The Temporalities of Waste: Out of Sight, Out of Time 2020021218, 2020021219, 9780367321796, 9780429317170

Citation preview

The Temporalities of Waste

This book investigates the complex and unpredictable temporalities of waste. Reflecting on waste in the context of sustainability, materiality, social practices, subjectivity and environmental challenges, the book covers a wide range of settings, from the municipal garbage crisis in Beirut, to food rescue campaigns in Hong Kong and the toxic by-products of computer chip production in Silicon Valley. Waste is one of the most pressing issues of the day, central to environmental challenges and the development of healthier and more sustainable futures. The emergence of the new field of discard studies, in addition to expanding research across other disciplines within the social sciences, is testament to the centrality of waste as a crucial social, material and cultural problem and to the need for multi- and transdisciplinary approaches like those provided in this volume. This edited collection seeks to develop a framework that understands the material properties of different kinds of waste, not as fixed, stable or singular but as dynamic, relational and often invisible. It brings together new and cutting-edge research on the temporalities of waste by a diverse range of international authors. Collectively, this research presents a persuasive argument about the need to give more credence to the capacities of waste to provoke us in materially and temporally complex ways, especially those ­substances that complicate our understandings of life as bounded duration. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, cultural studies, anthropology and human geography. Fiona Allon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and an affiliate of the Sydney Environment Institute. Ruth Barcan is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and ­Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and a Sydney Environment Institute Key Researcher. Karma Eddison-Cogan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

Routledge Environmental Humanities Series editors: Scott Slovic (University of Idaho, USA)

Joni Adamson

(Arizona State University, USA) and

Yuki Masami

(Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan) International Advisory Board William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China Rob Nixon, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA Kirsten Wehner, University of London, UK The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture. The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicenter of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences. We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change.

The Temporalities of Waste Out of Sight, Out of Time

Edited by Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan and Karma Eddison-Cogan

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan and Karma Eddison-Cogan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan and Karma Eddison-Cogan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allon, Fiona R., editor. | Barcan, Ruth, editor. | EddisonCogan, Karma, editor. Title: The temporalities of waste : out of sight, out of time / edited by Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan, and Karma Eddison-Cogan. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge environmental humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020021218 (print) | LCCN 2020021219 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367321796 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429317170 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Waste products–Environmental aspects. | Recycling (Waste, etc.) Classification: LCC HD9975.A2 T46 2020 (print) | LCC HD9975.A2 (ebook) | DDC 363.72/8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021218 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021219 ISBN: 978-0-367-32179-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31717-0 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of illustrationsviii Notes on contributorsix Forewordxiii MYRA J. HIRD



Acknowledgementsxvii



Introduction: out of joint—the time of waste

1

FIONA ALLON, RUTH BARCAN AND KARMA EDDISON-COGAN

PART I

Speed and slowness

19

  1 Open crowd: just-in-time food rescue

21

DAISY TAM

  2 Fridges and food waste: an ethnography of freshness

36

REBECCA CAMPBELL AND GORDON WAITT

  3 Chip, body, earth: toxic temporalities of Intel processor production

47

LUKE MUNN

PART II

Bureaucratic time

59

  4 Biopolitical temporalities of waste and the municipal collection schedule in the United States

61

RAYSA MARTINEZ KRUGER

vi  Contents   5 Housing waste in remote Indigenous Australia

75

LIAM GREALY AND TESS LEA

  6 The imaginaries of Beirut’s “invisible” solid waste: exploring walls as temporal pauses amidst the Beirut garbage crisis

87

CHRISTINE MADY

PART III

Disposability and persistence

105

  7 “All of them had been forgotten”: waste as literary symbol in the Arab world

107

TASNIM QUTAIT

  8 Lingering matter: materialities, temporalities and waste in clothes

122

ELYSE STANES

  9 The landfill paradox: reflections on the temporalities of waste

136

YUSIF IDIES

PART IV

Longue durée and intergenerational time

149

10 The waste of time

151

ELIZABETH GRAHAM, DAN EVANS AND LINDSAY DUNCAN

11 Crip Time and the toxic body: water, waste and the autobiographical self

167

ALLY DAY

12 Wasting seas: oceanic time and temporalities

179

ELSPETH PROBYN

PART V

Collisions and multiplicity

193

13 Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future: on the temporalities of two post-nuclear sites

195

ALEKSANDRA BRYLSKA

Contents  vii 14 Toxic transmogrification: Rare Earthenware as junk art

211

SABINE LEBEL

15 Crunch time: temporalities of scrap metal collection

224

STEVEN KOHM AND KEVIN WALBY

PART VI

Revivals and returns

237

16 New temporalities of everyday life in Australian suburbia: cultural and material economies of hard rubbish reuse

239

TANIA LEWIS, ROWAN WILKEN AND FRÉDÉRIC RAUTURIER

17 Temporal cycles of waste management in Southern African Indigenous societies

253

SOUL SHAVA AND ROB O’DONOGHUE



Index264

Illustrations

Figures   4.1  Garbage collection infrastructure   4.2  Surveillance of boarding house non-compliance   4.3  Surveillance of servants’ non-compliance   4.4  Rubbish dump and Italian waste pickers   6.1  Garbage disguised in white bags along main roads   6.2  Map of the wall locations within the municipalities   6.3  Strawberry seller sitting in front of a wall   6.4  Wall 10 in 2015    6.5  Wall 10 in 2015, replaced by a flower bed in 2018   6.6  Wall 1 in 2015, persisting in 2018 (front view)   6.7  Wall 1 in 2015, persisting in 2018 (side view)   8.1  Pre-consumer textile wastes   8.2  Sorting textiles, FabScrap, August 2018   8.3  A label from Patagonia’s Responsibili-tee   9.1  Strechfilm waste cubes, being worked in the landfill 10.1 Map of Belize showing location of Ambergris Caye and Marco Gonzalez 10.2  Marco Gonzalez from the air 10.3  Soil profile, Marco Gonzalez

67 68 69 73 92 93 96 98 98 99 99 126 127 131 142 157 158 159

Tables   6.1  Attributes of the 20 documented walls 10.1  Marco Gonzalez chronology

94 159

Contributors

Co-editor, Fiona Allon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and an affiliate of the Sydney Environment Institute. Her research interests include cities, communities and everyday life; home, belonging and housing; everyday practices of environmental sustainability. She is the author of Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (UNSW Press, 2008) and Home Economics: Speculating on Everyday Life (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She has contributed chapters to the edited collections Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2011) and The Greening of Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2016). She was Chief Investigator (with Anja Schwarz) on the Australian-German research collaboration Waste Matters: Cultural Studies of Waste and the City. She was also Chief Investigator (with Zoe Sofoulis) on the project Everyday Water: Values, Practices, Interactions. Co-editor, Ruth Barcan is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and a Sydney Environment Institute Key Researcher. Her work centres on embodiment, the senses and everyday life, with a particular interest in everyday practices of sustainability. In recent years she has studied the environmental dimensions of the revival of domestic chicken-keeping in Sydney. Her current research focuses on everyday life as a space of informal environmental education. She is the author of Academic Life and Labour in The New University: Hope and Other Choices (Ashgate Publishing, 2013), ­Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Bodies, Therapies, Senses (Berg Publishers, 2011), Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Berg Publishers, 2004) and the co-editor of Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry (University of Western Australia Press, 1999) and Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning (Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies, UWS, 1997). Co-editor, Karma Eddison-Cogan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include creative renewal and the cultural studies of

x  Contributors waste, urban practices of reuse, recycling and exchange, everyday life and urban policy. She was a member of the Group of Eight/DAAD funded project Waste Matters: Cultural Studies of Waste and the City. She has published in Wi: Journal of Mobile Media, Etnografia e ricerca qualitative and most recently published a chapter focused on the aestheticisation of household waste in the photography series 7 Days of Garbage. Aleksandra Brylska is a participant in the international PhD program “Nature-Culture” at the Faculty “Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw, Poland, and Chief Investigator on the project “(Bio)discourse after Catastrophe: The Natural-Cultural Status of Nuclear Disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima” (no. 2019/33/N/HS2/00268). Rebecca Campbell completed her PhD in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her current research interests are embodiment, emotion and affect, gender, ethnic diversity and household sustainability. Ally Day is Associate Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo, U.S.A. She is currently finishing her first book project: Crip Reimaginings of Memoir and Medicine. Lindsay Duncan currently works in the museum sector and processes ­phytolith samples for various projects. Her PhD research utilised archaeobotany and Life Cycle Assessment to investigate long-term human-­ environment relationships at Marco Gonzalez, Belize. Dan Evans is a PhD researcher at Lancaster University, U.K., and member of the Soils Training and Research Studentships (STARS) Centre for Doctoral Training. His research focuses on quantifying lifespans of soils. Elizabeth Graham is Professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. She has carried out research on Maya archaeology in Belize for over 45 years. Liam Grealy is the Housing for Health Incubator Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. His Incubator research examines housing and infrastructure policies in northern Australia and southeast Louisiana (see www. hfhincubator.org). Myra J. Hird is Professor, Queen’s National Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Canada (www.myrahird.com). Professor Hird is Director of Waste Flow, an interdisciplinary research project focused on waste as a global scientific-technical and socio-ethical issue (www.wasteflow.ca). Hird has published ten books and over 70 articles and book chapters on a diversity of topics relating to science studies. Hird’s latest book is Canada’s Waste Flows (McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming).

Contributors  xi Yusif Idies is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at the WWU Münster, Germany, where his current research focuses on the geographies of waste and disposal. Steven Kohm is Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg, Canada. He has published works on fear of crime and victimisation in urban communities, popular criminology and crime films and society. Raysa Martinez Kruger holds a PhD in Geography from Rutgers University. An independent scholar, her research and publications examine the intersection of waste, environmental justice and governmentality in the United States, with a focus on New Jersey. Tess Lea is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and is Chief Investigator on the Housing for Health Incubator. Lea is the author of Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia (University of New South Wales Press, 2008), Darwin (UNSW Publishing, 2014) and the forthcoming Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention (Stanford University Press, 2020) (see www.hfhincubator.org). Sabine LeBel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at the University of New Brunswick Fredericton, Canada. Tania Lewis is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Christine Mady is Assistant Professor in Urban Planning, Urban Design and Architecture at Ramez G. Chagoury Faculty of Architecture, Arts and Design at the Notre Dame University-Louaize, Lebanon. Luke Munn uses both practice and theory to explore digital cultures, investigating how technical environments shape the political and social capacities of the everyday. He is based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. He recently completed his PhD on algorithmic power at Western Sydney University. Rob O’Donoghue is Emeritus Professor in Environmental Education at the Environmental Learning Research Centre, Rhodes University, South Africa. Elspeth Probyn is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her work spans several areas and disciplines, and is now focused on developing human-marine studies. Her most recent monograph is Eating the Ocean (Duke University Press, 2016), and the coedited (with Kate Johnston and Nancy Lee) Sustaining Seas: Oceanic Space and the Politics of Care (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). Tasnim Qutait is a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her work focuses on Arabic and Anglophone Arab writing, aiming to bridge divides between Anglophone scholarship and Arab literary traditions.

xii  Contributors Frédéric Rauturier is an independent researcher. He has a Master’s in Science of Management from the NEOMA Business School in Reims, France and is interested in political economies of creative industries and new trends in consumer and lifestyle culture. Soul Shava is Associate Professor in Environmental Education (Education for Sustainable Development) at the University of South Africa. Elyse Stanes is Honorary Associate Fellow in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Elyse’s research seeks to connect everyday cultures of consumption to a wider politics of excess and waste. Daisy Tam is Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University’s Department of Humanities and Creative Writing. She is the winner of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in 2018–19, developing the web application Breadline at MIT. Gordon Waitt is Senior Professor at the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong, Australia. Gordon’s research interests focus on vulnerable bodies specifically cyclists, gamblers, senior drivers and low-income households. Kevin Walby is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. He is co-author of Municipal Corporate Security in International Context (Routledge, 2015) and A Criminology of Policing and Security Frontiers (Bristol University Press, 2020). Rowan Wilken, PhD, is Associate Professor in Media and Communication and Principal Research Fellow in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Foreword Myra J. Hird

I write this Foreword from the confines of my home. Hopefully, by the time The Temporalities of Waste: Out of Sight, Out of Time is published, we will be luxuriating in a post-pandemic calm and contemplating waste’s temporalities while strolling through some outdoor social space. At my-our-this-time, we are speculating about the temporality of the COVID-19 pandemic, anxious about the short- and long-term consequences and hopeful for an effective resolution. Time is a weird thing, as Albert Einstein taught us, and as we are all currently experiencing: it’s as relative as it is important. Waste, as material, as linguistic signifier and as rhetorical technique, is a catch-all term denoting a nearly limitless heterogeneity of stuff, from strontium chromate to single-serve coffee cup to moral pronouncement (“you’re wasting my time”) to capitalist leitmotif (“time is money”). My research, and the nascent field of waste studies, tracks the ways in which waste transforms but never really goes away (Hird 2012). Several phenomena, including dumpster diving, yard/car boot sales, vintage clothing stores and the thriving garbage-picking industries in poor communities around the world point to the reality that one person’s waste is another’s sustenance, livelihood and/or treasure. Waste, in other words, flows between particular attachments, but always remains in some form: there’s no getting rid of waste (Hird 2015). For instance, we know that, globally, approximately 96 per cent of waste is landfilled (or openly dumped) (Kim and Owens 2010). Landfills may be out of sight, but their contents variously resist and transform into other substances, such as leachate, which may be contained for a couple of decades (in the best engineering scenario) and then leak into soil and water systems on which humans and other flora and fauna depend (Hird 2013). Leaks from open dumps work on a much shorter timeline, often escaping from the get-go. Waste is largely understood as both a techno-scientific and sociobehavioural problem. Fundamental to post-industrial society is the premise that techno-scientific problems are resolvable through techno-scientific solutions. This leads to a circular logic whereby engineering and science (both often driven at least in part by industry interests) articulate the terms of waste problems such that each new problem tethers us to further solutions

xiv  Myra J. Hird in the form of further techno-scientific innovations (Hird, forthcoming). As such, most attention is directed toward more recycling (which itself produces waste that may be more toxic than the original waste, see Hird, forthcoming), better landfilling and other repository technologies (Lougheed, Metuzals and Hird 2017) and better semiological technologies for warning the future about waste’s toxicity (van Wyck 2010). These solutions, as such, are not necessarily undesirable. But waste also involves the politics and economics of consumption; intergovernmental and industry-government relations; urban-rural divides; health; labour relations; gendered waste ­economies (in the global north, household waste sorting is most often performed by women, and in the global south increasing numbers of women and children engage in waste recycling activities in subsistence economies); science-public relations; risk; governance; and so on—a bewildering array of factors, considerably beyond the remit of engineering and science. Indeed, it raises profound socio-ethical issues about our “waste-maker” society (Packard 1960), and in particular, the effects of capitalism’s refusal to acknowledge waste as integral to production itself (Hird, forthcoming; Liboiron 2010). As such, interdisciplinarity is a vital pre-condition to understanding our waste issues. And yet, this challenging complexity has largely been reduced to the assumption that waste may be effectively managed through socio-behavioural change, which itself consists almost entirely in surveilling individuals and households to more effectively increase the volume and efficiency of our personal recycling behaviours, despite research that consistently demonstrates the environmental and human health limitations of this particular form of diversion (Hird, forthcoming; MacBride 2012). A classic Foucauldian governmentality analysis of household waste surveillance must surely be imminent! Our ethical responsibility to current and future generations means that we must turn the spotlight away from “downstream” repetitions of waste as individual responsibility, and toward “upstream” analyses of waste as both the condition of capitalism and as symptom of settler and non-settler colonialism (Hird, forthcoming). And here, in terms of our ethical intra- and intergenerational responsibilities, the temporalities of waste issues its imperative. The engineered landfills, which governments around the world have entrusted to sequester municipal solid (and some forms of institutional, industrial and commercial waste), have lifespans of—at maximum—25 years, after which the risk of water systems and soil contamination significantly increases. Thus, we are banking on waste containment systems that we know will be compromised within a single generation. And these forms of waste—the wastes we are so singularly focused on because they appear to require individual rather than system responsibility—account for only about 3 per cent of our total global waste production (Hird, forthcoming). But by orders of magnitude more abundant and more toxic, mining waste has been typically abandoned with no remediation efforts. We know that, at minimum, mining companies

Foreword  xv define 99 per cent of the materials they extract from the earth as waste, and that this waste may be contaminated (depending on what the mining company is after) with toxic substances. In some well-known cases, extraordinary remediation measures are being taken. For instance, in its search for gold, the Giant Mine in the Northwest Territories of Canada left eight open pits, several buildings, four tailings ponds and some 237,000 tonnes of highly toxic arsenic trioxide dust on Yellowknives Dene First Nation territory. Remediating the arsenic trioxide dust involves what engineers call the Frozen Block Method, whereby the dust has been re-buried in the mine shafts, which have then been frozen. The Canadian federal government’s official plan is to keep this toxic waste frozen “in perpetuity” for some future generation of engineers and scientists to develop a more permanent containment technology. The Frozen Block Method uses one of two basic methods adopted world wide to manage highly toxic industrial and military waste. One method favours temporary sequestering such that the toxic waste may be accessed at any time as we develop modified or new forms of permanent disposal. The other method consists of permanent geological entombment. For mining waste, this must mean forever, as its toxicity does not decrease with time. Even radioactive waste—whose timeline of natural radioactive decay spans hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years—is well beyond the temporality of human imagination (van Wyck 2010). While deep geological entombment appears to remove this waste from the environment, Kai Erikson argues that it actually does the opposite: It deliberately poisons a portion of the natural world for as many as half a million years, and in doing so, it not only leaves future generations with thousands of tons of the most dangerous rubbish imaginable on their hands but makes it as difficult as the state of our technology permits for them to deal with it. … And so long as that is so, we are not taking the problem out of their hands so much as we are taking the solution out of their hands. (1994: 224–5, my emphasis) Even if we found a way to eliminate the myriad forms of waste our species produces, its material, social and ethical legacy’s temporality exceeds our ability to imagine let alone ameliorate. This reason alone is sufficient to applaud The Temporalities of Waste: Out of Sight, Out of Time for its explicit and concerted focus on waste’s temporalities.

References Erikson, Kai T. 1994. A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Natural Disasters. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Hird, Myra J. 2012. “Knowing Waste: Toward an Inhuman Epistemology.” Social Epistemology 26 (3–4): 453–69. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2012.727195.

xvi  Myra J. Hird Hird, Myra J. 2013. “Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethics of Vulnerability.” Ethics and the Environment 18 (1): 105–24. doi: 10.2979/ethicsenviro.18.1.105. Hird, Myra J. 2015. “Waste Flows.” The Discard Studies Compendium, http:// discardstudies.com/discard-studies-compendium/#Wasteflows. Hird, Myra J. Forthcoming. Canada’s Waste Flow. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kim, Kwon-Rae and Gary Owens. 2010. “Potential for Enhanced Phytoremediation of Landfills Using Biosolids: A Review.” Journal of Environmental Management 91 (4): 791–7. Liboiron, Max. 2010. “Recycling as a Crisis of Meaning.” eTopia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 4: 1–9. Lougheed, Scott, Jessica Metuzals and Myra J. Hird. 2017. “Modes of Governing Canadian Waste Management: A Case Study of Metro Vancouver’s Energy-fromWaste Controversy.” Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 2: 1–14. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2017.1343137. MacBride, Samantha. 2012. Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Packard, Vance. 1960. The Waste Makers. New York: Ig Publishing. van Wyck, Peter. 2010. The Highway of the Atom. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to our contributors for being so open to working with us. It has been a journey marked by disruption—the wave of global protests, including in Hong Kong and Lebanon, the Australian bushfire crisis followed by floods and the global coronavirus pandemic. The creation of knowledge within multiple, uneven and fluctuating rhythms of everyday life—rhythms that face an unknown future—is a difficult task. We would like to extend our sincere appreciation for your efforts, responsiveness and original contributions to the collection. A special thank you too, to Myra Hird, who wrote the Foreword to the book. The initial impetus for this book began in 2014 with a project titled Waste Matters: Cultural Studies of Waste and the City, funded by the Group of Eight Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). We would like to thank our Berlin colleagues on this project: Anja Schwarz, Stephan Lanz, Carly McLaughlin and Kylie Crane, for their insight, conviviality and generous hospitality over many years. Waste Matters culminated in a 2016 workshop titled Making Waste: Reuse, Repurpose and Reduce? which brought together a number of other scholars to whom we are grateful: Gay Hawkins, Chris Gibson, Kate Johnston, Ruth Lane, Susan Luckman, Larissa Nicholls, Catherine Phillips, Yolande Strengers, Elyse Stanes, Bethaney Turner and Gordon Waitt. We would like to thank the Sydney Environment Institute for funding the workshop. Their enthusiastic support helped make it a generative site for collaboration and discussion. Thanks in particular to Michelle St Anne for her e­ fficiency and grace. Thank you, too, to our colleagues in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney for your intellectual generosity, collegial support and vibrant research culture. We are lucky to work with and among you. This collection would not have been possible without the guidance and support of its publisher. We would like to thank Iain McCalman, Libby Robin and Paul Warde, Rebecca Brennan, Leila Walker and Rosie Anderson at Routledge, as well as the Series Editors of the Environmental Humanities

xviii  Acknowledgements series, Scott Slovic, Joni Adamson and Yuki Masami. We would also like to extend our thanks to Emma Critchley at Wearset for her efficiency and good cheer, and to Claire Bell for the meticulous, eagle-eyed copyediting. Thank you for making the process such a pleasant one. In keeping with the central theme—temporality—this book had its own idiosyncratic timeframe, sometimes proceeding at a fast and steady rhythm and at other times moving into a slower pace dictated by time commitments to children, caring and living. The authors would like to thank their families for accommodating the syncopated and often wildly irregular rhythms associated with working, writing and editing. Fiona would like to thank Lindsay, Arthur, Auntie Jane, Stuart, Mark and Sophia for the fun times, play dates and help over many years. Ruth would like to thank Mark Higgs and Sophia Higgs for their everconstant support. We’ve been through the book-making process a few times now. Over time, the child being minded so that I could write has become a child helping with the minding. Time passes. Karma would like to thank Eleanor Eddison-Cogan for perhaps one of the most important resources—time. The time to write, research and edit is invaluable, though only made possible by her behind-the-scenes dedication, support and labour. We would like to finish by acknowledging a far longer temporality: this book has been edited by scholars working on the unceded lands of the Eora people of the Cadigal nation, the Darug and Guringai peoples and the Gweagal, Bidjigal and Cadigal peoples.

Introduction Out of joint—the time of waste Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan and Karma Eddison-Cogan

Waste is often defined as “matter out of place” (Douglas 2002, 36)—an unwanted surplus that needs to be contained by a variety of technologies and practices of ordering, management, separation, secretion or social categorisation that are ultimately spatial in their logic. These “technologies of mundane governance” (Woolgar and Neyland 2013) operate at a range of scales, from plastic bags to bins to landfills. At one end of the scale, outer space itself is a “dumping ground,” a “junkyard in the sky” into which an increasing number of satellites and other objects are being sent to join the existing “orbital clutter” (Webb 2018). Back on earth, the ocean continues to be operationalised as a waste management technology of planetary scale, used as a dumping ground for sewage, military equipment and industrial waste. As Gay Hawkins observed almost two decades ago, in sea-girt countries such as Australia, the ocean has been considered since colonisation to be a key part of “the alchemy of ‘waste management’ ” (2003, 40). At the other end of the scale, microscopic organisms are enlisted as agents of waste management in landfills. As Myra Hird points out, this process of recruiting legions of invisible organisms to deal with the residue of “all our sated desire” (2013, 107) reposes on a fantasy of control that belies the real human vulnerability underpinning the attempt to spatially restrain the ­ultimately unrestrainable flows of biology and the unpredictability of geological forces. Landfills are “ubiquitous sites of forgetting” (2013, 107), and part of what is forgotten is human vulnerability itself: “bacteria remind us that most relational encounters on earth have nothing to do with humans; nor are humans even aware of most of these encounters and assemblages” (2013, 110). Given waste management’s implication with geographies and lifeforms at wildly different scales, it is unsurprising that a spatialised conception of waste has been a crucial explicit or implicit foundation of the rich conceptual engagement that has been a hallmark of the humanities’ engagement with waste. Underpinning much of this work was Mary Douglas’s seminal (1966) conception of “dirt” as a social and symbolic category of thought rather than an absolute: dirt as “matter out of place” (2002, 36), “essentially disorder” (2002, 2). Douglas’s enormous contribution to the conceptualisation

2  Fiona Allon et al. of waste was to enable an analytic that foregrounds the symbolic and social dimensions underpinning, motivating and directing the material organisation of “dirt” in all societies. As she famously concluded, “Where there is dirt there is system” (2002, 36). Systems require work to maintain their boundaries. The ritual expulsion of pollutants, both material and symbolic, is one form of boundary work, and the repudiated matter can include human beings themselves, who can function as a form of symbolic waste. The designation of some humans as waste takes different forms in different societies, but for Zygmunt Bauman, the designation of certain persons, or types of persons, as human waste is “an inevitable outcome of modernization and an inseparable accompaniment of modernity” since it is “an inescapable side-effect of order-building … and of economic progress” (2003, 3, original emphasis). Thus, attentiveness to the spatial politics of waste distribution and management has been an important plank of social and environmental justice movements, and many of the chapters in this volume recognise both the inequitable distribution of waste and the way particular groups of human persons themselves can be designated as “waste.” These chapters bring to the fore the long-standing histories of colonial, racial and gendered inequality that not only dictate which groups are more likely to be exposed to toxic waste, but also whose bodies are allowed to be “wasted,” to “let die.” “Without grievability, there is no life,” as Judith Butler (2015) so powerfully puts it. The (mis)management of waste demonstrates how existing social injustices are reproduced in time, extending the slow attrition of life itself. Such sombre analyses of course have impacts for ethics at an individual level as well. Waste “is fundamental to the practice of human subjectivity” (Hawkins 2006, 13), a “key player” in “the action of ethics and embodiment” (2006, 13). What we repudiate, expel or ignore in order to maintain our own comfort and sense of order is a profoundly ethical matter, and thus, an environmental ethics requires “remembering the experiences and sensations of others” (Hird 2013, 117). As Gay Hawkins puts it: “[W]hat we want to get rid of also makes us who we are” (2006, 12, original emphasis). Thus, our engagements with waste are inevitably, if often invisibly, ethical in nature, bound to the development of subjectivity itself. Susan Signe Morrison, too, points to the inherently intersubjective nature of these processes, whereby what is deemed to be marginal and an excess to be disposed of is central to the constitution of identity itself: we “throw things out in order to clean up” (2015, 99). Furthermore, Morrison describes the idea of the wasted human as a somewhat misguided “toxic metaphor,” aptly pointing out that “[w]asted humans may be the most ‘sustainable’ acting humans around” (101). Indeed, as she argues, it is generally waste pickers, rubbish collectors and majority-world recyclers who work with the “shifty” object of waste (Frow 2001, 283) and send it on its time travels along other circuits of use and reuse.

