp. 21). Prologue: “Intro to Discard Studies” and Ch. 3: “Insides and Outsides; a Theory of Power.” The MIT Press.
11. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 187.
12. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 187.
13. Smithson, R. (1979). In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (pp. 160). “A Tour of Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape.” University of California Press.
14. Roberts, E. F. S. (2017). “What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (pp. 595). https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.07.
15. Roberts, E. F. S. (2017). “What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City,” 594-595.
16. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 192.
17. Foster, H. (2004). An Archival Impulse, 6.
18. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 192.
19. Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, 82-83.
20. Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, 12, 67-68.
21. Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, 70.
22. Roberts, E. F. S. (2017). “What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City,” 595.
23. Pekow, C. (2021, May 17). “As the rest of world tackles plastics disposal, the U.S. resists” [web log]. Retrieved from https://news.mongabay.com/2021/05/as-the-rest-of-world-tackles-plastics-disposal-the-u-s-resists/.
24. Pekow, C. (2021, May 17). “As the rest of world tackles plastics disposal, the U.S. resists.” and MacBride, S. (2013). In Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States (pp. 179). Ch. 2: “Curbside Recycling Collection,” Ch. 5: “Extended Plastics Responsibility: Producers as Reluctant Stewards,” Conclusion. The MIT Press.
25. Pekow, C. (2021, May 17). “As the rest of world tackles plastics disposal, the U.S. resists.”
26. Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, 23.
27. Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, 77.
28. MacBride, S. (2013). In Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States, 181.
29. MacBride, S. (2013). In Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States, 222.
30. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 192.
31. Liboiron, M., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, 90.
32. Douglas, M. (2015). In Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, with a new preface by the author, 5.
33. Douglas, M. (2015). In Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo, with a new preface by the author, 5.
34. Arefin, M. R. (2015, February 27). Abjection: A definition for discard studies.
35. Arefin, M. R. (2015, February 27). Abjection: A definition for discard studies.
36. Arefin, M. R. (2015, February 27). Abjection: A definition for discard studies.
37. Arefin, M. R. (2015, February 27). Abjection: A definition for discard studies.
38. MacBride, S. (2013). In Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States, 238.
39.  MacBride, S. (2013). In Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States, 238.
40. Arefin, M. R. (2015, February 27). “Abjection: A definition for discard studies.”
41. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 189.
42. Smithson, R. (1979). In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings: “A Tour of Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” 74.
43. Nagle, R. (2011). Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, 187, and Smithson, R. (1979). In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings: “A Tour of Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” 72.
44. Foster, H. (2004). An Archival Impulse, 15.
45. Roberts, E. F. S. (2017). “What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City,” 596.
46. Smithson, R. (1979). In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings: “A Tour of Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” 73.