Introduction  3

The complex temporalities of waste The value of spatial inquiry to the conceptualisation of waste is evident. Nonetheless, our relation with waste is as deeply marked by time as it is by space. Against the backdrop of a planet that is rapidly running out of time, scholars in the humanities and social sciences are exploring the many temporal dimensions of waste. These dimensions include shifts from the linear time of production to the post-linear time of waste disposal, recycling and reuse; the lingering duration of certain materials, including their stubborn persistence; the often invisible flows and intergenerational legacies of air- or water-borne toxic wastes; the deep temporalities of industrialisation and colonialism; the inconceivable timescales of nuclear waste; the imagined wasted futures of the Anthropocene in which the future itself appears as a fossil; and the circular temporalities of renewal, repair and revival. Focusing on time does not mean abandoning our attentiveness to environmental and social injustices or disputing the value of spatialised inquiry in revealing historical and contemporary inequities in the way waste is distributed and managed. On the contrary, many of the contributions to this collection analyse complex spatiotemporal relations and new timespace configurations, such as the bizarre new temporalities formed within the seclusion of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or how making artworks from toxic waste materialises variable time-spans of toxicity, including the “immateriality” of radiation. Moreover, a focus on temporality assists us to pay attention to the noxious intergenerational effects of waste, whose legacies can be conceived as a form of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011). Indeed, Rob Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence is reinforced by many of the contributions to this volume as a conception that is both complementary and equal in stature to Douglas’s seminal trope of matter out of place in its capacity to help us understand the toxic legacies of contaminated water, air and soil. The importance of thinking about the temporalities of waste was brought to prominence by William Viney in his important book Waste: A Philosophy of Things (2014), which argued for a concept of waste that is grounded in temporality. Viney writes that “the insistence on spaces of waste can confuse and obscure the crucial influence that time has in our experience of and dealings with waste things” (2014, 2). He observes that “waste is also (and in both senses of the phrase) matter out of time” (Viney 2014, 2), in the sense that recognising waste involves negotiating with, and making explicit, the time we ascribe to things. Waste is matter whose time is up. Understanding the temporalities of waste requires drawing on the rich sociological, historical and philosophical scholarship on time, which often begins by de-naturalising our understanding of time. Barbara Adam, for example, describing time as “like an iceberg … largely submerged and invisible” (Adam 1996b, 85), notes how it has been able to be misunderstood as a taken-for-granted constant positioned in the background to

4  Fiona Allon et al. everyday life (Adam 1996b, 85; Hofmeister 1997, 310). She argues that beyond the common-sense time of “calendars and clocks,” a richer understanding of the temporal dimensions of socio-environmental life is needed now more than ever: Nature, the environment and sustainability … are not merely matters of space but fundamentally temporal realms, processes and concepts. Their temporality, furthermore, is far from simple and singular. It is multi-dimensional, a multiplex aspect of earthly existence. Without a deep knowledge of this temporal complexity, I suggest, environmental action and policy is bound to run aground, unable to lift itself from the spatial dead-end of its own making. (Adam 1998, 8) In contrast to the conventional focus on the spatiality of environmental degradation, what Adam et al. call “time ecology” focuses on time in its multitude of forms, including the multiple rhythmicities of nature, different time frames and time scales, the sequences of events, the duration of processes, time that is generative in form, such as reproduction and care, as well as the speed and intensity of actions and transactions (Adam et al. 1997, 75). Here, too, the variability of scale is crucial: the equally unimaginable timescales of nuclear contamination or of computer microprocessors point to the differential multi-scalar temporalities that co-exist today and which confound traditional ideas of linear time, cause and effect, producer and end user, movement, progression and causation, as well as the spatiality of time. Whether it is the artificially enhanced speeding-up of time registered in nanoseconds, the almost imperceptible “glacial time” of slow-moving generational shifts or the “deep time” of Anthropogenic change, the spectrum of different temporalities conveys how “time” is not a neutral medium, an envelope or container in which human activity takes place, or a field in which events happen, but a dynamic and mutable set of relations. For the historian of time Reinhart Koselleck, time is far from constant or universal, and different temporalities arise at different points throughout history. His guiding question therefore is “How, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future related?” (2004, xxiii). What we generally understand as “modern” historical time is a relatively recent phenomenon, he suggests, emerging in the West from about 1500 to 1800, as part of the Enlightenment. Prior to this specific temporalisation, past and present were experienced on a “common historical plane,” a continuum that was “timeless” to a great extent, governed by natural or Messianic forces beyond human comprehension or control. With the modern era, a new temporality appears predicated on the “expected otherness of the future” (2004, 252). In other words, “The future would be different from the past, and better, to boot” (2004, 280). The model of modern, industrial time

Introduction  5 that went hand-in-hand with what Koselleck calls the “technical-industrial modification” (2004, xxiv) of the world is, as we now know, directly complicit with extensive environmental degradation. Moreover, as Adam (1998,  9) underscores, “many of the products of the industrial way of life are not graspable with the conceptual tools of their construction.” A conceptual approach that is attentive to distinctly new temporal configurations, and which moves beyond traditional ways of relating to the material world, is therefore ­essential for understanding contemporary phenomena, especially waste phenomena, whose temporality often exceeds human perception. The concept of the Anthropocene, for example, likewise plays havoc with established temporal trajectories, including the temporality of evolution itself. If the past is the key to the future, as much of the literature on the ­Anthropocene suggests, how are we to understand the folding together of multiple temporalities in the geological strata of the past and the possible futures to come? The deep time of ecology versus the shallow brevity of human chronology, the humanist distinction between natural history and human history, simple models of cause and effect, equivalence and evaluation, linear time versus non-linear time, political time and historical time, the particular versus the universal—temporal scales that once appeared incommensurable must obviously be rethought (see Chakrabarty 2009). The interlocking environmental and epistemological crises of today make a mockery of the idea of a simple, linear time unfolding as a series of discrete, measurable events. Indeed, the prospect of a global climate emergency foregrounds the range of non-measurable, achronological temporalities that are now oriented towards uncertain futures. Speed and slowness, volatility and duration and the unanticipated configurations of past and future under f­ar-from-equilibrium ­conditions are the dominant features of a changing climate. The temporalities of waste, too, are decidedly non-linear. An overly linear conception of time, with a given beginning, middle and end, forecloses the possibilities of engaging with critical questions about waste and contemporary life. It limits our understanding of the scale, intensity and speed of globalised processes of discarding and their geographically uneven effects and power relations. A linear, unexamined conception of time also obscures the many important ways that discarded matter returns with the passing of time, the ways that discarded matter has the potential “to return to haunt” (Gregson, Metcalfe and Crewe 2007, 198), both symbolically and materially. Thus, waste itself must be regarded as non-static, non-predetermined matter, a shift in perspective that directs us to its dynamics of movement and becoming, to the unpredictability of waste materials over time and to its capacity to generate repercussions “downstream” in non-predetermined ways. This is the case for everyday forms of waste such as plastic and wastewater, as well as more insidious forms of waste such as asbestos and waste by-products of mineral extraction (D’Angelo and Pijpers 2018; Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010; Mazzeo 2018). As with other instances of “laying waste,” the act of demolition, or destruction, must be seen then as a

6  Fiona Allon et al. “transformative state,” one which “involves the animation of an abundance of materials, including [in some instances] asbestos” (Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010, 1068). This process also occurs at a variety of temporal and spatial scales. Cities and metropolises are commonly built on the compacted platforms of waste, debris and household rubbish of previous eras, “rising up over time so gradually that city dwellers hardly notice its vast presence” (Edgeworth 2017, 157). These underground landfill deposits “may themselves be mined for their mineral content at some point in the future” (159). This temporal circularity is novel but far from unique. The side-effects of numerous forms of waste can emerge from the past long after their initial use and be reactivated in unexpected forms at unexpected times.

Materiality and ethics Recognition of the distributed properties of waste and of its complex, contingent temporalities also prompts us to consider the surprising consequences of matter and materials. First, there are the temporalities of objects and materials themselves. As Brian Thill powerfully observes, waste can be understood as “every object, plus time” (2015, 8). Moreover, material existence is enmeshed in sociocultural contexts, including cultures of convenience, comfort and disposability (Shove 2003). When Gay Hawkins, for example, asks “How did a material as tough and durable as plastic become classified as transient and disposable?” (2018, 91), she points to a paradox in which the temporalities of late-capitalist production and consumption, manifesting as a cultural practice of single-use disposability, have become tied to plastic’s material endurance (2018, 91–2). Although disposable plastic in particular is governed by a distinct temporality that registers the contradictions between immutability and ephemerality, presence and transience, so too are many different kinds of waste. Take, for example, the dangerous unruliness of asbestos and radioactive waste, the deviousness of polyester microfibres, which travel from the world of “fast fashion” and settle in the aquatic food chain, the generative capacities of artefact-rich soils in archaeological excavation sites, or the monumental cities built upon thick layers of quotidian waste and debris. These latter two examples point to a deeper enmeshing of time and ­materiality—the ability of certain materials to produce time. Time is actively produced by social relations, but it is also fabricated by the force and properties of materials and material forms. Tim Ingold puts it thus: “Materials are not in time; they are the stuff of time itself” (2012, 439, original emphasis). Attending to the interactions between materiality and time, including the materials that inevitably end up becoming what we call “waste,” does not point just towards the historicity of materiality, but also to the ways in which materials have the capacity to actualise new temporal habits, dispositions, rhythms and routines—new “temporal ontologies,” as Hawkins (2018, 91) calls them—that then become embedded in everyday social practices.

Introduction  7 What, then, does this enriched conceptualisation of time and materiality suggest for the ethics and politics of waste? Some have argued that interrogating time in the context of environmental processes is an important step towards taking ameliorative action (Adam et al. 1997, 74); that this enables us to see the ways that globalisation, contemporary technologies and environmental hazards pose problems for the political idea of democracy (Adam 1996a); that it allows us to see environmental issues anew in terms of the connection between local and global, the “colonisation of the future,” as well risks, threats and our responsibilities for the future (Adam 1996b, 86). Gay Hawkins was a prescient and influential voice in recognising and theorising the ethico-political dimensions of waste and in moving beyond psychoanalysis as the discipline best suited to understanding and analysing “the minefield of emotions and moral anxieties that waste can provoke” (Hawkins 2006, 7). Rather than relying on universalist concepts like abjection (Kristeva 1982), Hawkins has consistently focused on the materiality of waste and its incorporation into everyday embodied habits as the basis for understanding its ethical dimensions and for addressing the material problems it presents. Thus, alongside the rise of “global garbage” (Lindner and Meissner 2015), we also see the rise around the world of new modes of valuing discarded objects, second-hand goods and under-used city spaces. This has occurred alongside the revival, in new contexts and within new value systems, of the habits and practices associated with previous modes of life in which thrift or self-sustainability played a central role. Through these processes of reusing, recycling and repurposing, waste has begun to take on a newly valorised and important place in everyday rhythms and routines. This collection assembles new and original research on a range of cultural phenomena, including food sharing, scrap metal collection, kerbside scavenging and recycling, clothing reuse, reversible materials, building repair and repurposing and e-waste art, that illustrates how waste is formed and transformed, made and remade, within wider conduits of consumption, circulation and renewal. Through such material practices, waste is not only revalorised but also becomes entangled in the formation of new identities, pleasures and everyday politics. Collectively then, the research presented in this volume makes a striking and persuasive argument about the need to give more credence to the capacities of waste to provoke us in materially and temporally complex ways, especially those substances that complicate our understandings of life as bounded duration.

Outline This book aims to stimulate reflection on different dimensions of the temporalities of waste through close study of a variety of historical, contemporary and literary examples. These are drawn from a wide selection of geographical locations and settings, ranging from a study of the municipal

8  Fiona Allon et al. garbage crisis in Beirut, to food rescue campaigns in Hong Kong, the toxic by-products of computer chip production in Silicon Valley and the wastefulness of housing policy in remote Indigenous Australia. It also draws on an unusually diverse range of disciplines, using methodologies as varied as literary analysis, archival research, ethnography, action research and an archaeological uptake of Life Cycle Assessment. The aim throughout has not been to apply theories top-down, but rather, to allow expert empirical study to enrich our conceptualisations of time and temporality. Thus, while the collection is organised around six temporal themes, many of its ideas about time, such as intergenerational time, colliding temporalities, persistence and return, in fact resonate across the volume as a whole. Speed and slowness The collection opens with three chapters addressing the question of speed, each taking a particular technology as its point of focus. Daisy Tam’s chapter “Open crowd: just-in-time food rescue” draws on her first-hand experience of food rescue programs in Hong Kong, bringing to light the complex intersecting temporalities at play: the industrially produced but increasingly naturalised regime of best-before dates, the organic timescales of the biological decay of food and the complex and unpredictable temporalities of food excess itself and of the lives of the busy volunteers who try to redistribute it. Presenting a digital platform that she has had a role in developing, Tam argues that we need to exploit the speed that digital technologies provide in order to counter the inevitable slowness and contingency of collecting and rescuing food. Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt’s chapter explores an older food waste reduction technology, the refrigerator. This technology has become so normalised in Western societies as to render its role in the organisation of household food consumption somewhat invisible. Their study of Papua New Guinean migrants’ accounts of life in their home country and in ­Australia demonstrates that the meanings and uses of the fridge are not uniform, but are assembled differently in different geographical, climatic and social contexts. In the Papua New Guinean (PNG) context, the fridge is a focal point of community, whereas in Australia it is connected to atomisation and individualisation. Luke Munn’s examination of the temporalities of computer processor production shines a light on the hidden injuries on which the capitalist need for speed depends. His chapter “Chip, body, earth: toxic temporalities of Intel processor production” demonstrates how the unfathomably rapid time of digital information communication made possible by ceaseless advances in computer chip technology is paid for in toxic legacies of far greater—indeed, intergenerational—duration. Chip time reposes on and destroys body time, leaving an environmental and embodied legacy of “slow contaminations and deadly after-effects.”

Introduction  9 Put together, these chapters paint a complex picture of gains and losses: the fridge is commonly heralded as a useful and convenient technology for preventing food waste by sustaining the freshness of food, but ironically it also contributes to food waste by promoting unsustainable shopping practices. In another irony, the digital technologies that might reduce food waste in some contexts rely on the computer chips whose toxic environmental and embodied legacies are so powerfully presented in Munn’s chapter. Bureaucratic time This section investigates some temporal dimensions of government-led mechanisms for dealing with waste. From the fine-grained rhythmic temporalities of waste collection schedules implemented by municipal governments to the epochal timeframe of the colonial state itself, states have a role in organising (or failing to organise) spatiotemporal patterns of waste management. In doing so, they tacitly create divisions between “clean” and “dirty” spaces and corresponding orders of personhood and citizenry: valuable lives versus wasted or wastable lives. The chapters in this section note the failures and the successes, both laudable and lamentable, of a particular governmental regime in producing both materially clean and dirty spaces and in normalising and operationalising the imaginaries of order, propriety and cleanliness with which such spaces are inter-implicated. These ideas and imaginaries of cleanliness and order can be an instrument for normalising repressive state power, but they can also be used to help rebuild cities in times of crisis, when the state fails, as in the case of Beirut’s solid waste crisis. The section begins with Raysa Martinez Kruger’s historical excavation of the creation of the municipal waste schedule in the United States. Her archival case study of Asbury Park in New Jersey demonstrates the role of the state in building and normalising both the idea and the reality of a clean city—a materialisation brought about through the imposition of a temporal grid (the municipal waste collection schedule) onto a set of spatial arrangements. Kruger introduces the metaphor of a “conveyor belt” of waste to evoke the resultant division between “clean” areas and people whose waste was removed from sight and the “wasted spaces” typically inhabited by the poor or people of colour where this waste was dumped. The bureaucratic expedient of a timetable thus reveals itself to be socially and politically compromised, a social and environmental injustice that continues, she claims, to underpin waste management regimes in the United States today. While this analysis demonstrates the power of local municipalities to tacitly define people and places as clean or unclean, Christine Mady’s study of the walls built to hide the unsightly accumulation of waste during ­Beirut’s solid waste crisis demonstrates the failure of the state to maintain a

10  Fiona Allon et al. form of order that is crucial to a modern clean city imaginary. Mady documents the importance of cleanliness to shared perceptions of order and functionality and the efforts that individuals and communities may go to sustain the imaginary of a clean city in the face of the failures of the state. The stalled or stop-start temporalities of Beirut’s fragmented post-war government, unable to maintain basic urban waste management infrastructure, stand in stark contrast to the seemingly perennial failure of the colonial state with regard to Indigenous Australians living in remote communities. And yet, underpinning this chronic failure is a not dissimilar stop-start temporal regime in which intermittent bursts of action do nothing to seriously interrupt the stalled temporalities of “normalised waiting.” Liam Grealy and Tess Lea’s detailed engagement with the “policy cultures” surrounding Indigenous housing and maintenance demonstrates how a chronic long-term failure takes shape within the inefficiencies and illogics of particular bureaucratic temporalities. Despite the good intentions of many of the actors involved, Indigenous housing in Australia’s Northern Territory is all too often a story of waste: the wasted money of taxpayers, the wasted potential of decaying houses and the wasted time and efforts of residents forced into an unremitting and seemingly never-ending sequence of bureaucratically constituted procedures: “phone calls, complaints, reports, scheduling, follow-ups, appointments, fines, inspections, and more reports.” Grealy and Lea frame the state’s failure to stop Indigenous housing from falling into waste as a failure to be responsive to “entropy,” to the simple material fact that “Over time, things wear out, break and fall apart.” Disposability and persistence The chapters in this section explore the hidden persistence of people, objects and materials as discomforting, unknown or unwanted residues of dominant lifestyles. They note how this material persistence belies fictions or fantasies of disposability. Whether it be the disenfranchised people living suspended lives in refugee camps or border towns, the invisible residues of fast or disposable fashion, or the materials and chemicals that lie outside the reach of circular economies and endure into an indefinite future in managed afterlives in landfills, this section notes the interplay between disposability and endurance. The section opens with an examination of “wasted” human lives. Tasnim Qutait’s chapter argues that we need to move beyond the spatial metaphors through which the experiences of displaced or disenfranchised people are conventionally understood and evoked. In contrast to the spatial metaphors of “unwanted lives as flows, tides or swarms, invading secure, privileged spaces,” she foregrounds the temporal dimensions of people whose lives are often organised around stalled movement and life “in ­suspension.” She argues that fiction’s inescapable imbrication with temporality makes it a useful vehicle for detecting and analysing the temporal

Introduction  11 dimensions of the lives of “disposable” people, a claim she demonstrates by engaging with three recent fictional works by Arabic authors, which explore the lives of refugees, illegalised migrants and frontier town dwellers. Elyse Stanes’s chapter on clothing and textile waste considers movement and persistence in relation to materials rather than people. It opens with the stark contrast between the “dizzying speeds” of fast fashion and the far longer time-spans of the materials out of which such fashion is constructed. Drawing on her ethnographic research with a textile recycler in New York, she notes the “material recalcitrance” of textiles which, whether it be in domestic laundries or even in the process of being sorted and separated for recycling or reuse, unravel and escape in the form of tiny, needle-like fibres that inevitably make their way into water and soil. Thus, even the very processes designed to reduce “dirt” and waste—washing, repurposing, ­ recycling—serve as reminders that the microplastic fibres out of which so much modern clothing is composed are both obdurate and hyper-mobile: moving untraceably through the waterways and into the oceans, they travel and persist. Continuing the theme of the unrecognised or unwanted afterlives of materials and objects, Yusif Idies takes us on a tour through a modern German landfill facility. He argues that landfills are the hidden, necessary condition of waste management even in its modern “greener” forms, since even the circular economy, and its emblematic processes like recycling, still rely on the existence of landfills. In Idies’s analysis, landfills are shadow places of hidden or stigmatised work that reveal our ongoing reliance on disposability. Even when a landfill is full and can no longer accept materials, the work of monitoring and managing it will persist into an indefinite future. Landfills thus call to mind both the periodicity of daily waste disposal practices (collection and dumping) and the longer-term processes of managing and keeping such spaces safe. Even the green economy towards which modern nations aspire is thus haunted not only by the persistence of things in landfills but also the necessary persistence of landfills, both of which present us with the “endless challenge” of aftercare. Longue durée and intergenerational time This section continues the theme of persistence by focusing on forms of waste that cannot be contained within the lifespan of any one generation. The section begins with an innovative contribution from archaeology in which Elizabeth Graham, Dan Evans and Lindsay Duncan combine insights from soil science and environmental engineering with a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to explore the productive dimensions of waste. Archaeology is of course centred on long-term timeframes and on the foundational recognition that the value of objects changes over time. Today’s waste is, after all, tomorrow’s artefacts. But Graham and colleagues’ close study of a Maya site on a coral caye off the coast of Belize moves beyond

12  Fiona Allon et al. the typical archaeological interest in artefacts to include the medium in which artefacts reside: soil. The team’s discovery that the soil at this site has been created from the residue or waste of civilisations past pushes us beyond simple categorical distinctions—objects, waste, soil. This not only represents a theoretical and methodological intervention in their own field of archaeology—reminding it not to be always object-focused and suggesting the potential of LCA—but also suggests the importance of recognising the productive and generative potential of waste in some contexts. The next two chapters take us from soil to water. Ally Day’s chapter “Crip Time and the toxic body” explores the intergenerational legacies and effects of environmental toxicity by engaging with three U.S. autobiographies involving contaminated water. Interweaving her own life story of growing up on the shores of the heavily polluted Blackstone River on the U.S. east coast, she mobilises and extends a concept used within critical disability studies: that of Crip Time. She demonstrates how this concept, usually used to analyse the lived temporalities experienced by individualities with disabilities, can be pushed to recognise the interweaving of human and (other) environmental bodies. Day argues that this more expansive conceptualisation of Crip Time can push critical disability studies beyond a focus on individual personhood towards one that recognises the role of environmental toxins, be they nuclear, chemical or carbon, in the creation and distribution of debility. In “Wasting seas: oceanic time and temporalities,” Elspeth Probyn continues the exploration of water and the themes of slow violence and intergenerational legacies, by conceptualising the ocean as a place of multiple temporalities. In the ocean, many temporal currents “interweave and coexist”: the rapidity of some ocean crises, such as the collapse of oyster stocks, contrasts with the slow, often invisible, contamination of urban water sources and the epigenetic impact of these contaminations on generations to come. Riffing on the traditionally romanticised concept of “oceanic time,” Probyn notes how the ocean, far from being the singular, pure and ancient mystery of romantic dreams, is in reality messy and multiple. It throws back to us what we have thrown into it. The ocean is not a world away from life on land, but, rather, bound to the ugly injustices of human activity, such as the illegal gold mining that releases mercury into the body of the sea and the bodies of people, with effects on generations still to come. The case of oceanic methylmercury reminds us, as many of the contributors to this volume do, that waste’s inevitable return is characterised by unevenness—“of time, temporality, geography and justice.” Collision and multiplicity This theme of the interweaving of multiple, sometimes conflicting, temporalities is extended in the next subsection of the collection, with three ­chapters focusing on temporal collisions and multiplicities. The first two of

Introduction  13 these chapters, Aleksandra Brylska’s “Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future: on the temporalities of two post-nuclear sites” and Sabine LeBel’s “Toxic transmogrification: Rare Earthenware as junk art,” also contribute to another of the collection’s running themes: the social injustice and intergenerational legacies of toxic waste. Aleksandra Brylska’s study of the ecological and conceptual paradoxes embodied in two post-nuclear sites—the Chernobyl zone in the Ukraine and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, U.S.—demonstrates how the concept of novel ecosystems—those degraded or newly configured landscapes that now in fact dominate the planet—can be enriched by considering their temporal dimensions. Brylska notes how the inapprehensible temporality of nuclear contamination inevitably challenges normative conceptions of time, but differentially, depending on the circumstances of the contamination. Chernobyl, she argues, is a space now totally defined by a single moment in historical time. She draws on a range of witness accounts, including her own interviews with people directly affected by the accident, a space now imagined as existing in “non-time.” Yet this perception of suspended time is complicated by the unexpected non-human flourishing that has occurred because of the evacuation of most humans from the area. The overarching temporal regime in which Chernobyl exists is that of an “eternal catastrophe” living on in “a cracking, looping time” in which it is constantly re-enacted. By contrast, the Hanford Nuclear Site, contaminated not in a sudden apocalyptic moment of disaster but less visibly through the process of industrial production of nuclear materials, is now a designated National Monument, public perceptions of which swing from pride at a now-flourishing ecosystem to horror stories of ongoing radioactive leaks. Toxic waste figures in the next chapter, Sabine LeBel’s analysis of a series of vases in the high-prestige Chinese blue-and-white porcelain style made out of contaminated mine tailings from Mongolia. Since each vase uses the amount of toxic waste produced by a smartphone, a laptop and a car battery, the pleasures and conveniences of life in a consumer society are brought into proximity with the dangerous invisible labour in the world’s “shadow places” (Plumwood 2008). By bringing these different worlds into material proximity, these works also force a collision of different temporalities: the long history of Chinese porcelainmaking, the longue durée of prestige artworks but also of toxic waste itself, the ephemerality of consumer products and the disposability of the bodies of those whose labour produces the raw materials from which they are fashioned. Shadow places—backyards, alleys and industrial sites—feature also in Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby’s analysis of the temporalities of scrap metal collection in the Canadian city of Winnipeg. Their first-hand study of scrap metal collectors, based on observations and interviews, reveals how their work is structured around a complex set of overlaying and often ­competing temporalities, which they distil into five themes. It turns out that

14  Fiona Allon et al. collectors’ work temporalities are undergirded by factors as diverse as climate, the garbage and recycling schedules, urban zoning and the weekly rhythms of city dwellers’ socialising. Their study paints a complex picture of a particular form of urban waste work and its imbrication in the “(poly) rhythm” of the city. Revivals/return The volume concludes with two chapters observing the revival of some of the skills associated with more sustainable ways of life. Scholars of sustainability have noted the potential importance of practice revivals in helping us move “back to the future” (Maller and Strengers 2015, 148; cf. Barcan 2018). The COVID-19 context in which this volume is being finalised is likewise catalysing a host of practice revivals. Whether these revived practices continue to craft new futures or will be subject to the “bounce back” (Maller and Strengers 2015, 153) to hegemonic practice that all too often follows a moment of crisis is yet to be seen. Tania Lewis, Rowan Wilken and Frédéric Rauturier’s chapter, “New temporalities of everyday life in Australian suburbia: cultural and material economies of hard rubbish reuse,” distils the findings of a video ethnography of 15 households of “hard rubbish” gleaners in the Australian city of ­Melbourne. These mostly middle-class and well-educated suburbanites refuse certain contemporary norms of convenience, speed and disposability in favour of practices of reuse, despite the time-consuming nature of these practices. These gleaners’ willingness to dedicate time and attachment to such practices is understood as “marking a broad investment in a new ethics of temporality,” one that is a mindful reaction to the short timeframes underpinning the disposability of household goods in a consumer culture. The collection concludes with Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue’s call for urbanised societies to recognise and learn from the adaptive, resilient and sustainable systems of organic waste management characteristic of traditional Indigenous societies in South Africa. Their chapter “Temporal cycles of waste management in Southern African Indigenous societies” notes the limited and technocratic nature of mainstream waste management in South Africa, arguing that there is a missed opportunity for modern South Africa (and beyond) to learn from the circular temporalities and localised action that characterised traditional Indigenous practice. Drawing on their long history of action research with two Nguni communal areas in South Africa, they argue that the localised circular economies of organic waste that characterised these communities can serve as a model for a more sustainable, adaptive and flexible alternative to the dominant linear practices of waste management. The chapters collected in the volume reflect these novel perspectives on time and invite us to think about materials that have been designated as “waste” in terms of dynamism and transformation (rather than just constancy) and

Introduction  15 according to different time frames: the short-term timescapes of immediate toxicity as well as the longue durée of epigenetic change in which chemicals have ongoing effects across generations. This is a model of environmental dynamics characterised not by equilibrium but by feedback loops between past and future events, including the unforeseeable effects of an array of materials. As Nigel Clark (2011, 115) has argued, “tomorrow’s emission of a tonne of carbon dioxide might have consequences utterly different from yesterday’s tonne: a world which most emphatically does not play by the rules of universal equivalence.” Every time we wash our polyester clothes, microplastic particles are released into the water; chemicals, plastics and toxins like methylmercury are now part of the molecular make-up of bodies. It’s unclear what effect substances that now reside in the human anatomy may have in years to come, but some contaminants not only produce physical changes in the course of a human life but also have unexpected consequences over much longer temporalities. Waste, in other words, is unpredictable and unruly. Nonetheless, its trajectories, engagements and patterning often reinforce existing prolong, and extend across time social inequalities and injustices (Murphy 2017). Together, the essays that make up this volume demonstrate the necessarily multi- and transdisciplinary nature of engagement with waste. Many of them make original contributions not only to the interdisciplinary field of discard studies but also to their home disciplines. This suggests the extent to which both waste and temporality are conceptually generative— “good to think,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it (1969, 162). In an era when time is said to be both disorienting and disoriented, somehow “out of joint,” this volume hopes to make a small contribution to the research and conceptualisation of problems whose resolution requires both novel thinking and urgent action.

References Adam, Barbara. 1996a. “Beyond the Present: Nature, Technology and the Democratic Ideal.” Time & Society 5 (3): 319–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X 96005003003. Adam, Barbara. 1996b. “Re-Vision: The Centrality of Time for an Ecological Social Science Perspective.” In Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, edited by Scott M. Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Brian Wynne. London: Sage Publications, 84–103. Adam, Barbara. 1998. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. London: Routledge. Adam, Barbara, Karlheinz Geißler, Martin Held, Klaus Kümmerer and Manuel­ ­Schneider. 1997. “Time for the Environment: The Tutzing Time Ecology Project.” Time & Society 6 (1): 73–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X97006001005. Barcan, Ruth. 2018. “Back to the Future: Australian Suburban Chicken-Keeping as Cultural Pedagogy and Practice Revival.” Locale: The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies 7: 15–44.

16  Fiona Allon et al. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 2015. “Judith Butler: Precariousness and Grievability—When Is Life Grievable?” Blog, Verso Books, 16 November 2015. www.versobooks.com/ blogs/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability-when-is-life-grievable. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. Clark, Nigel. 2011. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage. D’Angelo, Lorenzo and Robert J. Pijpers. 2018. “Mining Temporalities: An Overview.” The Extractive Industries and Society 5 (2): 215–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. exis.2018.02.005. Douglas, Mary. 1966 [2002]. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Edgeworth, Matt. 2017. “Humanly Modified Ground.” In The Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, edited by Dominick A. Dellasala and Michael I. Goldstein. Oxford: Elsevier, 157–61. Frow, John. 2001. “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 270–85. www.jstor.org/stable/1344268. Gregson, Nicky, Alan Metcalfe and Louise Crewe. 2007. “Moving Things Along: The Conduits and Practices of Divestment in Consumption.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32 (2): 187–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14755661.2007.00253.x. Gregson, Nicky, Helen Watkins and Melania ­Calestani. 2010. “Inextinguishable Fibres: Demolition and the Vital Materialisms of Asbestos.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42 (5): 1065–83. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42123. Hawkins, Gay. 2003. “Down the Drain: Shit and the Politics of Disturbance.” In Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, edited by Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 51–63. Hawkins, Gay. 2006. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Hawkins, Gay. 2018. “Plastic and Presentism: The Time of Disposability.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5 (1): 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33291. Hird, Myra J. 2013. “Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethic of Vulnerability.” Ethics and the Environment 18 (1): 105–24. https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.18.1.105. Hofmeister, Sabine. 1997. “Nature’s Temporalities: Consequences for Environmental Politics.” Time & Society 6 (2–3): 309–21. https://doi.org/doi:10.1177/09614 63X97006002011. Ingold, Tim. 2012. “Toward an Ecology of Materials.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 427–42. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. ­Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude F. 1969. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. ­Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lindner, Christoph and Miriam Meissner, eds. 2015. Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess, and Abandonment. London: Routledge. Maller, Cecily and Yolande Strengers. 2015. “Resurrecting Sustainable Practices: Using Memories of the Past to Intervene in the Future.” In Social Practices,

Introduction  17 Intervention and Sustainability: Beyond Behaviour Change, edited by Yolande Strengers and Cecily Maller. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 147–62. Mazzeo, Agata. 2018. “The Temporalities of Asbestos Mining and Community Activism.” The Extractive Industries and Society 5 (2): 223–9. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.exis.2018.02.004. Morrison, Susan Signe. 2015. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, via Springer eBooks. Murphy, Michelle. 2017. “Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 494–503. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plumwood, Val. 2008. “Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling.” Australian Humanities Review 44, March. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2008/03/01/ shadow-places-and-the-politics-of-dwelling/. Shove, Elizabeth. 2003. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg. Thill, Brian. 2015. Waste. New York: Bloomsbury. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Webb, Amy. 2018. “Space Oddities: We Need a Plan to Stop Polluting Space Before It’s Too Late.” Wired, 4 December 2018. www.wired.com/story/we-need-aplan-to-stop-polluting-space-before-its-too-late/. Woolgar, Steve and Daniel Neyland. 2013. Mundane Governance: Ontology and Accountability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

Speed and slowness

1 Open crowd Just-in-time food rescue Daisy Tam

Introduction Food waste is a problem on the global and local agenda. Every year, 1.3 billion tonnes of food goes to waste, amounting to approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption (FAO 2013). In sustainability discourses, this is represented as a squandering of resources—a waste of land, water and energy as well as the human labour and capital that went into the production of food. As an environmental issue, food waste is seen as a pollutant, the world’s third-largest source of carbon emissions and greenhouse gases that contribute directly to global warming and climate change (FAO 2013). Alongside environmental and sustainability issues, food waste is also a major topic in food security. In this arena, food waste is represented as a missed opportunity, as there are 821 million people suffering from malnutrition and other hunger-related diseases (FAO et al. 2018). Juxtaposed alongside these staggering figures is the question of world population growth and rapid urbanisation. The 2019 UN World Population Prospects estimates that by 2050, there will be 9.7 billion people on the planet, two-thirds of whom will be living in urban environments (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019). In these discourses, affluent places are presented as resource-intensive sites; rich countries consume double the food of developing economies, and cities account for 75 per cent of global natural resource consumption (UNEP 2013, 4). The rapid urban population growth is preceded by an even faster rate of waste production: while waste increased tenfold in the last hundred years, the figure is expected to double by 2025 and over half of that is organic food waste (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata 2012). These figures are commonly quoted in studies relating to food waste: from climate and environmental sciences; agriculture and nutrition; food policy and security to planning and governance. Within each discipline, how food waste is conceptualised—that is, how and when food becomes waste—is understood differently, mobilising registers of different scales and measures (carbon emissions, calories, blue water footprint etc.) such that different solutions to solving the problem are generated. In this chapter,

22  Daisy Tam I suggest that waste, as matter out of place, is produced by temporal systems of enclosure: hoarding, either through storage or proprietorship, restricts access and eventually leads to degradation and decomposition. This can be observed in our urban commercial food systems, where edibility and waste go hand in hand. Food rescue, as a form of surplus redistribution, extends the life span of food and reduces waste by facilitating circulation. This form of food sharing has been hailed as an “all win” solution. In practice, however, there are still many challenges that need further investigation. In this chapter, I explore the becoming and unbecoming of commercial food, attending to its temporal specificities by approaching the question of food waste as matter out of time. I also present Breadline, a web application I developed to demonstrate a possible solution to the temporal and spatial challenges of food rescue. In other words, this chapter presents my own action research on food waste—it is both a conceptual and practical investigation—and contributes to the current lack of examples of innovative food waste management coming from Asia.

Expiration—matter out of time One hot summer evening, I came face-to-face with my research problem while grocery shopping at a 24-hour supermarket in Hong Kong. It was just past midnight when I brought my basket to the till. As the cashier scanned my items, she realised with the jump of the digits that the best-before date had passed, and the pot of yoghurt was no longer available for sale. Without wanting to enter into a discussion about food safety, I offered to take the pot of yoghurt for free, as this might relieve the supermarket of any liability should the yoghurt be contaminated, and I were to suffer food poisoning. But that option was not available either: instead the staff had to log the product and send it back to the manufacturer as per company guidelines, where it would be disposed of in the city’s near-saturated landfill, and where it would continue to decompose and cause air, soil and water pollution. Waste is commonly presented as a problem, unsightly and undesirable, and experienced as a nuisance through its qualities of dirtiness, untidiness and untimely presence. It is seen to pollute, contaminating and tarnishing the environment with its existence. However, as scholars have made clear, the discarded is not a fixed category (Evans 2014; Hawkins 2006; Strasser 1999), and studying waste is not just about understanding its inherent properties or its excess and management, but rather a question of apprehending classification systems that create and destroy value (Douglas 2001; Scanlan 2005; Thompson 1979). In other words, it requires an analysis of how things become rejected and why waste came to be. The British anthropologist Mary Douglas demonstrates the structuring capacities of our classification systems through her study of dirt. In Purity and Danger, she distils from her observations on polluting behaviours the conclusion that dirt simply “exists in the eye of the beholder” (2001, 2).

Just-in-time food rescue  23 Cleansing, as the ritualistic response to dirt, involves separating and classifying the pure from the impure, such that the concept of dirt, when abstracted from its pathogenic and hygienic qualities, is merely “matter out of place” (2001, 36) and cleansing becomes a way of re-ordering the environment. In this conceptualisation, Douglas successfully argues that dirt is produced by categorical systems: “where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (2001, 36). Where value is concerned, what is deemed worthy in our classification systems is maintained by a balance of what is both accepted and rejected (Schor 1999). The economic idea of value comes from utility, but it also depends on exclusivity; the rejection of goods can sometimes be used to exchange, maintain or create value in different circuits. For example, in Marcel Mauss’s study of potlatch societies, wasting, as the absolute form of expenditure, creates value through prestige for one’s family or tribe. Conspicuous destruction, rather than accumulation, demonstrates the family’s capacity for unproductive expenditure of time and money, and, as a display of wealth and superiority, it allows them to move up the social scale (Mauss 2002). In these societies, gifting is a form of socialised exchange, where the value of objects is transformed through reciprocity. The importance lies in ongoing circulation, which forms the basis of social relationships. While our food system could not be paralleled with the Indigenous cultures of both Douglas’s and Mauss’s studies, the ontological framing allows a different perspective from the established discourses of food waste. What the example of my midnight grocery excursion demonstrates is that food waste, much like the category of dirt in Douglas’s study, is matter out of place, produced by temporal enclosures and barred from circulation. Food, wasted as a result of time-stamped protocols, is literally matter out of time. Tackling the problem of food waste therefore requires a reconfiguration of our system so that we can extend the lifespan of food that is “out of time.” This changes our perspective on food waste, shifting it from a problem of storage to a problem of circulation—of how to keep things moving.

Temporal ontology of food waste In our urban food system, constituting something as food is not as straightforward as equating it with edibility. The realities of what is considered food (and non-food) are shaped by practices of knowing, which in turn construct what is possible. This is what Mol (1999), drawing on a Foucauldian analytic, calls “multiple ontologies,” where different ontological versions of the object create conditions of possibilities and lead to different ecologies of practice. In our commercial industrial food system, food loss and waste occur in all steps of the value chain, from production, handling and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and retail to finally consumption. In general,

24  Daisy Tam “food loss and waste” is a term that refers to the phenomenon when things that are valued as food—“the edible parts of plants and animals that are produced or harvested for human consumption” (Lipinski et al. 2013, 1)— are not ultimately eaten. However, within the food industry, a further distinction is made, defining food loss as “food that spills, spoils, incurs an abnormal reduction in quality such as bruising or wilting, or otherwise gets lost before it reaches the consumer” (Lipinski et al. 2013, 1). Food waste, on the other hand, refers to “food that is of good quality and fit for human consumption but that does not get consumed because it is discarded— either before or after it spoils” (Lipinski et al. 2013, 1). In this conception, loss and waste are defined by intention, the former understood as the unintended result of agricultural processes or technical limitations, while the latter is the result of negligence or a conscious decision to throw food away. This particular ontology frames food waste as two distinct problems: a question of optimisation in the production cycle, and an issue of awareness on the consumption end. Within this understanding, food loss can be tackled by creating better infrastructure in supply chains, and on the other hand, improving consumer awareness and household management. A recent study found that up to 600 tonnes of food waste produced in the retail and consumer sector could be prevented, with a corresponding saving of up to $260 billion annually (Hegnsholt et al. 2018). While this may be the case, this separation between intentional and unintentional wasting does not account for the obsolescence of food loss generated as part of the normal production cycles of commercial food. In the industrial process, edible products go through cycles of becoming and unbecoming food. In other words, the conditions under which things become food (Blake 2019; Nyman 2019) and the ways edibility is maintained (Morrow 2018; Weymes and Davies 2019) are a relational process shaped by rules and regulations as much as degradation caused by human and non-human actors (Davies and Evans 2019; Midgley 2014). Here I would like to articulate the particular ontology of commercial food through the lens of time. Commercial food is defined by a series of time-bound processes. The conditions of how and when things become defined as food, surplus and waste (and what is then done with them) are all bound by temporal enclosures. In the commercial food supply chain, edible materials become viable food products only if they do what it says on the tin. This means having the right content in the right amount that matches the label on the packaging, calculated during normal speed of production. “Food” in this context comprises not just the edible material, but also the packaging and the production process, including machinery and labour, branding and food regulations (Blake 2019). For example, during the manufacturing process, machines need to reach a certain speed of calibrated flow; when a part of the process is faulty or when recipes or product line changes, machines continue to operate as it is more resource-intensive to reset. The interim outputs are redirected to waste, which, while edible, is not sellable

Just-in-time food rescue  25 as it does not meet industry standards (Blake 2018). Packaging is also part of the becoming of food: quality and appearance are maintained often by modifying the atmosphere inside the packaging, literally trapping matter in time (see also Tam and Hall 2019). Much of the debate around packaging protocols such as best-before dates also revolves around what is edible but not commercially viable. Best-before dates have their roots in the 1970s, when the British supermarket chain Marks and Spencer introduced the sell-by date as a stock control aid to retailers to ensure a certain turnover of goods (Blythman 2015). Today it is used to indicate the shelf life of a product, a manufacturer’s guarantee to ensure the appearance and texture of the food. Edibility is not part of that concern but consumer confusion around the topic is nonetheless a significant source of waste (Li and Leung 2017; Rosengren 2017; Sawa 2019). In trying to alleviate the issue of food waste, there is first a need to distinguish between the different types of waste and where, when and how they are produced. By articulating the becoming and unbecoming of food, I am highlighting the conditions of possibility generated within the temporal ontology of commercial foods. Here, edibility is not necessarily valued as the intrinsic quality of food. Products that are edible but classified as commercially nonviable—which is still food but treated as waste—are lost not because of negligence or lack of optimisation, but because a system that is geared around efficiency and viability in fact produces them as waste. In a profit-driven production line where time is of the essence, the most efficient way of using money, labour and food resources is to waste.

Food rescue: tackling temporal enclosures Food that is fit for consumption but not commercially viable is considered surplus—tolerated losses within the normal production cycle, which occur as a result of faulty or excess production during manufacturing. At the retail stage, overstocking, slow sales or unsold goods that are too close to their end-of-life cycle are also written off as loss. It has been observed that many retailers destroy surpluses at the end of the day by pouring bleach or other contaminants onto the food itself, rendering it inedible and unsalvageable (Lo 2012). This intentional (albeit not publicly conspicuous) destruction serves to maintain the value of commercial products. As a shop manager from a local supermarket chain in Hong Kong explained to me, “If people can come take it for free, then who would pay full price for our products?” Shop staff who are generally tasked with the destruction of food justify the act by saying, “We don’t want people to eat the food and get sick. This [pouring bleach] would discourage them [from dumpster diving].” Maintaining optimum pricing of the product or avoiding liability are common responses when retailers are questioned about such practices. The act of wilfully destroying food can be understood as a result of proprietorship. Claiming ownership, whether via appropriation through

26  Daisy Tam pollution (Serres 2011), or through accumulation and stockpiling, constructs enclosures by restricting access. Although these acts of privatisation are intended to preserve and safeguard food, in fact they contribute directly to the decay of edible produce. Waste that occurs under such circumstances is not so much a squandering of resources as an expenditure, one that results from enclosure and containment (see also Tam et al. 2016). In the context of food as a carrier for potential profit (Clapp 2014), it also demonstrates the enclosure as the continuous characteristic of capital logic (De Angelis 2004). Food rescue, or surplus food distribution, shifts food away from its commoditised ontological state. Donating extends the life cycle of surplus food by facilitating its circulation, allowing its use value as sustenance to continue in alternative economies. Donating and sharing food interrupts the logic of capital accumulation through non-market forms of exchange and is considered by some a challenge to the market economy (Santala and McGuirk 2019). Food rescue is understood as “the practice of safely diverting edible food that would otherwise go into waste disposal systems and distributing it to those in need—the food insecure” (Reynolds, Piantadosi and Boland 2015, 4708). This is often regarded as a win-win-win solution—contributing positively to environmental protection and improving food security for the socially vulnerable while being economically beneficial. The redistribution of food is considered by some to be a form of food sharing (Davies and Evans 2019; Davies and Legg 2018; Edwards and Davies 2018). This scholarship often traces food sharing as one of the oldest forms of collaborative behaviour (Jones 2007). Indeed, sharing parts of a meal together is a form of social practice that creates and cements social relationships (Kaplan and Gurven 2005), understood by anthropologists and sociologists as playing an important role in shaping human history and cooperative psychology. As a communal act, it is seen to promote social cohesion and intensify social relationships (Belk 2010; Kennedy 2016; Schor 1999). When framed within an alternative economy discourse, it is positioned as a challenge to competitive and profit-driven economic structures (Frenken and Schor 2017; Friedman 2013; Heinrichs 2013). By democratising access to services and goods, sharing is also credited with improving social equality and social justice (Botsman and Rogers 2010; McLaren and Agyeman 2015). Finally, it is also seen to contribute positively to reducing waste by decreasing consumption and by promoting recycling, reuse and redistribution of assets (Agyeman 2013; Rifkin 2014). With the rise of information and communications technology (ICT), digitally enabled forms of food sharing have proliferated in the past decade and the landscape is ever-changing (Davies et al. 2017). ICT has transformed the status quo by enabling information to reach large numbers of people outside of immediate geographical networks, reshaping practices by bypassing traditional enclosures such as shops and supermarket chains, which improves access to services and goods, and maximising underutilised

Just-in-time food rescue  27 resources. The burgeoning academic literature that examines ICT-mediated food rescue remains limited, however, with case studies mainly emerging from the Minority World (Australia, U.S., Europe). Most studies offer descriptions of current practices (Ciaghi and Villafiorta 2016; Corbo and Fraticelli 2015) and investigate the environmental and socio-economic drivers and impacts of food rescue (Davies and Legg 2018; Weymes and Davies 2018). Following the traditional inquiry of food rescue, the majority of case studies present viewpoints from social justice, food politics or food security points of view. Due to the nature of food rescue, most case studies are site-specific in order to account for local practices and governance. ICTenabled food sharing covers a very wide range of initiatives—from community mapping for example, surplus harvests; end-of-day flash sales; meal sharing to community fridges; employing various models of community organisation, charity to social ventures and for-profit models. Within the specific realm of surplus food distribution, there are also different ways of employing ICT. Some initiatives offer a marketplace that matches donors to beneficiaries or operate as collection points that aggregate and distribute surplus food, for example, food banks; others deliver direct services, running soup kitchens or meal deliveries. ICT-enabled models problematise the concept of sharing: within the digital world, networked sharing is considered a form of communication rather than a cultural practice. Sharing on social media, for example, could take on meanings of participation, content production, consumption and scaled distribution (Kennedy 2016). As an economic term, sharing is also problematic when used in an indistinct manner to refer to the array of online platforms that match supply and demand, particularly in accommodation and transportation. These platforms, which employ the language of sharing but do not involve collaboration, further confuse what sharing means. Botsman (2015) defines the sharing economy as “an economic system based on sharing underused assets or services, for free or for a fee, directly from individuals.” The appropriation of positive values that are associated with generosity and community has been critically challenged because this kind of digitally mediated sharing economy effectively transforms sharing and its associated values into commodified experiences (Belk 2010; Cheng 2016; Holloway 2010; Rifkin 2000). O’Regan and Choe (2017) argue that Airbnb uses sharing as the utopic front to put forward socio-­ ideological motifs and mobilises the language of collaboration, intimacy and relationship building to legitimise its business model, which ultimately commodifies social relationships. The blurring between what is private and what is public also provokes questions of regulation and protection (van Dijk 2013). The sharing angle of the on-demand transport service Uber has similarly been tarnished by lawsuits filed against worker exploitation. The labour force that supports the dark side of the sharing economy extends the hyper-precarisation of workers who are increasingly disposable and less protected (Scholz 2016).

28  Daisy Tam The next section looks at the food rescue practices in the city of Hong Kong and in particular the development of Breadline, a web application that facilitates the rescue of surplus bread. Breadline is ICT-enabled, but I do not wish to put it forward as an example of a food sharing initiative, but rather as a logistical tool that focuses on the temporal challenges presented by end-of-life goods. In this context, the web application borrows notions from the sharing economy and carries certain characteristics of sharing platforms in that it is efficiency-seeking, relies on internet technologies to coordinate access, attends to the latent capacity of underutilised resources, opens up institutional barriers and decentralises information to facilitate circulation. However, it should be noted that Breadline is developed as a research tool and as such does not have a business model.

Breadline Hong Kong exemplifies much of the food waste problem faced globally. As a fully urbanised, high-income city, Hong Kong spends 5.26 per cent of its GDP on importing food from all across the world. Food waste is a pressing issue; it is the single-largest category of municipal solid waste, estimated at 3,600 tonnes a day (the weight of 250 double-decker buses), and it is pressuring the city’s near-saturated landfill sites (HK Environment Bureau 2014). At the same time, Hong Kong is a developed economy with one of the highest GINI coefficients; 1.3 million of the wealthy city’s population is poor: amongst the 20 per cent of the population who live on the poverty line (Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 2018, viii, 19), one in three elderly and one in four children face food insecurity, without adequate nutrition to sustain an active and healthy life (HK Census and Statistics 2017). As with global narratives that surround food rescue, forms of food redistribution are highlighted as key strategies for environmental protection as well as poverty alleviation. Despite positive responses to food rescue by the government, academic research has typically adopted a more critical approach. Poppendieck (1998) and Heldke (2009), for example, have noted the limitations of the right-to-food model adopted by charities, which tends to displace systemic issues of social equity. Van der Horst, Pascucci and Bol (2014), Vlaholias et al. (2015) and Garthwaite (2016), amongst others, document feelings of shame, noting that social othering adds to the costs of human dignity when one is at the receiving end of charity. Aside from this, there is also the practical challenge of how effective food rescue operations are beyond the optimistic claims. Studies have shown common challenges include food rescue’s difficulties in providing nutritionally sound food (Wilson, Szwed and Renzaho 2012); lack of consumer acceptance of food; inefficient operational logistics; and instability with supply and distribution (Caraher and Cavicchi 2014). Attending to the specificities of the “leftover” nature of surplus food, food rescue offers an interesting logistical challenge. Food rescue has been

Just-in-time food rescue  29 described as a “random” process (Nair, Rashidi and Dixit 2017) whose functioning depends on variables of quantity, time and place. It is often difficult to predict when and where food becomes available, and even with regular donations from certain outlets, the volume can never be guaranteed. Surpluses also have a limited time window before they go to waste; “rescue” is indeed the temporal challenge of getting to the food in time. The uncertainty of what is available also presents a challenge for organisations to plan for the equitable distribution of recovered food, as they must operate with little information prior to collection. A forecasting model that could be used for operational decisions has yet to be seen. In terms of governance, Hong Kong does not have in place the Good Samaritan Law, which exempts food donors from civil and criminal liability if they donate food in good faith to non-profit organisations (The Law Reform Commission 2017a, 2017b). The organised food rescue operations in Hong Kong are undertaken largely by charities, which collect food from a selection of retail outlets, including supermarkets, hotels and canteens and local wet markets, as well as from individual ad hoc events such as banquets. These organisations could be largely separated into local districtbased and city-wide operations. For the purpose of this chapter, the focus is on city-wide operations, and the point to note here is that within the ecology of surplus food distribution, rules and regulations from commercial chains still hold sway, where protocols are used to ensure food safety and to avoid liability issues for donors and charities. It is also important to delineate these commercial operations from food (commercial and noncommercial) that is redistributed in other, more informal sites, where personal judgements of edibility could be utilised. In the following case study, I will focus on the end-of-day surplus from a major bakery chain in Hong Kong. Bread is part of the modern local diet, and as a low-risk and packaged food item it can be collected by volunteers and redistributed as part of breakfast programmes. Indeed, most of the local charities collect bread as part of their purview. However, to collect surpluses from over 300 bakeries located in disparate locations within a limited time window is a logistical challenge. Local charities like Feeding Hong Kong and FoodLink recruit volunteers to collect from designated shops. Given the restricted time window, most volunteers would be able to collect from two to three bakeries located near each other, but there is no guarantee of the amount of bread that is left over and available for donation. One charity reported that for every evening of the collection, around 20 to 30 per cent of the shops sell out. The research project I have developed with the bread donation programme FoodLink takes on the logistical challenge of providing just-in-time food rescue. Key to a successful rescue is ensuring that the information about the availability and location of surpluses reaches volunteers in time. Given the time-sensitive nature of both data and food, as well as the high adoption rate of mobile technology in the city, a digital platform has been

30  Daisy Tam identified as the most appropriate tool to coordinate between donors, volunteers and charities. The web application named Breadline is a Free Open Source Software platform that coordinates food rescue in real time across the city. By enabling bakery staff to share information on the approximate amount of bread available an hour before closing, the application allows volunteers to respond to the fluctuating spatial distribution of surplus food more efficiently. This enables a more effective use of the volunteers’ time and resources, allowing bakeries and charities to generate more impact. The design of Breadline is premised on the idea of opening the enclosures that surround food rescue, which applies to the food itself but also to the data surrounding the food. Previously, only shop staff had knowledge about stock availability but by giving tacit knowledge to a data body, the platform allows bakeries to share information directly with volunteers in real time. This enables volunteers to respond in an agile manner to the differential availabilities of surplus food. Given the time sensitivities of food rescue, data has also been identified as a perishable item in this scenario. During the pilot phase, Breadline has demonstrated that it is four times more volunteer efficient than previous collection schedules, as it enables volunteers to avoid empty runs and capitalise on last-minute opportunities. In another manner of description, Breadline is a platform that crowdsources logistics for food rescue. Crowdsourcing can be understood as a process whereby communities work together by eliciting contributions and compiling them to serve a specific purpose. It has been successfully deployed for a range of purposes such as knowledge gathering and map creation, for example, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. These successful cases have demonstrated that given the right conditions, individuals could work together collectively and achieve a result whose sum is bigger than its parts. The design of Breadline is premised on a similar idea; the challenge, however, is to extend crowdsourcing beyond the realm of digital data and into the movement of physical goods. While many other food rescue platforms utilise the distributive capacity of ICT technologies, most are focused on collecting, verifying and broadcasting information about surplus food. Breadline tries to extend the capacity of the digital platform by allowing volunteers to act on the information—changing their routes based on real-time information while on the run. Breadline has been developed as a digital tool to manage crowd-based distribution, collection, transportation and delivery of goods for public consumption that tests the feasibility of orchestrating on-the-ground movements in real time. The crowd is noise; undifferentiated and distracting, it jams and it congests. But it can also be tuned into, tapped as a resource to provide just-intime food rescue. Hong Kong is a dense city, with a high concentration of foot traffic, especially in shopping malls and other commercial areas. At the same time, recruiting volunteers to collect bread is a common challenge for non-governmental organisations (NGOs). One charity reported that fewer

Just-in-time food rescue  31 than 1 per cent of their volunteers return to continue with the work, making it a labour-intensive process with low return on time investment. This could also be partially attributed to compassion fatigue, with many social and environmental issues competing for attention, but it could also simply be that volunteers are short on time. Many reported that they found the event meaningful, but that their personal schedules do not allow for it, with their participation frequently restricted to the sanctioned time of their company’s corporate social responsibility events. Breadline therefore tries to harness the power of the crowd by tapping into the downtime of volunteers. During interviews with existing food rescue operators, many have observed that daily commutes to and from work offer ample opportunities for pick-ups; if volunteers could collect bread “on the way” it would greatly reduce their time commitment. In another possible scenario, volunteering could also happen on a more ad hoc basis; a delayed appointment, for example, could offer 30 minutes of idle time to collect available surpluses nearby even if volunteers have not signed up previously.

Conclusion The web application Breadline attends to the temporal and spatial challenges of rescuing commercial surpluses. By understanding waste as something produced out of temporal enclosures, the design of the platform focuses on facilitating circulation—both of information and of food. Preliminary results have shown a more agile response by improving access to information, making it four times more volunteer efficient. Academic scholarship has conventionally placed food redistribution within the arena of food sharing, focusing on the transformational qualities of conviviality, while also questioning the power structures that go behind such sharing. However, by attending to the temporalities of food rescue, this chapter offers a new, alternative perspective by understanding digital platforms such as Breadline as a logistical solution that warrants both conceptual and practical lines of inquiry.

Acknowledgements The author received funding from the Fulbright Program as part of her Senior Scholar Award. The project was also supported by a Collective Intelligence Grant from the innovation foundation U.K. Nesta.

References Agyeman, Julian. 2013. Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice. London: Zed Books. Belk, Russell. 2010. “Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (5): 715–34. https:// doi.org/10.1086/612649.

32  Daisy Tam Blake, Megan. 2018. “Enormous Amounts of Food are Wasted during Manufacturing—Here’s Where it Occurs.” The Conversation, 5 September 2018. https://the conversation.com/enormous-amounts-of-food-are-wasted-during-manufacturingheres-where-it-occurs-102310. Blake, Megan. 2019. “The Multiple Ontologies of Surplus Food.” Europe Now, 7 May 2019. www.europenowjournal.org/2019/05/06/the-multiple-ontologies-ofsurplus-food/. Blythman, Joanna. 2015. “Why Supermarkets’ Love of Use-by Dates Leads to Food Waste.” Guardian [Online], 4 November 2015. www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2015/nov/04/supermarkets-use-by-dates-food-waste. Botsman, Rachel. 2015. “Defining the Sharing Economy: What is Collaborative Consumption—And What Isn’t?” Fast Company, 27 May 2015. www.fastcompany. com/3046119/defining-the-sharing-economy-what-is-collaborative-consumption-andwhat-isnt. Botsman, Rachel and Roo Rogers. 2010. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Business. Caraher, Martin and Alessio Cavicchi. 2014. “Old Crises on New Plates or Old Plates for a New Crises? [sic] Food Banks and Food Insecurity.” British Food Journal 116 (9): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-08-2014-0285. Cheng, M. 2016. “Sharing Economy: A Review and Agenda for Future Research.” International Journal of Hospitality Management, 57: 60–70. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2016.06.003. Ciaghi, Aaron and Adolfo Villafiorta. 2016. “Beyond Food Sharing: Supporting Food Waste Reduction with ICTs.” 2016 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2), Trento, Italy: 1–6. http://doi.10.1109/ISC2.2016.7580874. Clapp, Jennifer. 2014. “Financialization, Distance and Global Food Politics.” Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (5): 797–814. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.875536. Corbo, Chiara and Fabio Fraticelli. 2015. “The Use of Web-Based Technology as an Emerging Option for Food Waste and Food Poverty.” In Envisioning a Future without Food Waste and Food Poverty: Societal Challenges, edited by Leire Escajedo San-Epifanio and Mertxe De Renobales Scheifler. The Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 133–42. Davies, Anna and David Evans. 2019. “Urban Food Sharing: Emerging Geographies of Production, Consumption and Exchange.” Geoforum 99 (December 2018): 154–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.015. Davies, Anna R. and Robert Legg. 2018. “Fare Sharing: Interrogating the Nexus of ICT, Urban Food Sharing, and Sustainability.” Food, Culture and Society 21 (2): 233–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2018.1427924. Davies, Anna R., Robert Legg, Ferne Edwards, Brigida Marovelli, Oona Morrow, Monika Rut and Marion Weymes. 2017. “Making Visible: Interrogating the Performance of Food Sharing across 100 Urban Areas.” Geoforum 86 (September): 136–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.09.007. De Angelis, Massimo. 2004. “Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character.” Historical Materialism 12 (2): 57–87. https://doi.org/10.1163/ 1569206041551609. Douglas, Mary. 2001. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis e-Library. Edwards, Ferne and Anna R. Davies. 2018. “Connective Consumptions: Mapping Melbourne’s Food Sharing Ecosystem.” Urban Policy and Research 36 (4): 476–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/08111146.2018.1476231.

Just-in-time food rescue  33 Evans, David. 2014. Food Waste. London: Bloomsbury. FAO, 2013. Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources. Summary Report. Rome. www.fao.org/3/i3347e/i3347e.pdf. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2018. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018: Building Climate Resilience for Food Security and Nutrition. Rome: FAO. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2014.2300145. Frenken, Koen and Juliet Schor. 2017. “Putting the Sharing Economy into Perspective.” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 23: 3–10. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.eist.2017.01.003. Friedman, Thomas. 2013. “Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy.’ ” New York Times [Online], 20 July 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedmanwelcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html. Garthwaite, Kayleigh. 2016. “Stigma, Shame and ‘People Like Us’: An Ethnographic Study of Foodbank Use in the U.K.” Journal of Poverty and Social Justice 24 (3): 277–89. https://doi.org/10.1332/175982716X14721954314922. Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Office of the ­Government Economist Financial Secretary’s Office, Census and Statistics Department. 2018. Hong Kong Poverty Situation Report 2017, November 2018. www.statistics.gov.hk/pub/B9XX0005E2017AN17E0100.pdf. Hawkins, Gay. 2006. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Hegnsholt, Esben, Shalini Unnikrishnan, Matias Pollmann-Larsen, Bjorg Askelsdottir and Marine Gerard. 2018. “Tackling the 1.6-Billion-Ton Food Loss and Waste Crisis.” Boston Consulting Group. 20 August 2018. www.bcg.com/publications/2018/ tackling-1.6-billion-ton-food-loss-and-waste-crisis.aspx. Heinrichs, Harald. 2013. “Sharing Economy: A Potential New Pathway to Sustainability.” GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 22 (4): 228–31. https:// doi.org/10.14512/gaia.22.4.5. Heldke, Lisa. 2009. “Food Security: Three Conceptions of Access—Charity, Rights and Coresponsibility.” In Critical Food Issues: Problems and State-of-the-Art Solutions vol. 2, edited by Lynn Walter and Laurel E. Phoenix. Santa Barbara: Praeger. HKSAR Environment Bureau. 2014. “A Food Waste & Yard Waste Plan for Hong Kong 2014–2022.” Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto. Hoornweg, Daniel and Perinaz Bhada-Tata. 2012. What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management. Urban Development Series; Knowledge Papers no. 15. Washington, DC: World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17388. Jones, Martin. 2007. Feast: Why Humans Share Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaplan, Hillard and Michael Gurven. 2005. “The Natural History of Human Food Sharing and Cooperation: A Review and a New Multi-Individual Approach to the Negotiation of Norms.” In Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life, edited by Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Fehr Ernst. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 75–113. Kennedy, Jenny. 2016. “Conceptual Boundaries of Sharing.” Information Communication and Society 19 (4): 461–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015. 1046894. Li, Jade and Megan Leung. 2017. “Don’t Trust the Label: Cautious Best-before Dates Cause Unnecessary Food Waste.” Hong Kong Free Press, 8 April 2017.

34  Daisy Tam www.hongkongfp.com/2017/04/08/dont-trust-label-cautious-best-dates-causeunnecessary-food-waste/. Lipinski, Brian, Craig Hanson, Richard Waite, Tim Searchinger, James Lomax and Lisa Kitinoja. 2013. Reducing Food Loss and Waste. Working Paper, Installment 2 of Creating a Sustainable Food Future. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. www.worldresourcesreport.org. Lo, Wei. 2012. “Supermarkets Dumping 29 Tonnes of Food a Day.” South China Morning Post [Online], 28 May 2012. www.scmp.com/article/1002240/supermarketsdumping-29-tonnes-food-day. Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781912281008. McLaren, Duncan and Julian Agyeman. 2015. Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Midgley, Jane L. 2014. “The Logics of Surplus Food Redistribution.” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 57 (12): 1872–92. Mol, Annemarie. 1999. “Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions.” The Sociological Review 47: 74–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1999.tb03483.x. Morrow, Oona. 2018. “Sharing Food and Risk in Berlin’s Urban Food Commons.” Geoforum 99: 202–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.003. Nair, Divya J., Taha Hossein Rashidi and Vinayak V. Dixit. 2017. “Estimating Surplus Food Supply for Food Rescue and Delivery Operations.” Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 57: 73–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2016.09.004. Nyman, Marcus. 2019. “Food, Meaning-Making and Ontological Uncertainty: Exploring ‘Urban Foraging’ and Productive Landscapes in London.” Geoforum 99: 170–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.10.009. O’Regan, Michael and Jaeyeon Choe. 2017. “Airbnb and Cultural Capitalism: Enclosure and Control within the Sharing Economy.” Anatolia 28 (2): 163–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2017.1283634. Poppendieck, Janet. 1998. “Want Amid Plenty: From Hunger to Inequality.” Monthly Review 50 (3): 125–36. Reynolds, Christian John, Julia Piantadosi and John Boland. 2015. “Rescuing Food from the Organics Waste Stream to Feed the Food Insecure: An Economic and Environmental Assessment of Australian Food Rescue Operations Using Environmentally Extended Waste Input-Output Analysis.” Sustainability (Switzerland) 7 (4): 4707–26. https://doi.org/10.3390/su7044707. Rifkin, Jeremy. 2000. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam. Rifkin, Jeremy. 2014. The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosengren, Cole. 2017. “California Governor Signs New Date Label Bill to Reduce Food Waste, Waste Dive” [online], 16 October 2017. www.wastedive.com/news/ update- california-governor-signs-new-date-label-bill-to-reduce-food-waste/506956/. Santala, Inka and Pauline McGuirk. 2019. “Sharing Cities: Creating Space and Practice for New Urban Agency, Capacities and Subjectivities.” Community Development 00 (00): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/15575330.2019.1642928. Sawa, Dale Berning. 2019. “The Truth about Expired Food: How Best-before Dates Create a Waste Mountain.” Guardian, 17 April 2019. www.theguardian.com/ food/2019/apr/17/the-truth-about-expired-food-how-best-before-dates-create-awaste-mountain.

Just-in-time food rescue  35 Scanlan, John. 2005. On Garbage. London: Reaktion Books. Scholz, Trebor. 2016. Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Cambridge: Polity. Schor, Juliet B. 1999. “The New Politics of Consumption.” The Boston Review, 1 June 1999. http://bostonreview.net/forum/juliet-b-schor-new-politics-consumption. Serres, Michel. 2011. Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Tam, Daisy and Benjamin Hall. 2019. “The Circus of Inconspicuisine: A Science Fiction Short about the Future of Food.” Social Paper 3. http://socialpaper. xintiandi.com/#/issue3. Tam, Daisy, Benjamin Hall, Tomas Holderness and Melissa Cate Christ. 2016. “Keeping It Fresh: Crowd-Sourced Modes of Food Preservation.” Harvard Design Magazine 43, Fall/Winter. www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/43. The Law Reform Commission. 2017a. “The Emergence of the Good Samaritan Food Donation Law in the United States.” 8. Hong Kong. www.hkreform.gov. hk/en/docs/essay2017_no_8.pdf. The Law Reform Commission, 2017b. “Should Hong Kong Introduce a Good Samaritan Law.” 22. Hong Kong. www.hkreform.gov.hk/en/docs/essay2017_no_22.pdf. Thompson, Michael. 1979. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. UNEP, 2013. City-Level Decoupling: Urban Resource Flows and the Governance of Infrastructure Transitions. Summary for Policy Makers. Key authors: Mark Swilling, Blake Robinson, Simon Marvin and Mike Hodson. www.resourcepanel.org/sites/default/ files/documents/document/media/city-level_decoupling_summary_english.pdf. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Dynamics. 2019. “World Population Prospects 2019.” Highlights (ST/ESA/SER.A/423). https://population.un.org/wpp/. van der Horst, Hilje, Stefano Pascucci and Wilma Bol. 2014. “The ‘Dark Side’ of Food Banks? Exploring Emotional Responses of Food Bank Receivers in the Netherlands.” British Food Journal 116 (9): 1506–20. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ02-2014-0081. van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vlaholias, Elisha, Kirrilly Thompson, Danielle Every and Drew Dawson. 2015. “Charity Starts … at Work? Conceptual Foundations for Research with Businesses that Donate to Food Redistribution Organisations.” Sustainability (Switzerland) 7 (6): 7997–8021. https://doi.org/10.3390/su7067997. Wilson, A., N. Szwed and A. Renzaho. 2012. “Developing Nutrition Guidelines for Recycled Food to Improve Food Security Among Homeless, Asylum Seekers, and Refugees in Victoria, Australia.” Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition 7 (2–3): 239–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/19320248.2012.704663.

2 Fridges and food waste An ethnography of freshness Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt

What do we know about fridges? Scholars have made sense of fridges in terms of the gendered dynamics of household labour, changing diet, convenience and freshness. Scholarship on conceptions of freshness reminds us how refrigeration responds to public health conventions and political concerns around food safety and nutrition. We learn that “fresh” has become an almost unquestionably positive food quality through cultural connections with nutrients, vitamins, purity and the “natural.” Refrigeration has transformed the understanding of freshness from “just picked” to one that is bound up in bestbefore-dates and the pursuit of healthy eating (Friedberg 2009). But as Evans (2012, 1132) argues, fridges “very often operate as coffins of decay” where food is left to rot and decompose. This chapter looks at how the fridge helps constitute our domestic everyday life through the routines and rhythms of food purchasing, eating and disposal. The rhythms of refrigeration, we argue, are integral to how food is categorised as waste, through the interdependency of time and space. Thinking past notions of food waste as tied to attitudes and choice, we argue that closer attention to the rhythms that constitute the temporalities and spatialities of the house-ashome is a better way of understanding how food becomes waste. To illustrate our argument, the chapter draws on an ethnographic study of Papua New Guinean (PNG) migrants living in Australia. As they move between their “home” and “new” countries, these migrants bring to the fore similarities and differences as to how the rhythms of refrigeration sustain the categories of food waste and domestic places.

Fridges, freshness and food waste Freshness is an excellent example of Foucault’s (2007) concept of ­governmentality—that is, how people are guided in what food is edible, alongside what foods are understood as “good” and “bad” for one’s health. How the food industry and the state define freshness through best-before dates is an example of the ways people think about themselves as responsible consumers, through how they classify food as healthy to eat or as unhealthy, suitable only to be consigned to a disposal stream.

Fridges and food waste  37 Alongside conversations of governmentality, however, social scientists have positioned refrigerators as non-human actors which determine human behaviours and practices in concrete ways. Social practice theory reminds us that human interactions with fridges respond not only to the political coercion of discourses but also to the materiality of refrigeration and embodied skills. This literature helps us understand how refrigeration, by slowing the process of decay, has shrunk distance, enabling the consumption of out-of-season perishable foods from faraway locales. This has come at significant environmental cost, of course, as fridges have been complicit in ozone depletion, high energy consumption and—most relevant to this chapter—increased food waste. Refrigerators open a “gap in disposal” (Evans 2012; 2014, 63), where food that has become surplus has the potential for future use (and thus cannot be yet categorised as waste) but in reality is often left to decay, becoming inedible and therefore directed to the bin. This gap can alleviate a sense of guilt about producing food waste. Despite the idea that fridges prolong freshness and thus ostensibly reduce waste, the bulk of foods that become categorised as “inedible” are vegetables and fruit that have entered this gap (Kaipia, Dukovska-Popovska and Loikkanen 2013). A consideration of gaps turns our attention to the emotional and embodied factors that help reproduce the demarcations of categories between food and waste. Waitt and Phillips (2016) examine the visceral and embodied politics of how people categorise certain refrigerated food items as being waste or not. Through this switch in perspective we can understand that freshness is assembled as much from the layout and material design of the fridge and the smell and touch of food as it is from ideas of the natural, purity and healthiness. Thinking of “freshness” as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) brings to the fore the multiple rhythms of refrigeration to help us understand the temporalities and spatialities of how food becomes waste. It also attends to the non-human to better understand the relationship between temporalities and waste. To illustrate this argument, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “refrain” (1987, 310–50) to argue that the rhythms that constitute what we term the “preservation assemblage” are integral to understanding the constitution of fresh food. Rhythms do so by generating a liveable order and keeping chaos at bay by directing inedible food to conduits of disposal. We illustrate how thinking through the refrain highlights the capitalist and communal rhythms of participants’ lives in PNG and Australia. The refrain turns to fridges not only as symbols of modernity and health, but as integral to the multiple rhythms that help sustain the temporalities and spatialities of everyday life to understand how food does or does not become waste. The notion of the preservation assemblage views refrigeration as an uncertain play of relations between human and non-human entities. Importantly, the assemblage comprises ongoing processes of assembling and

38  Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt reconfiguration. An assemblage is therefore an “arrangement … of heterogenous elements” (Nail 2017, 22) that work together and alongside each other to produce a “working order.” At the same time, understanding preservation as an assemblage suggests it is not fixed or static, but fluid and ever-changing as these elements shift over time and space. These elements may be material (e.g., physically embodied) or expressive (e.g., intangible or ideological) (Buchanan 2015). When conceived as an assemblage, “preservation” and hence “freshness” is produced by the ways in which material objects (such as the fridge, human and non-human bodies and waste itself) and ideas (notions of freshness and temporality etc.) intersect and transmit affect to one another. The notion of “preservation assemblage” invites us to think about how food waste may be performed in different ways rather than as something already made. The concept of preservation assemblage underscores two aspects of food becoming waste. First, it highlights the varied socio-material relations that make food waste possible in the first place. Second, it illustrates how food waste is a relational process that, through the body’s interactions with the world, increases or decreases people’s capacities to act (Shouse 2005). Rhythm is a key element of an assemblage as different “refrains” come together to provide organisation and repetition: rhythm “brings a minimum of livable order to a situation in which chaos beckons” (Grosz 2008, 52). As individuals enter a kitchen, for example, they enter a preservation assemblage that is comprised of specific refrains of disposal and storage with their expressive (rules, ideas, gestures, emotions and affect) and material elements. Fridges have their own specialised refrains, and the challenge is how to sustain rhythmic consistency that prevents food from falling into the category of “waste.” To conceive how the refrain operates to sustain a liveable order from chaos, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss three interrelated processes. The first is how rhythms and repetitions create a sense of familiarity, stability and comfort within the chaos of the world. The second is that they do so by ordered times and spaces that are marked out from chaos. The rhythms of storage, arrangement and removal of food items from a fridge may be understood as ways by which participants construct their home territory. The refrain in our case is how the kitchen becomes the participant’s home in which a domestic life is built. The third process is that, when the kitchen is secured as a home, possibilities arise to take risks by letting other people and things into the territory. When this happens, individuals are potentially exposed to the forces of chaos. While most understandings of time and space may seem fixed, repetition and the refrain focus on how they are always open to change. Forces of chaos may emerge when storage regulations that are designed to constitute food as safe are broken. In other instances, forces of chaos may emerge from the accumulative wear and tear of domesticity; for example, from leaving the fridge door open. In short, the refrain is how rhythm provides

Fridges and food waste  39 the sensed liveable combination of time and space (timespace) that gives order amid the chaos of the everyday. Thus, for individuals who wish to occupy the same space, it becomes necessary to pick up or reproduce the rhythms that constitute the timespace. At the same time, the introduction of material or social elements that disrupt these rhythms may work to open up or destabilise the sensed time and space of an assemblage. The refrain is helpful in considering the different temporalities and spatialities of food waste by illuminating the rhythms of food preservation that feature the social and material arrangements that comprise the fridge.

Doing fridge research with Pacific Islanders Fridges are “good to think with,” just as much as the food they store and preserve (Lévi-Strauss 1963). Attending to the everyday refrigeration practices of participants in PNG and Australia, the notion of the preservation assemblage allows us to consider food waste as relational and a more-thanhuman achievement and has the potential to encourage people to think about waste in new and innovative ways. Through the experiences of PNG migrants living in Australia, the chapter illustrates the value of evaluating how items categorised as food waste are assembled by participants. This chapter draws on research that is embedded in a larger project on sustainability, food practices, migration and environmental knowledge (Head, Klocker and Aguirre-Bielschowsky 2019; Klocker and Head 2013). The project asks, “What insights on sustainability do migrants from the Majority World offer the Minority World?” It addresses a significant lacuna in the environmental literature in the Minority World that rarely incorporates the experiences or knowledges of diverse ethnic communities from the Majority World. Understanding the ways in which migrants perform domesticity may offer insights into expectations and norms that differ from those in the Minority World. The research presented here is from a sub-project that focused specifically on food procurement, preservation and disposal, the aim of which was to offer a more nuanced account of food waste. Food waste is a challenge of the Minority World. The project design involved a sensory ethnography that was inspired by talanoa, a research methodology from Polynesia that takes a non-linear approach to research and prioritises relationship building (Vaioleti 2013/14). A range of qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews, participant photography and kitchen visits was employed to better understand how food became categorised as inedible. Twelve migrants from PNG who were now living in either Australia or New Zealand participated in the project. Participants were primarily temporary migrants, holding a student visa and present in Australia for the purpose of pursuing university education. Relatively socio-economically advantaged individuals consented to participate. They arrived having worked in Port Moresby (the capital of PNG) in a range of industries (including education,

40  Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt finance and nursing) and had completed secondary schooling in PNG. This chapter focuses on two participants who lived in the small regional city of Wollongong, Australia, whose experiences with the fridge illustrate well how refrains and rhythms shape how food becomes waste. Each participant from the wider group spoke about their experiences of practising subsistence agriculture in their home villages in PNG. Most participants attested that fridges are a rarity in everyday life in PNG. They are expensive and outside the financial reach of many Papua New Guineans who dwell far from urban economic centres and rely on subsistence farming. The remoteness of many PNG villages means that it is difficult, if not impossible, to bring fridges to these locations. Furthermore, villages can be very far from electricity utilities. The absence of the fridge and associated food temporalities were integral to how participants narrated their understanding of rural and remote PNG. The fridge was not part of everyday food practices in the participants’ home villages. Here they spoke of meat smoking and eating vegetables directly from the gardens. If a fridge was present in a village, participants recalled how sharing this appliance became integral to constituting the community. In PNG, food cultures, sharing and reciprocity extend to the fridge itself. One or more fridges for the immediate family, as is the norm in Australia, was uncommon. Reciprocity is an important part of how social relationships, community structures and economy are shaped. Food is a vital component of this reciprocity, and sharing it is central to how many Pacific peoples forge and maintain social relationships and a sense of community (Schieffelin 2005; Thomas 1991; Whitehead 2000). Because food is distributed among large family and social groups in PNG, there is little need to store leftovers or excess. The following two examples discuss how fridges have their own specialised refrains in assembling time and home in PNG and Australia. How participants interacted with the fridge, and its role in everyday life, reminds us that domestic food waste is not produced exclusively around notions of freshness, but also by the rhythms that sustain the temporalities and spatialities of home. Accordingly, assemblage thinking and the refrain allow us to consider how measures to reduce food waste need to take into account its fundamental role in how people make and inhabit home.

Rhythms, fridges and shared households in Port Moresby, PNG The shared fridge is the principal preservation assemblage in households comprised of multiple tenants in PNG’s urban centres. In Port Moresby, the rhythms of food purchasing, storing, organising, retrieving and eating are organised around the socio-material arrangement that constitutes a shared fridge. The rhythmic regularity around the fridge brought to the fore a liveable order in which chaos beckoned through the storage of food items categorised as “luxury” or “expensive.” The fridge thus became positioned

Fridges and food waste  41 as a potential threat to communal living in Port Moresby. For example, Lakari explains: We don’t even like storing food in a combined fridge [in Port Moresby] … Like some people, they don’t eat the type of food you eat … What I mean is, ah, you know, we come from my contemporary society where people have … a bigger part of the population is lower income than us, and if you put the chicken packet in there, or if you put your, your meat pack [pause] you know, they get offended. Ah, he’s eating a lot of frozen food and we’re eating a lot of tinned fish, you know. From Lakari’s example, it is apparent that the purchase and storage rhythms of food are central to how the domestic communal space is felt as secure and stable. Lakari evokes a strong desire to be the same as everyone else. Purchasing and storing frozen foods carries the risk of creating chaos through making social difference felt in terms of food choices. Ice creams and other foods categorised as luxuries are not stored in fridges because that would be “showing off wealth” to others who perhaps were not able to afford the same, as illustrated in Lakari’s words that “he’s eating a lot of ah frozen food foods, and we’re eating a lot of tinned fish.” The fridge becomes a crack in the territory of the communal home base, a force of deterritorialisation that allows too much chaos to enter and make living ­difficult in the shared household. Hence, Lakari points out that reterritorialising his food purchasing rhythms led to less food being stored in the communal fridge, a compromise he was willing to make in order to retain a communal home territory. In his words: In some instance [some people] can be show off like that. I don’t intend to be thinking me, like showing off or—other times it’s like, ah, um [pause] it’s good to be like everybody, you know. Where you are, you want to be like everybody and not to make yourself feel different or look different … in terms of what you are eating. Eating is very important for everybody so it’s good to be seen as you are eating like everybody eats. To be seen like, I mean for you to be seen like, ah, everybody. You’re eating to be seen like everybody eats. It’s more better than to be seen like, they’re eating low level food and you’re eating high level food and those kind of things. Lakari illustrates how food purchase and storage rhythms sustain the communal fridge in PNG shared households, and (re)produce a household that values collective rather than capitalist values. The rhythms of refrigeration enabled Lakari to sustain a shared communal time and space through avoiding the purchasing and storing of luxury food items in order to constitute the self as a non-extravagant, non-conspicuous consumer. Choices, then, about what foods were suitable for fridge storage were mobilised by

42  Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt his desire to conform and to be “seen like, ah, everybody” more than by a need to prolong freshness. Notions of collective time and space are embedded in the fridge’s material presence. Through the rhythms of food purchase and storage, the shared fridge generates feelings of being part of a collective in which individuals may flourish. In his desire to maintain this refrain, Lakari restricts his purchase of frozen foods. He suggests that, in order to reterritorialise the collective domestic space as calm, stable and secure, it is necessary to act as a humble and frugal subject. In contrast to the Minority World, to engage in rhythms of frozen food purchase, such as bulk buying, Lakari suggests, is to put the refrain under threat. The rhythms of daily shopping underpinned food preparation and storage. When asked if living in a shared household changes the food purchasing and storing rhythms and repetitions for him and his family, Lakari said: We will buy for the evening, straight from the [shop]. No need to store it … Yeah, we get straight from the supermarket, bring it, and then just cook straight here. In PNG, Lakari illustrates how the shared fridge is embedded in territorialising share households. The fridge is used to help situate individuals as part of a collective that prioritises equity. Thus, frozen foods operate as a chaotic force. Unlike the Western view of the fridge, Lakari illustrates the ways in which the fridge in PNG, alongside food purchasing and storage rhythms, is not only tied to the actions of preservation, but is also integral to establishing a communal space in which he can consider himself to be “at home.” For Lakari, making a home meant that less food would be stored in the fridge. In terms of food waste, Lakari has little need to store most of his food in the fridge. As a result, it doesn’t enter Evans’s “gap in disposal” and is less likely to become waste.

Rhythms, fridges and private households migrating to Australia Best-before dates are integral to Western food preservation refrains. They are examples of temporal units that equate clock time with health and feature commonly on many processed or packaged foodstuffs. The challenge consumers face is how to sustain the rhythmic consistency of purchasing, storing and eating food within the timeframe of the preservation assemblage. For many participants, best-before labels as part of the preservation assemblage in PNG did not seem to evoke the same emotional response. Most participants appeared to experience neither horror nor concern if frozen meats were unlabelled or had gone beyond the prescribed date. However, after people migrated to Australia, best-before dates ­generated heightened affective intensities. Participants identified detailed knowledge of the new rhythms surrounding food purchase and preservation in which

Fridges and food waste  43 the fridge, and specifically the best-before date, was now central to sustaining their liveable order. Take, for example, Joyce’s narrative of how bestbefore dates became integral to sustain rhythmic consistency of fresh food only after migrating to Australia: With the, um, protein, I’d say I find them more fresh here [in Australia], especially those frozen ones, get really fresh meat and stuff here. And I also realised, noticed that they don’t stay in the freezer for a very long time. They have due dates [in Australia], okay so from here to here and it’s expired. Whereas back at home they can stay in the fridge for as long as they can stay, until whoever comes and buy them. So, like they’re not, you know, that really tasty … There’s only specials, whenever like it’s Easter or Christmas, but they [shop owners in PNG] don’t like, look at the, you know, freshness of the food and think, “Oh, okay, this one has gone past. Let us put them on sale so people can buy.” They just sell them. This example shows that the social and commercial rhythms that make food abundance possible are necessary for use-by dates to become an affective force of chaos within a preservation assemblage. In a context of social and seasonal arrhythmia that is expressed as food scarcity, Joyce implies that some people will purchase frozen meats regardless of the use-by date or previous visceral encounters with frozen food that are characterised by diminished eating pleasure. Thus, the specialised refrains of best-before dates do not sustain notions of freshness and “good” health in PNG. Therefore, unlike in the Minority World, the fridge is not central to securing the sense and sensibilities of home. By contrast, participants, migrating to Australia, illustrate the process of attunement to the rhythms of the refrigerator in a preservation assemblage that constitutes the house-as-home and “good” citizens. As a result, the affective intensity of the specialised refrain of the best-before labels increased. For instance, maintaining the rhythmic consistency of food purchase and consumption within the temporal limits of the best-before dates makes possible the experience of the “good” migrant subject. For example, Joyce says: In Australia, I don’t leave it [meat] like … the thing is when I buy my, uh, the meat that I want to eat it’s just for like … I wouldn’t want to keep it for two weeks cause I know that this meat always being sold in the shops and the due dates are like this, so I just look at the due date and it’s like, yeah, I must follow the rule here when I’m living here, so I should have it before this, the date. So yeah, I don’t leave it that long. Yeah, so I just said, okay, I have it before that date [the expiry date]. And there’s always fresh ones out there that I can go back and buy. Joyce shows how the interplay between expressive elements (due dates, notions of convenience and ideas of authority and trust) and material

44  Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt e­ lements (food abundance, fridges, freezers and fridge/freezers) makes possible her desire to become a “good citizen.” Joyce’s example also shows how maintaining the rhythmic consistency of a good citizen requires adopting the rhythms and practices associated with food expiry labels such as label checking, fridge organising and food binning. These rhythms are made possible in part through Joyce’s trust in these labels to be accurate indicators of freshness, edibility and healthiness. In incorporating these rhythms into her everyday life, Joyce reproduces the specialised fridge refrain that produces home as comfortable and secure by removing food felt as a threat to both her health and the good “citizen” subject. This food becomes waste and is thrown away. Repeated patterns of food binning help to constitute a rhythm by which the refrain is realised through removing “bad foods” that are a threat to the “safety” of domestic space. To create a functioning kitchen, Joyce is aware that the rhythms of food suppliers and retailers, performed through the best-before label, are required for her to hold together not only her diet but her status as a clean and orderly subject who is at home in Australia. We learn how disposal becomes possible when foods may be easily repurchased in supermarkets at low cost. The refrain of food purchasing and storage made possible by the fridge is employed to make the “good subject” and house-as-home in Australia, but brings the potential for more food to be routed to the bin as waste. Ironically, then, the fridge in these Minority World contexts actually works against “freshness” by artificially prolonging the life of foods and discouraging daily shopping and purchasing. By promoting “convenience,” fridges may also encourage over-shopping, which also increases the risk of food wastage and binning (Shove 2003).

Conclusion This chapter has suggested how one might offer interpretations of food waste by focusing on the temporalities and spatialities of fridge use. We have shown the importance of attention to rhythms that make food edible or not. To better understand how food becomes waste through the seasonal, bodily and social rhythms that comprise the everyday, we introduced the notion of the preservation assemblage and the specialised refrain of the fridge. We found out about the importance of the timespace of the fridge in relation to food waste through the experiences of PNG migrants living in Sydney Australia. Using the lens of the preservation assemblage and refrain reveals that the temporalities and spatialities of food waste are always relational, emerging through the interplay between material and expressive forces. In using this perspective to examine the food cultures of migrants as they move between the Majority and Minority World, this chapter makes three significant contributions to understanding the temporalities of food waste. First, in slowing decay, fridges achieve more than mere food preservation: they help sustain places, temporal experiences, economies, subjectivities

Fridges and food waste  45 and collectives. Thus, when people are asked to change their preservation practices to adopt more sustainable or less “wasteful” alternatives, there is far more at stake than what might be otherwise be first assumed. Second, the rhythms that sustain the communal fridge in shared households in PNG cities illustrate that it is not the convenience, freshness or weekly shopping trips typical in the Minority World that are achieved, but rather a complex navigation of social relationships that shape people’s decisions about what foods should be purchased, placed into fridges and directed to the waste stream. Third, the notion of the preservation assemblage acknowledges that learning about freshness is always about doing, where skills and decisions about what is fresh or not are made and unmade through everyday performances and actions. The specialised refrain of the fridge in the Minority World reminds us that how people categorise food waste is driven by embodied, technological and social behaviours underpinned by experiences of productive time and the familial house-as-home. Given the growing interest in food waste and temporality, studying the fridge as a preservation assemblage offers the potential for learning about more sustainable domestic practices, including the ways in which some preservation technologies that promote modern convenience and comfort actually work against the changes necessary to achieve more sustainable lifestyles.

References Buchanan, Ian. 2015. “Assemblage Theory and its Discontents.” Deleuze Studies 9 (3): 382–92. https://doi.org/10.3366/dls.2015.0193. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, David. 2012. “Binning, Gifting and Recovery: The Conduits of Disposal in Household Food Consumption.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (6): 1123–37. https://doi.org/10.1068/d22210. Evans, David. 2014. Food Waste: Home Consumption, Material Culture and Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Edited by Michel Senellart, François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedberg, Susan. 2009. Fresh. London: Belknap Press. Grosz, Elizabeth A. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Head, Lesley, Natascha Klocker and Ikerne Aguirre-Bielschowsky. 2019. “Environmental Values, Knowledge and Behaviour: Contributions of an Emergent Literature on the Role of Ethnicity and Migration.” Progress in Human Geography 43 (3): 397–415. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518768407. Kaipia, Riikka, Iskra Dukovska-Popovska and Lauri Loikkanen. 2013. “Creating Sustainable Fresh Food Supply Chains through Waste Reduction.” International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management 43 (3): 262–76. https:// doi.org/10.1108/IJPDLM-11-2011-0200.

46  Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt Klocker, Natascha and Lesley Head. 2013. “Diversifying Ethnicity in Australia’s Population and Environmental Debates.” Australian Geographer 44 (1): 41–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2013.765347. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press. Nail, Thomas. 2017. “What is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46 (1): 21–37. Project MUSE. Schieffelin, Edward L. 2005. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shouse, Eric. 2005. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8 (6). www.journal. media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Shove, Elizabeth. 2003. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organisation of Normality. Oxford: Berg. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vaioleti, Timote M. 2013/14. “Talanoa: Differentiating the Talanoa Research Methodology from Phenomenology, Narrative, Kaupapa Maori and Feminist ­ Methodologies.” Te Reo 56/57: 191–212. Waitt, Gordon and Catherine Phillips. 2016. “Food Waste and Domestic Refrigeration: A Visceral and Material Approach.” Social and Cultural Geography 17 (3): 359–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2015.1075580. Whitehead, Harriet. 2000. Food Rules: Hunting, Sharing, and Tabooing Game in Papua New Guinea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

3 Chip, body, earth Toxic temporalities of Intel processor production Luke Munn

Waste reconfigures time. This chapter uses processor production as a lens for understanding the broader intersection of waste and temporality within regimes of capital production. The early production of Intel processors in Silicon Valley heavily relied upon an array of toxic chemicals. Intel Corporation manufactured semiconductors at its production site in Mountain View California from 1968 to 1981 (Environmental Protection Agency 2016). It was here, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, that Intel Corporation used trichloroethylene and benzene in the production and degreasing of the processor chips. Working intimately with these chemicals, workers internalised burns and bleaching as well as long-term injuries to organs (Pellow and Park 2003). At the same time, these chemicals seeped into the earth below production facilities, contaminating the soil and water tables (CampbellDollaghan 2013; Olivieri et al. 1985). These highly toxic chemicals leaked into both skin and soil, creating long-term damage. Processor production thus enfolds chip, body and earth, simultaneously incorporating a triad of temporalities: the time of technicity, the time of labour and the time of nature. The three sections in this chapter explore each of these temporalities in turn. Admittedly, these labels are too tidy: the messy interconnections between these spheres and the multitude of rhythms and paces within them quickly become apparent. Yet they provide a shorthand structure for examining how regimes of capital expand across multiple temporalities. As will be discussed, the toxic waste of chip production offers a clear example of this phenomenon, an overt material trace left on environments and people. It shows how the moment of production— and its attendant waste—actually unfurls across time through slow contaminations and deadly after-effects, a form of temporal lag. Yet more subtly, there is a sense in which both labour and nature are treated as waste. The worker’s body becomes a vessel of labour-power to be exhausted, poisoned and then dispensed with; land and water become an industrial resource to be depleted, contaminated and then discarded. Indeed, what the focus on temporality will show is the durational aspect to these vitalities. Capital takes up the extended durations of human and ­non-human life and rapidly exhausts them. In harnessing this disparity, it

48  Luke Munn effectively conducts a form of temporal arbitrage. This process generates enormous productivity while leaving a trail of devastation in its wake that will linger for years, decades, or centuries. The chapter thus seeks to show how, in regimes of capital, time itself is taken up into the production process. Delayed and compressed, altered or arbitrated, time becomes a material to be leveraged, a productive hinge that fosters both accumulation and dispossession.

I Chip First there is the time of the processor itself. In the semiconductor industry, speed becomes paramount—the ability to accomplish more in less time. Speed is usually indicated by clock rate, the frequency at which the chip is running. This value informs, but doesn’t directly determine, the number of calculations that can be executed per second. For example, the Intel 4040 chip, introduced in 1974, was one of the earliest models manufactured. It features a clock rate at a nominal 500 khz, or cycling around 500,000 times per second. However, alongside this frequency it is the microarchitecture of the chip—the ways in which instructions are grouped, parsed and processed—that ultimately establishes the amount of work accomplished across this second. For instance, after every clock cycle, the “signal lines” within the chip must return to their previous state, that is, “every signal line must finish transitioning from 0 to 1, or from 1 to 0” (Wiza 2019). These kinds of limiting factors mean that a chip such as the 4040 ends up processing around 92,000 instructions per second (Shvets 2017). Of course, this particular speed limit was quickly surpassed, swept away by newer versions released in rapid succession. Over the decades, one witnesses a shift from clock speed given in kilohertz (kHz) to megahertz (MHz) to today’s standard of gigahertz (GHz). Intel’s seventh-generation “Kaby Lake” processors on both desktop and mobile, for example, are all running around the 3 GHz range, or three billion cycles per second (Intel 2017b). Here we see an ongoing attempt to exhaustively instrumentalise time—to perform more operations across shorter durations. The temporal envelope of the single second is fixed and bounded. Yet its contents can be cut into, the instant segmented and made cellular. With each increase in clock speed, the second is sliced into increasingly thinner wafers. On top of this, techniques like instruction-pipelining and out-of-order execution attempt to wrangle more work from each wafer. Given these techniques, media theorist Robert Hassan (2014) goes so far as to declare that “digital machines are a radically different technology” that creates “network time,” a new temporality “where speed through cyberspace creates something approaching real time.” For Hassan (2014), network time supersedes “clock time,” that ostensibly older, more analogue and more machinic form of time. Vague in definition, this neologism is further undermined by the existing technical usage of the term network time to

Chip, body, earth  49 describe the synchronisation of that supposedly ancient temporality—clock time—across computer networks.1 Yet new technologies do not simply dispense with time, as though it were some outmoded constraint. Within the processor chip itself, the processes discussed—clock cycles, signal lines resetting and instruction ­ ­delegation—are all synchronised to the master pulse of the clock, which is “utilized like a metronome to coordinate actions” (dos Santos Oliveira 2015, 3). In newer chips, operating at billions of cycles per second, executions may finish in one section of the chip before an instruction even reaches the other side, producing a synchronisation error. At these clock speeds, heat also becomes a major factor. Heat builds up in the chip and increases with heavy loads and high frequencies. In terms of temporality, heat might be framed as a side-effect of speed that dissipates over time. Thus, in newer chips, in order to synchronise work, to achieve accurate results and to regulate heat, the time discipline of the clock has to be more stringent, not less. As André dos Santos Oliveira (2015, 3) stresses in his dissertation on processor clock synchronisation: The data signals are provided and sampled with a temporal reference by the clock signals, so the clock waveforms must be particularly clean and sharp, and any differences in the delay of these signals must be controlled in order to limit as little as possible the maximum performance as well as to not create [a] catastrophic race condition in which an incorrect data signal propagates … Against Hassan, then, time is not something that can simply be reframed in the constant now of real-time; nor can the staccato beat of the clock simply be shrugged off. Uniformity and regularity, far from being anachronistic, become fundamental to the temporalities engendered within technicity. Clock time is a core mechanism internalised into the architecture of the chip and refined over decades by semiconductor manufacturers in order to maximise productivity. Through the historical refinement of this technical architecture, the temporal potential within each moment becomes more thoroughly exhausted—an imperative striving to extract more time from time.

II Body Second, there is the time of the body. The design of microchips entails ­electronics and physics, but their production is all about chemistry. Historically, the silicon wafer was coated through a process of chemical vapour deposition; a chemical cocktail called a photoresist is overlaid on the wafer and exposed to light, creating the main circuitry pattern; chemical impurities in gaseous form (dopants) are added in a layer; and additional solvents wash away exposed regions to complete etching and stripping processes

50  Luke Munn (Sherry 1985, 96). These processes are repeated, building up multilayered circuitry. Dopants gases include arsine and phosphine; stripping agents include sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide; and photoresist solvents include ethylbenzene and xylene. When microelectronics comes to mind, the principal image is the bright white room, hygienically scrubbed and sealed. But these “clean rooms,” especially historically, have primarily been about screening out impurities and ensuring sterile conditions from the processor’s perspective. In other words, they protect the chip, not the worker. These production conditions put chemicals and bodies alongside each other. In close quarters, day after day, gases infused into organs, solvents seeped into tissues, toxins accumulated in bloodstreams. The result was the slow-motion destruction of bodies: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headaches, chest pains, aggressive menstrual cycles, miscarriages, cancer and ongoing psychological and physical debilitations. In their chapter titled “Work and the Struggle to Make a Living without Dying,” Pellow and Park (2003) chronicle a tragic litany of cases gleaned from personal interviews: one Chicana worker discarded her Latex gloves because they disintegrated, using her bare hands to handle chemicals, and was later diagnosed with breast cancer (114); another constantly smelled xylene while working through her pregnancy, which turned her breast milk toxic orange coloured (120); another remembers regularly having chemicals splash on her skin and face, and has recently been diagnosed with allergic rhinitis, early menopause and sterility (120). The toxicity of semiconductor manufacturer took years to leak out into the public consciousness. But this is unsurprising given that these messy bodily by-products had been sealed into bodies that management seemingly deemed dispensable and docile. In Silicon Valley at the time, that meant toxins were internalised into the preferred labour force of mothers, women of colour, Asian immigrants and other marginal groups. These groups were specifically chosen by electronics management as a more pliable workforce, “socially and culturally compliant, less likely to agitate for benefits, more physically adaptable to monotonous and intricate labor tasks, and easier to control” (Pellow and Park 2003, 13). These workers were typically given no training in workplace safety and were offered only proprietary names for the chemicals they worked with, such as “Yellow 6” (Pellow and Park 2003, 128). If they complained, they were disciplined, assured that toxicity levels were acceptable, accused of mass hysteria, or simply fired on the spot (Pellow and Park 2003, 124). Historically then, chip production was only made possible by a lineage of bodies that—due to a set of a managerial manipulations—silently took its toxicity into themselves. The waste of manufacture was sealed off from the chip and sealed into the body, causing it to waste away. In chip manufacture, the outwardly pristine clean room and the acquiescent, internally ravaged body go hand in hand.

Chip, body, earth  51 Here again there is a kind of enfolding or expansion of time, one in which the time of the chip is entangled with the time of the labourer who built it. To be sure, this entails their interweaving during production—an imaginary of the swift calculating machine assembled by the plodding manual labourer. This is particularly evident in the discourse that surrounds the former. In marketing materials from Intel, for example, the chip is constantly touted as “blazingly fast” and “lightning-quick” (Intel 2017a). Once completed, it possesses “superhuman speed” (Whitney 2017). This is a performance defined precisely by the inability of the individual to achieve it, a supersession of the vestigial human. In this fantasy, the worker’s limited cognition and ponderous corporeality are just the more obvious symptoms of a fundamentally all-too-human temporality, a temporality rendered increasingly irrelevant in the face of technological acceleration. And yet there’s a broader sense in which the time of production dovetails with the worker’s lifetime. Indeed, the example of the damaged workers in Intel’s first facility outlined by Pellow and Park suggests something more—the time of the processor lives on in the body of the labourer. For those ex-employees with breathing issues, for those with burnt skin, and particularly for those with permanent reproductive problems, the job is over and the work long since completed, but the damage remains tangibly and sometimes painfully in the present. In other words, the time of production has been permanently inscribed into the body. In this sense, the debilitation, the disease, or the cancer are often a latency embedded in the labourer, a time lag that may be triggered years later. Pressing this point further, we might think about toxicity as something that accelerates morbidity. Medical concepts such as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) are metrics that consider how life has become impinged and attenuated using time as the core unit (NCCID 2015). If life can be constrained and shrunk into less life, then death is no longer an event that marks the end of a lifetime, but rather a degenerative force, playing out over time. “Death,” as Gail Weiss (1999, 171) reminds us, “occurs not outside time, but in time; death inhabits time as a virtuality which is continually embodied or actualized.” Here, death is not a single occurrence but rather a slow spiral, a progressive deceleration of vital processes. If this is the case, then the toxic time of technicity, stored and internalised into the worker in the form of bodily decay, is nothing less than a necronicity—an acceleration and intensification of death-time. From mining to fabrication, assembly to waste, for many workers within algorithmic ecologies, underpinning the speed of technicity is a second chronology drawn out over ­decades—a slow corrosion of corporeality. Of course, the phenomenon of labour conditions recalculating human lifetimes is by no means constrained to the twentieth century. Marx ­frequently cited the reports of health inspectors who began noticing specific diseases connected to specific industries. Within pottery manufacturing, for example, labourers suffered from “potter’s asthma, or potter’s consumption. Scrofula

52  Luke Munn attacking the glands, or bones, or other parts of the body, is a disease of two-thirds or more of the potters” (1999, 454). For Marx, these bodily byproducts were the inevitable consequence of a mode of production with time as a central logic. If surplus value was only achieved after socially necessary labour time had been exceeded, then this value could be maximised in only two ways—either by extending the duration of the working day, or by intensifying the labour that took place during it (Marx 1999, 434). Frequently, both techniques were employed. These techniques imposed a heavy toll on the life of the labourer, but this was a toll deemed external or irrelevant. As Marx (1999, 473) stressed, “capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power.” Unbridled and largely unregulated, capital in nineteenth-century Britain created torturous conditions that prematurely aged the agents caught within it. If the time of production was written into the labouring body, then the inscription of industrialisation was a very blunt instrument indeed—­ stunting or shortening life. Marx (1999, 477) cites an 1863 speech in the House of Commons by politician William Ferrand, who testified that a ­particular industry had existed for just “three generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during that period it has destroyed nine generations of factory operatives.” Here we witness an exhaustion of labour that was both unchecked and historically unprecedented. Yet this immense productivity was achieved only by draining its life-sources rapidly and completely—using up nine lifetimes in the former duration of three. For the operatives, their treatment as wastable workers meant an acceleration of death. For capital, it was simply an intensification of labour achieved through a compression of time.

III Earth Finally, there is the time of nature. Semiconductor production only took place in Intel’s Santa Clara facility from 1968 to 1981—13 years in total. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency declared the site so polluted that it would take “300 years to clean up” (Pellow and Park 2003, 75). Indeed, Silicon Valley has the highest concentration in the United States of these so-called Superfund sites, locations polluted by hazardous contamination that require a long-term clean-up response. In “the roughly 1,300 square miles of Santa Clara County, California, there are 29 Superfund sites,” reveals Nathan Ensmenger (2013, 80), “most of them contaminated by the by-products of semiconductor manufacturing, including such highly toxic chemicals as trichloroethylene, Freon, trichloroethane, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).” Pump-and-treat facilities have been one of the most used responses. These are systems that pump millions of litres of groundwater through the contaminated area in order to filter out and collect toxins. In some locations, these have declined in efficiency, causing companies to

Chip, body, earth  53 pump molasses into the soil’s subsurface, attracting microbes that aid in breaking down the chemical compounds. These systems operate continuously, day in and day out, over decades. They attempt to erase an unwanted past, a past crucial for—and contiguous with—the more lauded and publicised present. As Alexis Madrigal (2013) asserts, “though the idea of Silicon Valley does not allow for history, the place, itself, cannot escape it” (emphasis in original). This clean-up produces its own mess. Journalists Susanne Rust and Matt Drange conducted an extensive investigation into Superfund sites, following the flow of contaminants throughout the country. What they found was that the costly filtration provided by the pump-and-treat systems was “only the start of a toxic trail with no clear end” (Rust and Drange 2014). The toxins must be trucked to a treatment facility, often hundreds or thousands of miles away. To take just one example, Calgon Corp’s Big Sandy plant is located in Kentucky, 2,500 miles from Mountain View (Rust and Drange 2014). Chemicals are burnt in Big Sandy’s 2000-degree (°F) furnace, producing additional waste like toxic ash which must be trucked and treated elsewhere. This combustion process also produces dioxins, which can leak into the ground, water and air—highly toxic chemicals which can cause cancers, reproductive problems and damage to the human immune system (Environmental Protection Agency 2016). These facilities often take shortcuts, bypassing expensive processing by illegally offloading waste. In 2013, Calgon Corp paid $1.6 million to settle charges that it “sold hazardous waste byproducts instead of disposing of them properly”; in 2011, the company dumped 540,000 gallons of hazardous waste into the Big Sandy river; and in 2010, the company polluted the river with “oil, grease and fecal coliform” (Rust and Drange 2014). Big Sandy then sends its waste to other treatment plants in other parts of the country, plants which themselves have been fined or put on watch-lists for illegally disposing of waste. All this continuous pumping, trucking, burning and processing is highly inefficient and energy intensive. Rust and Drange (2014) estimate that “for every 5 pounds of contaminants pulled from the ground, roughly 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced.” Waste is distributed, but never completely eradicated. Toxicity is diffused, but never entirely erased. All the while, energy is being expended and money made—an entire economy built around the logistics of toxicity. Here again there seems to be a double move in which algorithmic capital expands in order to enfold multiple temporalities together, and yet simultaneously compresses these temporalities by impinging on them in significant ways. Creating 300 years’ worth of pollution in 13 years is reminiscent of the nine generations of labour compressed into three observed by the nineteenth-century factory inspectors. Indeed Marx (1999, 473) himself ­ clearly saw parallels between the unsustainable exhaustion of labour and of nature, stating that capital’s amplified productivities could only be attained by “shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches

54  Luke Munn increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.” Like the human labourer, nature works too, whether through the fertility of the soil, the power of a river, or the production of precious metals. And like the labourer, the productivities of this natural work can be amplified and exhausted in a fraction of the time they took to produce. If time is money, then these natural gifts should be exorbitantly expensive, but instead they effectively come for free. They are appropriated, as environmental historian Jason Moore (2015, 59) theorises, as Cheap Natures—the unpaid work of “labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials.” Moore sees the perpetual identification, colonisation and exhaustion of Cheap Natures as something fundamentally intrinsic to the genealogy of capital. For Moore, one of the best examples of this logic is found in the sugar colonies of the “long” sixteenth century. As Moore (2000, 414) documents, each colony repeated an identical cycle: accelerated industrialisation, colonisation and expansion were followed by dwindling returns, reduced labour productivity and endemic environmental devastation—and this exhaust-and-abandon strategy created a constantly shifting centre of sugar trade: from Cyprus and Crete to Brazil, from Brazil to Barbados, from Barbados to Jamaica and Cuba. If the depletions of the sugar trade revolved around soil, slaves and cane, then today’s technological cultures might centre around rare earth minerals, metals and mining. In 2008, for example, the proportion of the world’s metals underpinning electronic media technologies was “36 percent of all tin, 25 percent of cobalt, 15 percent of palladium, 15 percent silver, 9 percent of gold, 2 percent of copper, and 1 percent of aluminum” (Maxwell and Miller 2012, 93). From sugar to silicon, these exhaustions undoubtedly demonstrate the strong intersections between colonisation, capital and world-ecologies. But adding a temporal lens demonstrates how these productivities are also about leveraging a fundamental temporal asymmetry—a disparity between the slow, organic germination of natural production and the hasty human time of consumption. Whether conversion of 16-monthold sugarcane to an instant spoonful of sweetness, or the transformation of the mineral columbite-tantalite (coltan) into an instantly-obsolete mobile phone processor, the commodity achieves its value through a compression of durations, becoming an incredibly time-dense object. In this sense, profit is achieved by successfully mediating between these two times—by temporal arbitrage. But, like the other temporalities, this compression of natural time can also be seen as an expansion, an unfolding. If the time of production inscribed itself for decades on the body of the labourer, then it also expands outwards into the world, writing itself on those aspects we term environmental or ecological. In other words, 300 years’ “worth” of pollution compressed and commodified by capital is also 300 years of pollution, pure and simple. And this 300 years of localised, ostensibly measurable, degradation is taken up into the far more extended temporalities of ­atmosphere, earth and ocean. Historically, the disparity between these vast

Chip, body, earth  55 geologic timeframes and the human lifetime—or even the human species— was seen as incommensurable. Indeed, in the Cosmic Calendar, an educational aid which scales 15 billion years into a single year, “modern history” only appears in the last second before midnight on 31 December (Sagan 1980). Comparing the two temporalities, one would stretch in an infinite line, while the other would be a blip or a bubble; one would appear static and immense, the other, a frenetic jumble of motion. This is why, for geologist James Hutton (2004, 22), geologic or deep time is essentially timeless: “time, which measures everything in our idea, and is often deficient to our schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing.” Cyclical and unmoved by mankind, deep time undermines the hubris of human-centred history and the Hegelianist vision of linear progress. Yet the stasis of deep time also erases the possibility of evolution or alteration altogether. Hutton’s view needed to be updated by biologist Eugene Stoermer and chemist Paul Crutzen through their newly introduced term—the Anthropocene.2 The argument for this epoch, in essence, was that humanity was now the primary agent of planetary change. The growing evidence of climate change signalled a technically amplified species exerting forces that would play out over millennia. These impacts were “now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010, 2228). Media theorist Jussi Parikka combines Hutton’s deep time with these new developments to arrive at a temporality that acknowledges the radical immensity of geologic cycles, yet also recognises the (often pathologic) power of humanity to intervene within this timeline. As Parikka (2015, 44) explains: “Temporalities such as deep time are understood in this alternative account as concretely linked to the nonhuman earth times of decay and renewal but also to the current Anthropocene of the obscenities of the ecocrisis.”

Conclusion Waste unfurls across a diverse set of temporalities. Processor production enfolds the disparate durations of technicity, labour and nature. In doing so, the processor, like other objects which could have been chosen, indexes a multiplicity of heterogeneous temporalities, congealing them together in complex ways. This layering resonates with work on timescapes from Barbara Adam (1998). For Adam, modernity ushered in industrial time, the time of the punch card, the clock and the calendar, a systematic and determinable time imposed on environments and activities. And yet she also stresses that this machinic time is entangled with other forms of ­biologic time: “the very fast firing of neurons to the heart-beat, from digestive to activity-and-rest cycles, and from the menstrual cycle to the larger regenerative processes of growth and decay, birth and death” (Adam 1998, 12). Analysing modern society and its environmental degradations through this temporal lens foregrounds a range of invisible or imperceptible ­phenomena

56  Luke Munn that typically exceed the narrow range of human perception. Her work thus focuses on the conflicts that arise within the industrial modes of life from a) the complexity and interpenetrations of rhythms: cosmic, natural and cultural; b) the imposition of industrial time on the rhythmicity and pace of ecosystems; and c) the prevailing emphasis on visible materiality and quantity at the expense of that which is hidden from view and latent. (Adam 1998, 9) Waste provides one way to render this imposition visible, to trace the fallout of industrial time on the pace of human and non-human life. Yet perhaps more fundamentally, modernity also reframes this lifetime itself as wastable-time. As Adam (1998, 11) stresses, time now becomes a “quantifiable resource that is open to manipulation, management and control, and subject to commodification, allocation, use and abuse.” Driven by the imperatives of late capital, technologies take up time as a material, as something to be optimised and operationalised. The early production of processor chips in Silicon Valley demonstrates the ways in which time is sliced into in order to accelerate clock speeds, how lifetimes are rapidly exhausted in order to amplify productivities, how the disparity between organic natural production and hasty human consumption is leveraged, and how the human as a technically amplified species inscribes itself into geological times. The instrumentalisation of these chronologies is also a recalibration. Whether burning through bodies, stripping soils or warming the atmosphere, temporalities are reshaped in significant ways.

Notes 1 Network Time Protocol was developed originally by computer engineer David Mills. It is a system in which “a distributed subnet of time servers operating in a self-organizing, hierarchical configuration synchronizes local clocks within the subnet and to national time standards via wire, radio, or calibrated atomic clock” (Mills 1991, 1482). 2 Stoermer was using the term from the 1980s onwards in less formal contexts but it was Crutzen who formally introduced the term in his 2002 paper (Crutzen 2002).

References Adam, Barbara. 1998. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. London: Routledge. Campbell-Dollaghan, Kelly. 2015. “The Secret History of Silicon Valley and the Toxic Remnants of the First Computers.” Gizmodo. 23 November 2015. www. gizmodo.com.au/2015/11/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-and-the-toxic-remnantsof-the-first-computers/. Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (6867): 23–4.

Chip, body, earth  57 Ensmenger, Nathan. 2013. “Computation, Materiality, and the Global Environment.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 35 (3): 78–80. Environmental Protection Agency. 2016. “Site Overviews, Intel Corp. (Mountain View Plant).” Overviews & Factsheets. US EPA. 31 May 2016. https://yosemite. epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/vwsoalphabetic/Intel+Corp.+(Mountain+View+Pl ant)?OpenDocument. Hassan, Robert. 2014. “A Temporalized Internet.” The Political Economy of Communication 2 (1): 3–16. www.polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/27/204. Hutton, James. 2004. Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations. EBook #12861. Vol. 1. 4 vols. Salt Lake City: Project Gutenberg. Intel. 2017a. “Intel Processors.” PC World. www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/intel-processors336-commercial.html. Intel. 2017b. “Kaby Lake.” Intel ARK (Product Specs). 11 September 2017. https:// ark.intel.com/products/codename/82879/Kaby-Lake. Madrigal, Alexis. 2013. “Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History.” The Atlantic, 23 July 2013. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/not-even-silicon-valleyescapes-history/277824/. Marx, Karl. 1999. Capital: An Abridged Edition. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. 2012. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, David L. 1991. “Internet Time Synchronization: The Network Time Protocol.” IEEE Transactions on Communications 39 (10): 1482–93. Moore, Jason W. 2000. “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern WorldEconomy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 23 (3): 409–33. www.jstor.org/stable/40241510. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. NCCID. 2015. “Understanding Summary Measures Used to Estimate the Burden of Disease.” Winnipeg: National Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases. https:// nccid.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/03/GBD_Factsheet_FINAL_E.pdf. Olivieri, Adam, Don Eisenberg, Martin Kurtovich and Lori Pettegrew. 1985. “Ground-Water Contamination in Silicon Valley.” Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 111 (3): 346–58. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)07339496(1985)111:3(346). Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pellow, David and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. 2003. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York: New York University Press. Rust, Susanne and Matt Drange. 2014. “Cleanup of Silicon Valley Superfund Site Takes Environmental Toll.” The Center for Investigative Reporting. 17 March 2014. http://cironline.org/reports/cleanup-silicon-valley-superfund-site-takesenvironmental-toll-6149. Sagan, Carl. 1980. The Cosmic Calendar. Cosmos. Public Broadcasting Service. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzG9fHMr9L4. Santos Oliveira, André dos. 2015. “Clock Synchronization for Modern Multiprocessors.” Master’s Dissertation, Universidade do Porto.

58  Luke Munn Sherry, Susan. 1985. High Tech and Toxics: A Guide for Local Communities. Washington, DC: Golden Empire Health Planning Center. Shvets, Gennadiy. 2017. “Intel 4040 (I4040) Microprocessor Family.” CPU World, 22 October 2017. www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/4040/index.html. Weiss, Gail. 1999. “The Durée of the TechnoBody.” In Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, edited by Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 161–75. Whitney, Lance. 2017. “Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans?” MSN, 30 September 2017. www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/are-computers-alreadysmarter-than-humans/ar-AAsDFwI. Wiza, Kiley. 2019. “Intel Processor Frequency ID Windows 7 64-BIT.” Drivers List. 17 July 2019. https://osac.info/intel/intel-processor-frequency-id-windows-3/. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Will Steffen and Paul Crutzen. 2010. “The New World of the Anthropocene.” Environmental Science & Technology 44 (7): 2228–31.

Part II

Bureaucratic time

4 Biopolitical temporalities of waste and the municipal collection schedule in the United States Raysa Martinez Kruger The regular waste collection schedule today appears to be a fixed and everpresent feature of modern urban life in most developed countries. Since its gradual inception during the late 1800s, the schedule has become so normal that it exists as a routine, unquestioned part of our collective waste management practices. Its mundane nature obscures how this routine became normalised and embodied in our daily lives as a practice of biopolitical governmental management, with the temporality of biological waste decay, exacerbated by population densities and temperature seasonality, dictating its regularity. The normalisation of the schedule also obscures how this crown jewel of sanitary reform that rendered clean the public and private spaces of the hygienic city is implicated in producing both spaces and people alienated by waste. At the tail-end of the linear processes put in place by the municipal waste collection schedule are wasted spaces, typically the communities of the poor and people of colour, which constantly receive the waste of others or are provided substandard sanitation services. These spatiotemporal inequalities of waste raise an unresolved ethical and moral question. Are the temporalities of waste we collectively embody and enact through the waste collection schedule the correct ones for achieving social justice for all people and a better relationship with nature? With this question in mind, this chapter reflects upon the various biopolitical temporalities that significantly influenced the institutionalisation and embodiment of regular waste management and collection practices, simultaneously producing clean spaces for some and wasted spaces for others. Governmental efforts to enrol the population in projects of urban sanitary reform included a significant emphasis on producing clean spaces to protect the population from death and disease (Huxley 2006; Legg 2005; Melosi 2005). Although waste is a multifaceted material, literature on these reform projects highlights the ways in which the negative, hazardous and nuisance aspects of waste act as a disturbance in space that must be removed (Moore 2012). This chapter extends this focus but brings attention to how the goal of producing the clean spaces of the sanitary city—its streets, alleys, lots, homes and other spaces—necessitated the superimposition of a temporal

62  Raysa Martinez Kruger grid of compliance upon its inhabitants, synchronising their previously random waste management practices and bringing a measure of order to the uncontrollable biological and environmental processes of waste decay. Akin to the disciplinary governmental micro-practices put in place within the confined spaces of schools, prisons and workhouses to elicit human conduct in accordance with timetables, the municipal waste collection schedule was a governmental technology applied at the level of the individual, eliciting compliance through designated bodily movements and practices, to realise macro-effects at the scale of the population (Foucault 1995, 135–69). This temporal grid of compliance was accepted and embodied by obedient human subjects in their daily lives as they enacted, on time and on a regular basis in accordance with the specified timetables of waste pickup, the individual disciplinary micro-practices of waste containment, moving to the kerb, collection and final disposal that collectively aggregated to realise the biopolitical imperative of protecting the general population’s health, safety and welfare (Foucault 1995, 135–69; 2003, 239–64; Legg 2005). The synchronised enactment of municipal waste management and collection ­practices produced the clean spaces of the home and the town through the establishment of a conveyor belt of waste that culminates in wasted spaces. We are implicated as participants in this conveyor belt, which produces alienation and environmental inequality for some while others enjoy the benefits of sanitation. This alienation is an aspect of environmental injustice that emerged historically and continues to this day, riding on and perpetuating racial and class inequalities. The work of environmental historians on the implementation of municipal waste collection services in the United States during the late 1880s and early 1900s informs this chapter (Melosi 2005; Strasser 1999; Zimring 2015). The chapter also relies on primary source documents of the same period from the State of New Jersey and the seaside resort town of Asbury Park. Together, these materials offer key insights on the biopolitical temporalities of the waste collection schedule and its attendant environmental injustices that have broad significance for other geographical settings. Specifically, the nature of “house offal” as a biological material of rapid decay and rot in an urban setting, and the public health imperative to remove it before its decomposition, dictated the periodicity of a regular and comprehensive municipal waste collection system. The accumulation of decaying and rotting biological material in public and private urban spaces was exacerbated by other temporalities of the human and animal populations and the natural environment, such as the temperature seasonality of winter and summer and the fluctuations and densities of the human population. At a local level, the schedule’s implementation led to additional temporalities of calculation, performance and surveillance. Collectors’ daily reports quantifying the amounts and types of waste collected each day were in turn aggregated into weekly, monthly and annual reports to create a historical knowledge base for local boards of health to calculate and predict future

The municipal collection schedule  63 infrastructure and service needs while accounting for population fluctuations. Residents’ and collectors’ performance of their respective roles had to be on time, in accordance with the schedule, for the service to function like a well-oiled conveyor belt—especially the continuous rotation of waste pickup, dumping and pickup again—or havoc would ensue as waste remained on the streets for an inordinate amount of time to the ire of town residents. The continuous surveillance among residents, collectors and board of health inspectors of each other’s performance served as a check on the municipal waste collection service, a regular convenience the population slowly but surely grew to expect. The historical record also shows that the temporalities of waste inherent in the municipal collection schedule directly and simultaneously produced spaces and people alienated by waste, in at least two main spatiotemporal forms. First, there were areas never visited or regularly served by the established municipal collection system. Second, there were areas of disposal that constantly received the waste of others. These two categories of wasted spaces alienated by the temporalities of waste collection and disposal were and continue to be the neighbourhoods of the poor, immigrants and people of colour. The environmental inequalities associated with this crown jewel of environmental sanitation compel us to ask whether these temporalities are adequate for addressing the social justice and environmental challenges of our time.

House offal and municipal collection: temporal, technical and human elements The sanitary reforms implemented in the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s encompassed a wide range of activities, including sewer construction, ensuring a clean water supply to streets and lots, and planning for circulation and drainage (Melosi 2005; Strasser 1999). These reforms had the common goal of protecting the general population from death and disease by rendering clean the public and private spaces of the sanitary city. The removal of waste was just one piece of the sanitary reform agenda. This was a societal effort, involving governmental authorities, civic groups, experts and private citizens. In New Jersey, the New Jersey State Board of Health (NJSBoH or the Board), composed of and advised by experts in civil engineering, law and the medical professions— even pastors and reverends at times—led state-wide environmental sanitation efforts. The Board advised local boards of health in each municipality and regularly received updates from the local boards on their sanitary progress. The decaying nature of house offal presented a key rationale for instituting a system of regular municipal waste collection in each municipality in New Jersey since the beginning of state-sponsored environmental sanitation efforts during the 1880s. In its annual reports, citing English civil engineer Sir Robert Rawlinson, the Board described house offal as “the refuse from

64  Raysa Martinez Kruger the cleaning of meats, of poultry, of fish; the scrapings and peelings of vegetables; used-up rags or house cloths,” a biological category of waste quite different from “the dry dirt and rubbish of the house and its surroundings” (NJSBoH 1884, 10, quoting Sir Robert Rawlinson).1 Because of its rotting, smelly and disease-causing nature, house offal was identified as something that had to be removed from the public and private spaces of the town, especially in hot weather, “with a regularity which will never disappoint” (NJSBoH 1884, 10, quoting Sir Robert Rawlinson; 1892, 17). Once decaying biological material, which also included horse manure and dead animals on the streets, was recognised as a threat to the public health that must be regularly removed, the Board mounted efforts to ensure that local boards of health understood the nature of this challenge. As early as 1884, the Board recommended that local boards should implement a refuse collection system “so prompt as to secure the removal of decomposable or putrescible material before there is time for it to change” and to prevent refuse accumulations in public spaces (NJSBoH 1884, 10). By 1885, the Board went further to offer model language for municipalities to prohibit the accumulation of offal by any person in public places, like sidewalks, streets and alleys (NJSBoH 1885, 287). The temporalities of decay inherent in house offal and other decomposing biological waste therefore dictated the periodicity of the collection schedule to be embodied by the polity to produce the clean spaces of the sanitary city. The biological decay clock also informed technical decisions, especially about the type of receptacles to be recommended by experts for householders to contain the decaying waste for the desired amount of time between collections to prevent a nuisance. Citing Dr. Joseph H. Raymond of Brooklyn, New York, a physician who addressed the Board on “The Collection and Removal of Garbage, and the Final Disposition to be made of it,” the Board indicated that a “galvanized iron pail, furnished with a tight cover” was the only acceptable container that should be used by households to contain their garbage because other receptacles failed to control offensive odours, especially in the summer (NJSBoH 1885, 114). The physicians, civil engineers, attorneys and a reverend present at this lecture also emphasised the regularity of collection, and Dr. Raymond “strongly advised that garbage in cities should be removed three times a week regularly, the year round, if kept in safely-covered vessels. It keeps up the system of regularity in removal” (NJSBoH 1885, 116). While emphasising the regularity of collection and the type of garbage containers to be used as key elements of the system, the Board stressed the necessarily collective nature of this effort—the human element of synchronised conduct and compliance. It commented on the practical impossibility of “each householder in a city fully to provide for the removal of every form of debris, or to determine, independently of his neighbor, what plan shall be adopted” (NJSBoH 1884, 12). Slowly but surely, the temporal, technical and human elements of the system became integrated in future

The municipal collection schedule  65 discourse. When Dr. E.L.B. Godfrey of Camden, New Jersey, addressed the Board in 1887 concerning “The Collection and Disposal of Garbage,” he recommended that a comprehensive system should include laws detailing the responsibilities of housekeepers and scavengers, requiring the separation of house offal from dry wastes, their containment in galvanised iron containers with lids and sufficiently large to “hold the accumulation of two or three days,” and the removal of the containerised wastes “daily in summer and two or three times a week in winter” (NJSBoH 1887, 144). Dr. Godfrey reiterated these elements in his address to the Board in 1891, specifying that laws should require households to provide such garbage cans “and place them upon the sidewalk at specified hours,” collectors to “collect from certain streets at stated hours,” and municipalities to establish their own department to supervise the collectors, as the only proper way to ensure the regular collection of garbage while still fresh (NJSBoH 1891, 160). In its 1893 report, the Board published a paper by T.R. Chambers, also a physician, titled “The Disposal of Garbage,” where the author also brought together the need for “regular, systematic collections” of waste, especially during the warm weather months when garbage was sure to cause “vile odors, attract myriads of flies” and become “a fertile soil for disease germs” (NJSBoH 1893, 318–19). Waste separation, proper containment and the “exact and uniform” waste collection service at “regular times” for “speedy removal” continued to be emphasised (NJSBoH 1893, 18). In its 1898 report, the Board recommended exact language that municipalities could adopt by ordinance to impose these different temporal, technical and human elements on householders, scavengers or garbage collectors, and on their own department of municipal government, and also proposed that these elements must be a key part of the stipulated terms in any contract for the collection of waste in the municipality, should a private collector be hired to undertake this important job (NJSBoH 1898, 48–53). As shown by the focus on house offal and rotting material, the biological decay clock dictated the periodicity of municipal collection to be imposed upon and embodied by the polity. The spatial aspects of this effort were evident, including the designation of the public spaces of the town and private spaces of the home to be rendered clean of garbage and space as containment in the form of galvanised iron trashcans. However, the periodicity of waste management behaviours was key to achieving the clean spaces of the sanitary city. Efforts to “regulate” waste management practices through the schedule and its concomitant tools and technologies must be understood to encompass not only the institution and implementation of regulations in the form of legal proscriptions and mandates for the desired behaviour householders, scavengers and waste collectors were expected to undertake, but also and perhaps more importantly the temporal regularities to be superimposed upon the irregular and uncontrolled processes of waste production, accumulation and decay. In other words, it included all the temporal regularities of compliance to be embodied by the various segments of

66  Raysa Martinez Kruger the human population as obedient subjects in the private spaces of the home and public spaces of the town. This temporal grid of compliance was more evident at a local level.

Enacting the temporal grid of compliance for municipal waste collection Although timely and regular waste collection was a sanitary goal in each municipality, such a system was imperative in densely populated cities and summer resorts. For the latter, a sanitary state was important not only for protecting the public health and welfare of the resident and visiting population, but also for ensuring the economic viability of the resort town as a tourist destination (NJSBoH 1901, 299). As one of the summer resorts bordering the Atlantic Ocean, Asbury Park’s population swelled during the summer tourist season. The Board estimated that while the winter population of the municipality in 1901 was only about 4,000 persons, the population swelled to about 30,000 persons in the summer (NJSBoH 1901, 299). At that time, Asbury Park had made significant progress in sanitary reforms, having a “complete system of sewers” (although discharged in the Atlantic Ocean), well-kept “streets and public grounds,” and improvements in the removal of “refuse and excreta” and in the “collection of garbage and refuse” (NJSBoH 1901, 300) (see Figure 4.1). In Asbury Park, the dangers of biological waste in the town were compounded by its accelerated decay in the summer heat and the simultaneous influx of tourists. Residents, but especially tourists, expected a leisurely atmosphere. A waste collection service that operated like clockwork was of paramount importance, its timeliness dependent on people’s compliance. The reliability of contractors to provide timely and regular service emerged as an important concern. For example, one contractor was found to employ “volunteer collectors” who “were irregular in their time of collections, only coming when they were in need of feed for their swine” and who were also failing to “evenly distribute the men and teams throughout the borough to insure regular and uniform collection on each street” (NJSBoH 1896, 144). The reliability of certain businesses in complying with the collection schedule by placing their garbage on the kerb on time was also a matter of concern. The local board of health expressed frustration with some hotels and boarding houses who failed to provide enough “metallic garbage receptacles … to hold the amount of garbage accumulating between the times of regular collection” (NJSBoH 1896, 144–5; 1900, 171). The desire for uniformity in the collection service and in householder and business compliance led the municipality to impose the regular collection schedule upon collectors, householders and hotels and boarding houses in the municipality. The details of the collection system and the applicable schedule were printed on cards distributed to each household with instructions on the “storage, collection and removal of refuse” (NJSBoH 1898, 248).

The municipal collection schedule  67

Figure 4.1  Garbage collection infrastructure. Source: Photographed by the Asbury Park Board of Health, 1898. Courtesy Special Collections, George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences, Rutgers University Libraries.

To encourage the timely collective enactment of the desired waste management practices by compliant subjects, a system of contractor and householder complaints to the local board established the common surveillance of the system (NJSBoH 1898, 247; 1901, 188; 1903, 136; 1904, 127–9; 1906, 217–18; 1907, 232; 1908, 463). By 1903, householders were regularly complaining to the local health inspectors about “rejectamenta” in the wrong place, garbage and rubbish accumulations in back yards, dead animals in streets or on private property and about the service rendered by the garbage contractor, amounting to 415—100 more complaints than in the previous year (NJSBoH 1903, 136) (see Figure 4.2). The Board did not believe this increase necessarily indicative of increased non-compliance with the system and schedule, but rather that it reflected “the fact that citizens are more inclined from year to year to avail themselves of the opportunity of righting

68  Raysa Martinez Kruger

Figure 4.2  Surveillance of boarding house non-compliance. Source: Photographed by the Asbury Park Board of Health, 1899. Courtesy Special Collections, George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences, Rutgers University Libraries.

the class of nuisances complained against through the agency of the health department” (NJSBoH 1903, 136) (see Figure 4.3). This feature of the municipal collection service—the common surveillance of non-compliance—suggests the normalisation of the schedule in people’s lives such that it eventually became an expectation by the polity. This common surveillance created an evidentiary record of non-compliance and expectations, allowed the local board to gather evidence of the contractor’s performance for future use and alerted inspectors to hidden problems affecting the schedule’s regularity. For example, in 1905, when the number of complaints was greater than in any previous year, the complaints led the board to investigate and find that the contractor was using the garbage to produce grease by boiling it in wooden vats and selling the remainder to farmers for hog food, causing a back-up in the unloading of the garbage carts at the grease manufacturing site (NJSBoH 1905, 185–9; NJSBoH 1906, 80–1). The

The municipal collection schedule  69

Figure 4.3  Surveillance of servants’ non-compliance. Source: Photographed by the Asbury Park Board of Health, 1898. Courtesy Special Collections, George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences, Rutgers University Libraries.

grease production operation was delaying the expected conveyor-belt-like functioning of waste pickup, dumping and pickup again. At the site the board found that “three loaded vehicles were waiting to be unloaded, thus losing more time and preventing the use of the carts to their full capacity in removing the garbage from the city” (NJSBoH 1905, 185). The local board reported at the time that “an increasing number of complaints has been received from householders of neglect on the part of the contractors to render daily service” (NJSBoH 1905, 187). When this contractor was relieved from the contract, a new one was retained, and that one failed to pick up the refuse on time, leaving garbage “on entire blocks for as many as three days, and rubbish was left on entire streets for as many as four days” (NJSBoH 1906, 214–16). As these householder and contractor compliance and surveillance elements helped to hone the health inspectors’ enforcement

70  Raysa Martinez Kruger capabilities, the board simultaneously established requirements for scavengers to obtain permits to collect offal and remove refuse (NJSBoH 1900, 170; 1901, 189; 1903, 137; 1904, 130; 1907, 232–3; 1908, 464). The regular municipal collection schedule incorporated yet another temporal feature to produce knowledge: contractor daily reports that ­­ quantified the amounts and types of waste—garbage, rubbish and dead animals—collected (NJSBoH 1898, 246, 249–54). These daily reports were aggregated into weekly, monthly and annual reports and data tables, which were then used to make decisions concerning the type of collection and disposal infrastructure—from collection wagons and work horses to disposal plants—needed during various times of the year, and the costs of removal and disposal (NJSBoH 1898, 255–56; 1899, 169; 1900, 171–3; 1901, 185–7; 1903, 134; 1904, 127; 1905, 188; 1906, 216–17; 1907, 231–2; 1908, 462). On the documented fluctuations in waste types and quantities over time, the Asbury Park board of health commented that facts which have been gathered during the past season in relation to the amount of garbage and rubbish to be disposed of during the summer months will be of value for study in connection with the erection of a disposal plant for these waste products, as it will be seen that the amounts of both garbish [sic] and rubbish varies greatly from day to day, and from week to week. (NJSBoH 1898, 256) This temporal data aggregation was key for the board to calculate how the influx of tourists in the summer each year would increase the amounts and types of waste produced for collection and disposal (NJSBoH 1899, 170). The local board used this internal data with information concerning consumption patterns and private waste service provision. For example, in its 1903 report to the Board, the Asbury Park board of health remarked that despite having had the largest summer population compared to previous years, the amount of garbage produced was inordinately smaller due to “the exceeding scarcity and high prices during the season of vegetables which make bulky garbage, such as melons, corn, lima beans” and the use of a private garbage collector by five large hotels “thereby gaining the advantage of having the accumulation removed at an hour in the day best suiting their convenience” (NJSBoH 1903, 133). This temporal data feature exemplifies how the schedule and its related temporalities became part of the calculative and technocratic aspect of governmental waste management. As shown in Asbury Park’s experience with the implementation of the municipal waste collection system, a temporal grid of compliance was superimposed upon the previously random waste management practices of the population to achieve the synchronicity of expected waste management behaviours by householders, collectors and the local board of health. This

The municipal collection schedule  71 involved compliance with the collection schedule, the common surveillance of each other’s compliance, the ability to complain to the authorities when someone did not properly comply and the growing expectation and demand by the population that the collection service would always be provided like clockwork on a regular basis. The measuring, categorising and reporting of the amounts and types of waste collected daily to the local board augmented its ability for future technocratic planning. What is striking about these features is the extent to which they were aimed at producing the clean public and private spaces of the sanitary city, without considering that as they rendered spaces clean for some—out of sight, out of mind—the conveyor belt of waste collection and disposal simultaneously produced wasted spaces for others.

Producing wasted spaces: areas never visited and areas of disposal The municipal collection schedule is one of the crown jewels of environmental sanitation, rendering clean of refuse the public and private spaces of the sanitary city and helping to achieve monumental improvements in public health. And yet, as the regular waste collection schedule gradually became normalised, synchronising the waste management practices of containerisation, moving to the kerb, collection and final disposal, aspects of environmental injustice accompanied the otherwise sweeping march toward a sanitary state. Various municipal authorities in New Jersey routinely lamented to the Board that, while the regular collection schedule removed the waste from designated spaces, some areas were never visited by the established waste collection services, and some areas were constantly receiving the waste of others—and accompanying negative effects—because they were selected as disposal sites. These areas were typically the crowded neighbourhoods or marginal spaces occupied by the poor, immigrant communities and people of colour. The areas never visited and areas of disposal emerge in the historical record as two categories of spaces alienated by waste during the otherwise sweeping march toward a sanitary state for the general population. The Asbury Park board of health described one such area never visited by sanitary services, which it annexed from Neptune Township (on the western border of Asbury Park) in May of 1906. The area about 450 acres in size and a population of 5,284 residents was in a very poor sanitary state, 81 per cent of it without sewers, and receiving little or no refuse collection services (NJSBoH 1906, 210–11; 1907, 231). The board found that 50 acres of this area were in a most “primitive sanitary state” and densely settled with people of colour and immigrants, described as “twelve hundred negroes, three hundred and seventy-five Italians, and one hundred Hebrews” (NJSBoH 1906, 211). Simultaneously, during Asbury Park’s normalisation of municipal collection to render clean the public and private spaces of the

72  Raysa Martinez Kruger resort town, areas also located outside city limits in Neptune Township received the town’s waste, where the “mass of decomposing organic matter serves as a breeding place for flies, which swarm about the place in countless numbers” (NJSBoH 1905, 185). The nuisances created at the disposal site led the New Jersey State Board of Health to issue a sharply worded message to local boards of health, indicating that each “city is morally bound to so conduct the disposal of its refuse materials that they will not create a nuisance in any other locality” (NJSBoH 1906, 80–1). This message from the Board is commendable in that it pointed to the morally fraught aspects of waste exportation. The reality, however, was structural and complicated. This linear movement of waste, by redistributing waste without questioning its production, in and of itself predisposed alienation as a built-in feature. It also became a tool of alienation as this governmental technology was deployed within a deeply racist and hierarchical social context that marginalised blacks, other people of colour, recent immigrants and whites of low socio-economic status, who were tellingly dubbed “white trash” (see Figure 4.4). As environmental historians have documented, the implementation of sanitary reforms during the 1880s and early 1900s rode on and perpetuated the association of waste with marginalised people and spaces that had taken hold at the time in virtually all spheres of society, from the cultural and institutionalised defence of whiteness as a form of superiority and privilege, to academics who characterised non-whites and recent immigrants as unclean and dangerous pollutants, to companies marketing personal hygiene products such as soap using advertisements that depicted non-whites as unclean caricatures while linking cleanliness with white skin, and to the demeaning notions embraced by some sanitarians (Strasser 1999, 136–40; Zimring 2015, 79–106). As Melosi (2005) writes, many cities “dumped refuse on vacant lots or near the ‘least desirable’ neighborhoods, that is, those occupied by the poor, the working class and/or ethnic and racial minorities” (34). During this historical period, the implementation of this linear mode of waste disposal within a racist and hierarchical social context must have made it easy, even expedient, to condone the practices of disposing of waste in poor and minority communities and providing them comparatively substandard sanitation services. As seen in the historical and modern-day experience of communities burdened by waste, environmental inequalities persist (Melosi 2005, 197, 211–13, 218–20, 235; Pellow 2004). It was not until the environmental justice movement in the 1980s called attention to these spatiotemporal inequalities of waste that the impacts of waste disposal in marginalised communities emerged as a more broadly shared social concern, producing activism, public policies and education (Pellow 2004). The challenge, however, is that racism and marginalisation continue to exist in U.S. society in both cultural norms and institutions,

The municipal collection schedule  73

Figure 4.4  Rubbish dump and Italian waste pickers. Source: Photographed by the Asbury Park Board of Health, 1898. Courtesy Special Collections, George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences, Rutgers University Libraries.

and thus the conveyor belt of waste continues to ride on and perpetuate racial and class inequalities with our tacit participation.

Conclusion: toward new temporalities of waste When considering the ethics of waste production and disposal—who benefits and who is burdened by the biopolitical temporalities of waste inherent in the municipal waste collection system—we must ask: What other temporalities of waste would bring us into a more just and ethical relationship with each other and with nature? As this chapter argues, the current temporalities prioritise our clockwork-like movement of waste to achieve clean spaces for ourselves, without questioning wastefulness

74  Raysa Martinez Kruger itself, and without embodying concerns for the impacts of waste disposal on other people and spaces. More ethical and just temporalities would challenge us to embody waste management and disposal practices that achieve clean spaces for all and respect for nature by questioning ­wastefulness itself. Just as the institutionalisation and embodiment of our existing system since the late 1800s necessitated the massive synchronisation of our day-to-day practices, the challenge for us will be to ­collectively imagine and implement the waste temporalities necessary for our time.

Note 1 The NJSBoH annual reports, only cited within the text and not separately listed in the bibliography due to space limitations, can be accessed online through Rutgers University Libraries at: www.libraries.rutgers.edu/history_of_medicine/ NJHS/statistics.

References Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Huxley, Margo. 2006. “Spatial Rationalities: Order, Environment, Evolution and Government.” Social and Cultural Geographies 7 (5): 771–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14649360600974758. Legg, Stephen. 2005. “Foucault’s Population Geographies: Classification, Biopolitics and Governmental Spaces.” Population, Space and Place 11 (3): 137–56. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.357. Melosi, Martin V. 2005. Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Moore, Sarah A. 2012. “Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Waste.” Progress in Human Geography 36 (6): 780–99. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F0309132512437077. Pellow, David. 2004. Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Zimring, Carl. 2015. Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States. New York: New York University Press.

5 Housing waste in remote Indigenous Australia Liam Grealy and Tess Lea

Houses dilapidate, deteriorate and decay, managing waste as they move toward its status. Repairs and maintenance (R&M) of anticipated or manifest points of failure can help stave off this entropy. Drawing on literatures of infrastructural breakdown and repair to complicate theories of use and waste, this chapter examines policy cultures surrounding Indigenous housing and maintenance. It objectifies the property and tenancy management systems recently introduced to govern Indigenous public housing in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia, which is an area of high housing need and erratic housing attention. The absence or delay of R&M under bureaucratic regimes responsible for maintaining the productivity of NT housing stock is itself a matter (and cause) of waste—of time, resources and effort. This chapter describes how such a situation emerges in spite of broadly shared desires for better outcomes among key stakeholders—tenants and governments included. We argue that just as waste is materially recalcitrant (Bennett 2010), so too is policy. The pronouncement of new policy artefacts, task forces or directions contend with the infrastructural and social residuals of former regimes, as policies and programs also transition between novel, discarded and resurrected states. Recent recommendations for R&M are situated here within a larger historical field in which remote Indigenous housing is perennially both in crisis and inadequately addressed, oscillating across a spectrum of use values and becoming in turn a cause of wasted time, labour and public funding. We draw on alliances with Healthabitat, a not-for-profit company dedicated to fixing dysfunctional “health hardware” (taps, showers, pipes, wiring, power points, sewage disposal) in Indigenous and other disadvantaged housing contexts, in order to emphasise the material breakdown and decomposition of housing subject to inconsistent attention. The chapter is divided into two parts. To begin, we reflect on the applicability of recent literature on waste and temporality for understanding entropic housing in regional and remote communities and urban town camps. We then analyse a recent legal decision, Various Applicants from Santa Teresa v Chief Executive Officer (Housing), which awarded compensation to Indigenous litigants living in remote public housing for the

76  Liam Grealy and Tess Lea NT ­Government’s failure to undertake timely repairs in their homes. This case highlights the often wasted time and labour required from residents to have their public housing maintained and how narrow determinations of safety enable housing to remain at low standards, hastening their wasting journey.

Repair, waste, time In her photographic series, “My Country, No Home,” Yanyuwa Garrwa artist Miriam Charlie (2016) represents the frustrations of Borroloola residents with government inaction over housing: “the government comes, has a look and goes back to their air-conditioned office.” Until 2019, the last houses built in Borroloola’s town camps were built in 2006. Charlie composes portraits in which Indigenous householders stand in front of tidy homes—ranging from tin sheds never connected to municipal services to three-bedroom fibro buildings—in various states of disrepair. The artist states she “wanted to take these photos to show the world how my people are living,” complementing pictures of dilapidated houses with images of family photographs on living room walls and hat collections. These curated personal objects convey shared attachments, memories and quotidian routines of domestic world-making in public housing spaces otherwise ­ subject to processes of material “unmaking” through policy effect and neglect (Arrigoitia 2014). Charlie’s series can be contrasted with Healthabitat’s photographic archive. Healthabitat’s images are decidedly de-aestheticised: typically closeup, decontextualised photographs of failure points in Indigenous housing. For over three decades, Healthabitat has conducted repair and maintenance work according to its licensed Housing for Health (HFH) methodology, which emphasises the importance of health hardware for residents’ abilities to enact what the company calls “healthy living practices”: washing oneself and one’s dependents; disposing of waste; storing and preparing food safely; and so on. Data collected from over 9,000 houses has shown the main causes of health hardware failure are a lack of routine maintenance and poor initial construction (Commonwealth 2017). Healthabitat’s archive provides visual evidence for this: cracked pipes that leak and drains that clog; exposed wires and blackened powerpoints; misplaced power outlets, taps and exhaust fans; and inappropriately installed particle boards, insulation and appliances that rot, degrade and calcify. Targeted R&M staves off various forms of waste: deteriorations in people’s bodies from unhealthy homes, in material components, and in the usefulness of the property for accommodating fluctuating households. Yet such targeted scrutiny of Indigenous housing, if it happens at all, is more typically preoccupied with novelty, not age or condition. It is at the planning, promising and pre-handover stages that construction must meet certain building standards and codes, while post-occupancy, it is householders who

Housing waste in Indigenous Australia  77 become the primary objects of surveillance and superintendence. Reflecting this latter emphasis, the Commonwealth’s National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing (NPARIH 2008–18) sought to improve the sustainability of government housing investments by insisting upon standardised remote area property and tenancy management arrangements (ANAO 2012). NPARIH increased total stock and marginally reduced overcrowding (Commonwealth 2017), but the general picture remains one of significant shortage and neglect, and Indigenous residents continue to live with broken things. Having already expended 5.4 billion dollars, the recent Remote Housing Review (hereafter Review) of NPARIH recommended that “A recurrent program must be funded to maintain existing houses, preserve functionality and increase the life of housing assets” (Commonwealth of Australia 2017, 75). This key, yet-to-be-mandated recommendation identifies the dynamic materiality of housing. As Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007) write, “Architectures are morphogenetic figures forged in time, tacking against a general entropic tendency” (6). Over time, things wear out, break and fall apart. Without careful intervention, this process accelerates. Repair and maintenance are broad categories of intervention, on a wide spectrum that extends from practices of upkeep, mending, cleaning, tinkering and work­ around, to upgrading, repurposing, renovation, deconstruction, demolition and rebuilding. Such practices respond to dynamic material situations that we might variously call deterioration, dilapidation, entropic decay and, in legal terms, “reasonable wear and tear.” Ethnographies of infrastructure frequently note that infrastructures become visible when inoperable, with R&M performing a necessary role “between breakdown and restoration of the practical equilibrium” (Graham and Thrift 2007, 3), and as practices of “mending order” (Sormani, Bovet and Strebel 2018, 13). Healthabitat (2019) data of Indigenous housing prior to their repair intervention records notably low “practical equilibria” for housing function: 37 per cent of houses have a working shower; 29 per cent have laundry services working; and 59 per cent a working toilet. While Graham and Thrift (2007) acknowledge that breakdowns offer “the means by which societies learn and learn to re-produce,” this is simply optimistic potential (5). There is nothing inevitable about breakdowns generating innovative or effective solutions, nor to such solutions being repeated in some progressivist model of iterative improvement. Further, that something is repaired does not make it a good, original installation. Acknowledging instances of repair as human labour and ingenuity, we should also examine impediments to repair practices, and systems that oversee relative dysfunction before, as and after infrastructures are installed. But first, let us briefly examine how the poor state of public housing in Australian Indigenous communities justifies the conceptual framing of housing (as) waste. On the one hand, we can provide numerous examples of modern housing’s literal function, and failings, to remove wastewater

78  Liam Grealy and Tess Lea (including sewage) along with rubbish, chemicals, gases and so on, to municipal pipes, septic tanks and leach fields. On the other hand, we can draw on work in waste and discard studies that emphasises the dynamism of matter in relation to complex circular economies of value and use. In John Frow’s (2001) terms: “Waste is the degree zero of value, or it is the opposite of value, or it is whatever stands in excess of value systems grounded in use” (21). But such a status as waste does not foreclose an object’s incorporation into commodity markets (such as via waste management), and nor is it immutable. As Joshua Reno (2017) writes: “value is a mutable social relation and not an inherent characteristic of things themselves” (vii). In Michael Thompson’s important book, Rubbish Theory (1979), rubbish is characterised by its potential for an abrupt shift in value: “The rubbish to durable transition is an all-or-nothing transfer … across two boundaries, that separating the worthless from the valuable and that between the covert and the overt” (26). Rundown housing can re-emerge with new values, as when dilapidated inner-city housing stock undergoes a process of transformation via gentrification. However, these frameworks need adjusting for understanding Indigenous public housing in the NT. For a start, the drivers for a housing market where many Indigenous people live are rarely present, much to the dismay of conservative commentators bent on encouraging individual mortgages. More importantly, despite the poor condition of many houses, as Miriam Charlie shows, acute shortages provide few alternatives for residents but to continue living with broken things. This ongoing utility signals the “transient” value that Thompson attributes to most objects as they decrease in use and exchange value over time, even if, through the attachments that residents maintain to family homes, the building is also durably valued, even invaluable. Certain (disposal) categories employed by the NT Department of Housing, such as “Legacy housing” and “Beyond Economic Repair” (examined below), can variously reduce the forms of ongoing ­governmental attention that individual houses might receive or establish a temporal finitude by removing them from stock altogether. But such categorisations do not guarantee the removal of houses from effective circulation, nor their move towards demolition or renewal. Such buildings may well continue to be lived in, even if functionally they are “non-houses” (Lea and Pholeros 2010). To what extent, then, is the concept of waste an appropriate analytic for understanding housing in Indigenous communities? We propose that it is useful for recognising the dynamic materiality of objects and the related flexibility of value determinations, including as other regimes of value (time and labour) come into play. If, as William Viney (2014) writes, waste is “matter out of time” (2), as time “provides a measure of our uses, our projects and our ambitions” (3), then how houses transition into waste through differently valued temporal registers of attention, speed and labour warrants analysis. Even if wasted houses are pulled into

Housing waste in Indigenous Australia  79 continuing use, their deterioration and dysfunction signal wasted potential, through shortened lifespans for public infrastructure. The failure to provide for cyclical repairs and maintenance is further exacerbated by a prevailing conception of much Indigenous housing as unprofitable stock. Its potential to generate capital is presumed to be exhausted from the point of installation, before which profit can be turned through bureaucratic, design, procurement and construction work, and after which money is presumed wasted. Public housing is often allowed to waste through disinvestment when it escapes settler capitalist cycles of exchange and value creation. The dilapidation of housing proceeds alongside publication of serial government reviews and announcements of new funding programs and ­ partnerships. Here, assembly recommendations are invariably cast in the future perfect tense: proposing new or revised approaches and promising new housing construction within defined budget periods. The eventfulness of such publications, including their speculative futures, are otherwise experienced as ongoing deferral and delay by those with pressing needs to sleep safely tonight or to return to country yesterday. Unlike political announcements, housing decay is rarely a swift or spectacular process. A drain clogs, a stove element breaks, a fence collapses, a floor tile cracks and lifts. This is a normalised wasting within differentiated regimes of value, and it is difficult to intercept. Speaking of the ongoing resistance mustered against proposals to release toxic particulate matter over their Baltimore neighbourhood, an informant in Chloe Ahmann’s (2018) ethnography notes: “[i]t’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing” (146). The class action studied below and the complaints that it describes are events constructed in the necessary genres of the state, in order to demand recognition of situations that are otherwise deemed acceptable, as normalised wasting. As legal proceedings, the class action is a visible, crystallised event that narrates and infers the everyday, cumulative responses to the unremitting experience of housing failure that residents endure: phone calls, complaints, reports, scheduling, follow-ups, appointments, fines, inspections and more reports. As a multi-staged event coordinated by residents and their legal allies to concentrate an urgent focus on long-term, policy-tolerated cruddiness, the class action is what Ahmann (2018) characterises as a form of “moral punctuation: an explicit marking of time that condenses protracted suffering and demands an ethical [or legal] response, eschewing the delays of political caution and the painstaking work of ensuring scientific certainty” (144). Pursuing such action, including the demands it placed on the housing department to make submissions and meet deadlines, frames time as not simply a container for events, but as a strategy to enforce recognition and remediation. The legal proceedings also provided a contest for media narration in a context otherwise represented through “incremental and accretive” suffering around relatedly normalised wasting (Nixon 2011, 4).

80  Liam Grealy and Tess Lea

Legal protections for habitable housing On 27 February 2019 Les McCrimmon, Presiding Member of the Northern Territory Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NTCAT), ruled that litigants living in public housing in the remote community of Santa Teresa (also known as Ltyentye Apurte) should be awarded compensation for the government’s failure to provide necessary and timely repairs to their ­ homes. This is especially pertinent given the policy insistence that centrally governed property management would automatically improve conditions for residents. A former mission, Santa Teresa is now an Arrernte community 85 kilometres south-east of Alice Springs towards the Simpson Desert in Central Australia, where houses are mostly ageing cinder block structures built in the 1970s and 1980s. The decision in Various Applicants from Santa Teresa v Chief Executive Officer (Housing) [2019] NTCAT 7 (hereafter Various) confirmed that the NT Government has a legal obligation to ensure remote public housing is habitable and in good repair. Legal action began in 2016 with the lawsuit brought by 70 individual tenants demanding action for over 600 repairs. Residents were represented by the Australian Lawyers for Remote Aboriginal Rights (ALRAR), following initial consultation by ALRAR in late 2015 and a survey of the condition of housing in early 2016. This prompted the delivery of 70 Initiating Applications to NTCAT on 5 February 2016, after initial communications with the NT Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) outlining serial repair and maintenance issues received no response. At the time of filing, “78 per cent of tenants’ households did not have fully functioning facilities required for personal hygiene and the safe removal of human waste” (Patira 2016, 3). Once this class action was lodged, the DHCD hired private contractors to complete a number of the specified repairs, while also countersuing the Applicants for unpaid rent and for the costs of unapproved repairs. McCrimmon eventually dismissed the government’s counter claim, ruling that the DHCD had breached its obligations as a landlord under the Residential Tenancies Act 1999 (NT) (RTA). While four Applicant-households were examined in the decision, negotiations for settlements of the remaining 66 cases are still underway. Media and advocate commentaries on this case repeatedly turned to Applicant Jasmine Cavanagh’s situation, as her account of neglect was the most clearly eventful. Cavanagh described a leaking shower and a blocked toilet which spread raw sewage through her home. Wastewater would also leak out of the sink and through the wall into her kitchen: When it was leaking, we would have to mop up dirty water about every four hours. I would mop it up at 8 pm, then get up at midnight and mop it up again, and then get up in the early morning and mop it up again. (Bickley 2019)

Housing waste in Indigenous Australia  81 The house of fellow Applicant, Charlie Lynch, the father of an eightyear-old son with a congenital intestinal disease, lacked an indoor toilet and bathroom. He notes the patience required by Indigenous residents: “We are waiting, waiting, waiting. We get frustrated. We need a better house to live in for our sick kid, to help him grow stronger” (Ryan 2018). Enforced waiting and deferral are techniques of contemporary settler colonial (administrative) violence. In worlds where state processes assume both the time-availability and passivity of Indigenous people, a calculus of who and what will or will not wait is in constant operation. While a valued chance to jump on a licensed, fully fuelled vehicle for a necessary trip cannot wait, making a complaint, given the infinite ways such an act meets accumulating constraints and obstacles, might be put off. Such reluctance becomes relevant when deciding who is to blame for the house-becoming-waste. Under the 1982 Housing Act (NT), the Chief Executive Officer (Housing) is established as the landlord of public housing tenancies. The Housing Act outlines the tenant’s obligations over the maintenance of their dwelling: The tenant of a dwelling must keep the dwelling and its equipment in the condition that, in the opinion of the Chief Executive Officer (Housing), it was in when that person became the tenant of that dwelling or as improved from time to time by the Chief Executive Officer (Housing), fair wear and tear, and damage by, or arising out of, fire, storm and tempest, flood or earthquake excepted. (s19[1], emphasis added) Together with the other Applicant cases, Cavanagh’s testimony was scrutinised for the instances when she punctuated her endurance of the human faecal waste that was laying waste to her house with literate and clearly datestamped complaints. This is the administrative pivot required for routine neglect to become a recognised event. The “fair wear and tear” clause is important for determining the acceptable condition of housing stock and responsibility for specific defects, but the Housing Act is not the chief legislation governing tenancies: it is the Residential Tenancies Act 1999 (NT). The RTA specifies that premises are not to be let unless habitable and safe, with section 48 specifying that: the landlord must ensure that the premises and ancillary property to which an agreement relates: (a) are habitable; (b) meet all health and safety requirements specified under an Act that apply to residential premises or the ancillary property; and (c) are reasonably clean when the tenant enters into occupation of the premise.

82  Liam Grealy and Tess Lea The class action launched by the Santa Teresa Applicants was the first time remote Aboriginal tenants sought to collectively enforce their rights to housing at a safe and habitable standard under the RTA (Patira 2016). It also pulled the issue of wasted time into view. While wanting emergency repairs undertaken was the initial prompt for action, by the time of the NTCAT hearing, the Applicants were also seeking compensation for what they had endured in the interim. Determining culpability for houses going to waste was both a matter of fact and significant legislative interpretation. Since the key claims for compensation concerned whether the premises and ancillary property were indeed habitable, and that the NT Government had failed to maintain the premises accordingly, much depended on defining habitability. Presiding Member McCrimmon noted that “habitable” is not defined in the RTA. He turned to a common law meaning, determining that habitability is not met if the premises and ancillary property posed “a threat to the tenant’s safety, going to both structural and health issues” (Various 2019, 120). Tenants needed to demonstrate that repairs were neglected by the landlord and that the repairs were a corporeal safety threat. The determination then turned on whether and when specific hardware failures made individual dwellings uninhabitable and when complaints were administratively legible. The RTA requires that, once notified, the landlord “act with reasonable diligence in carrying out the repair or maintenance” (s22). Notably, “reasonable diligence,” like habitability, is also not defined. Again drawing on common law, the Presiding Member determined that “reasonable diligence” depends on the nature of the defect being repaired. In terms of theories of waste, McCrimmon was acknowledging that the category of dysfunction is determined by the significance of the object to impeding or enabling healthy living practices for residents—that is, by its apparent capacity to lay waste to a tenant’s physical body, or its value as a threat. This is also judged in temporal terms: slow injury is insufficient. In Cavanagh’s case, McCrimmon eventually found “that the leaking shower, combined with the blocked toilet, did pose a threat to the health of Ms Cavanagh and the other occupants of the premises so as to render the premises not habitable” (Various 2019, 143, emphasis added). However, the ruling shows the arbitrariness of wasting effects. Despite over six years of complaint and insufficient fix-work, McCrimmon determined the injury period existed for a total of 269 days. Conversely, other parts of Cavanagh’s claim, including that “the electrical powerpoint near the oven was broken and had exposed wires from about 2014,” did not constitute a “self-evident” claim of a safety threat. That is, Cavanagh could not find that these items rendered her premises uninhabitable (Various 2019, 49). Applicant Ms Young similarly submitted repeated problems with her toilet: “The toilet did not flush properly. Often, I could not get waste to flush down the pipe” (Various 2019, 192). While McCrimmon acknowledged the Respondent’s failure to act with reasonable diligence to have the toilet

Housing waste in Indigenous Australia  83 repaired on at least one occasion (this taking 76 days), the claim that this rendered Ms Young’s residence uninhabitable was dismissed for lack of evidence. Critically, Ms Young had not rendered her issues with waste a matter of record. What was an immediate health risk for 269 days in one case could not be registered in another without an associated written and date-stamped complaint. The valued object shifts from case law definitions of health threat to administrative registers of notation. The proceedings elucidate a significant dimension of classifying actionable waste: that of bureaucratic legibility. As Lisa Gitelman (2014) writes, documents are defined by “the know-show function”: “if all documents share a ‘horizon of expectation,’ then … that horizon is accountability” (1–2). But it was not only the Applicants’ records of individual housing defects that faced harsh judgement. The Respondent’s record-keeping was demonstrably inadequate. The department was not only denied its counterclaim of rental arrears because of its faulty documentation, but the accuracy of its rental payment records overall were also found wanting, together with its counterclaims for the cost of repairs. Here, the Presiding Member found that repairs undertaken by the government’s contractors lacked appropriate documentary evidence, including invoices and payment receipts. McCrimmon was scathing: “For reasons which, again, were not adequately explained, the Respondent tendered almost no evidence in support of its claim for costs of repair, and the evidence that was submitted was woeful” (Various II 2019, 9). In subsequent proceedings to determine who was owed what costs or compensation, the Respondent’s changing claims, apparent lack of rental records and failure to provide particulars to the Applicant and NTCAT on request were considered. McCrimmon concluded that “the Respondent proceeded with what was ultimately found to be unsustainable claims, resulting in a waste of both the Applicants’ money and time” (Various II 2019, 9). The waste of time and effort generated through the DHCD’s attempts to stall the proceedings, to lodge counterclaims and to announce revised claims within the hearing and without prior notice or the required amended documents signal the tactics of “paperfare” (Lea, Howey and O’Brien 2018). These tactics buy time for governments, but wear a complainant down, corroding wills to proceed by wasting time, even as the economic and temporal costs of enforcing one’s legal rights as a tenant accrue. This is not to assert, however, that neglect is straightforwardly intentional, even if the failure to reform waste-generating systems may be negligent. Rather than attributing intent to singular culprits, we are identifying a confederacy of causes, with differentiated valuations of time and decompositional housing among them.

Policy, classification, waste Accounts of Indigenous housing often interpret defective houses as ­exemplary of tenant damage, reinscribing highly racialised conceptions of

84  Liam Grealy and Tess Lea Indigenous pathology while rarely applying the same analysis to the policy worlds responsible for maintaining that housing. The high turnover of executive staff responsible for managing NT public housing, for instance, rarely comes into view: Since the Department’s establishment in 2012, it has had four different Ministers, with the longest tenure being 16 months, and it has had a different Chief Executive for each of its three Annual Reports … Annual Reports show that at June 2015 only two of the 10 people listed in the executive team held positions in that team in the previous reporting year and no one in the executive team had been in the team for two years. (Public Accounts Committee 2016, 66) This typically unremarked upon departmental instability accelerates entropic housing journeys. Shifting classifications of the state of housing— how wasted they are deemed to be—shapes the attention they receive. When the agency responsible fails to maintain, replace or repair houses in a timely manner, a house may be deemed “Beyond Economic Repair” (BER). Termite damage or corrosion may make a building structurally unsound, as might a decision that the property is “unlawful or obsolete, or for any other reason as determined by the Chief Executive Officer (Housing)” (DHCD 2018). Laying waste to a house is thus not simply a function of its value as capital nor even its maintenance biography, but of other judgements about time and value: whether a complaint is made in time, whether illness or injury occurs fast or slow, and key to all this is the question of whose time is most wastable. The BER classification masks a long series of prior determinations about what is worth attending to, how, and to what standard in the house’s maintenance biography. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of waste, our analysis shows that how dysfunction is measured, the status it is accorded and the techniques for defining time and determining its significance in law affects how housing is tended on its entropic journey through states of becoming waste. Within these somewhat arbitrary calculations, the risks to tenants’ lives are also attributed different values, and, like the material surrounds of the house, are subject to contradictory attention and neglect regimes. This is what Indigenous social policy is: an encounter with disruption and uncertainty, with Indigenous people expected to endure the perdition. It begs the question of what non-wasteful policy might look like.

References Ahmann, Chloe. 2018. “ ‘It’s Exhausting to Create an Event out of Nothing’: Slow Violence and the Manipulation of Time.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (1): 142–71. Arrigoitia, Melissa Fernández. 2014. “UnMaking Public Housing Towers: The Role of Lifts and Stairs in the Demolition of a Puerto Rican Project.”

Housing waste in Indigenous Australia  85 Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space 11 (2): 167–96. https://doi.org/10.2752/175174214X13891916944634. Australian National Audit Office. 2012. Implementation of the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing in the Northern Territory. Audit Report No. 12, 2011–12. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bickley, Ella. 2019. “Grata Fund Supports Compensation Win for Remote Aboriginal Residents.” UNSW Newsroom. 3 April 2019. https://newsroom.unsw.edu. au/news/business-law/grata-fund-supports-compensation-win-remote-aboriginalresidents. Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service. 2016. Submission from the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service Inc to the Public Accounts Committee, Legislative Assembly of the NT. March. Alice Springs. https://parliament.nt.gov. au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/362490/Submission_No_10_Central_Australian_ Aboriginal_Legal_Aid_Service.pdf. Charlie, Miriam. 2016. “Miriam Charlie: No Country, No Home.” Artlink, 1 June 2016. www.artlink.com.au/articles/4496/miriam-charlie-no-country-no-home/. Commonwealth of Australia. 2017. Remote Housing Review: A Review of the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing and the Remote Housing Strategy (2008–2018). Canberra: Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Department of Housing and Community Development. 2018. “Disposal of Housing Properties.” Darwin: Northern Territory Government, 11 September 2018. https:// dlghcd.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/567995/HSG2016-01846-5~001-Disposalof-Housing-Properties-policy-DRAFT-10092018.pdf. Frow, John. 2001. “Invidious Distinction: Waste, Difference, and Classy Stuff.” UTS Review 7 (2): 21–31. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/34126. Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. 2007. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (3): 1–25. Lea, Tess, Kirsty Howey and Justin O’Brien. 2018. “Waging Paperfare: Subverting the Damage of Extractive Capitalism in Kakadu.” Oceania 88 (3): 305–19. https:// doi.org/10.1002/ocea.5203. Lea, Tess and Paul Pholeros. 2010. “This is not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing.” Public Culture 22 (1): 187–209. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2009-021. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Patira, Elly. 2016. “Cuts Both Ways: Tenants’ Rights and the Double-Sided Consequences of ‘Secure Tenure’ in Remote Aboriginal Communities.” Indigenous Law Bulletin 8 (23): 3–9. Public Accounts Committee. 2016. Report on Repairs and Maintenance of Housing on Town Camps. Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory. https://parliament. nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/363871/Report_on_Repairs_and_Maintenance_ of_Housing_on_Town_Camps_May_2016.pdf. Reno, Joshua. 2017. “Foreword.” In Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, by Michael Thompson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, vi–xiii.

86  Liam Grealy and Tess Lea Ryan, Hannah. 2018. “This 8-year-old Boy’s House is Making Him Sick. The NT Government is his Landlord.” BuzzFeed News, 2 December 2018. www.buzzfeed. com/hannahryan/santa-teresa-housing-health. Sormani, Philippe, Alain Bovet and Ignaz Strebel. 2018. “Introduction: When Things Break Down.” In Repair Work Ethnographies: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality, edited by Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet and Philippe Sormani. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–27. Various Applicants from Santa Teresa v Chief Executive Officer (Housing) [2019] NTCAT 7, 27 February 2019. www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/nt/ NTCAT/2019/7.html. Various Applicants from Santa Teresa v Chief Executive Officer (Housing) [2019] NTCAT 12, 13 May 2019. www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/nt/ NTCAT/2019/12.html. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury.

6 The imaginaries of Beirut’s “invisible” solid waste Exploring walls as temporal pauses amidst the Beirut garbage crisis Christine Mady Introduction On 17 July 2015, Beirut’s population woke up to piles of garbage, unaware that this scene would last for years. The crisis was caused by the failure of an emergency plan for the solid waste management (SWM) of Beirut and Mount Lebanon (BML) that had been in place post-war, since 1997. As the crisis continued, responses included piling up garbage, transporting or burning it nocturnally or even building walls. This chapter draws on two periods of primary research about these walls, conducted first in October 2015, with follow-up visits in August 2018. The aim was to understand their role in the ongoing crisis. I argue that these walls created a temporal pause amidst the unresolved crisis and protected open urban spaces from the accumulation of garbage. Over time, the walls exemplified and projected an imaginary of a “clean city.” This imaginary was transformative; it affected perceptions of public spaces and a range of social practices more generally and it became a powerful symbolic means of collectively counteracting the crisis. What, then, is a “clean city” imaginary, and how is it related to time? One’s first encounter with a city is through its public spaces, and if haphazard rubbish is seen, it is usually culturally repulsive and attributed to an urban malfunction (Cornea, Véron and Zimmer 2017, 731). If it endures, it signals a crisis. Garbage and the lack of its management have an impact on people’s everyday lives by generating an atmosphere of instability (Furniss 2017, 304). This interplay between public space, garbage, practices and experiences is dynamic and can be examined relationally as an intertwining of objects, persons and activities unfolding across time (Knierbein and ­Tornaghi 2015). Urban public spaces are generally comprised of streets, squares and parks. These planned spaces are obdurate, long-lasting and integrated within the urban tissue, but they are unevenly available for use and appropriation. Public spaces are “not a blank canvas for all to use, but a dynamic and multilayered socio-spatial and historical construct” ­(Lehtovuori 2010, 42). But in a crisis situation, when urban rhythms are disrupted (Lefebvre 2004), public spaces cannot be considered only as physical

88  Christine Mady locations; they need to be understood spatiotemporally, as the nexus of social practices, material forms, experiences and imaginaries (Lefebvre 1991; Lehtovuori 2010). Several scholars have proposed concepts to address the reconfiguration of public spaces in unstable times. This analytical spectrum of urban spaces (Carmona, de Magalhães and Hammond 2008) includes those termed variously as temporary public spaces (Haydn and Temel 2006), loose spaces (Franck and Stevens 2007), lost space (Trancik 1986), urban cracks (LoukaitouSideris 1996) or weak places (Lehtovuori 2010). The latter refers to spaces which, through their materiality and perceived under-used state, can be temporarily claimed, lending themselves to be imagined and used for different purposes, such as garbage stockpiling. In 2015, BML’s public spaces became such spaces, where the rapid accumulation of garbage became the marker highlighting the temporality of these appropriated, malleable and “under-defined” spaces (Lehtovuori 2010, 141). A focus on temporality reveals the lived potential of an urban open space, where experiences and practices are dynamic and could be shortterm or enduring. Over time, a place changes depending on who uses it and how, what is present in it and how it is perceived through time. The longer particular uses and practices persist, the more likely that rhythms and habits get established and perceptions, beliefs and emotions get attached to the place. Gradually, the panoply of combinations of physical and virtual objects, people and activities generates opportunities for new encounters and social practices (Merrifield 2012). In this case, encounters with garbage have the potential to change the temporality of a public space, which in itself becomes the nexus of “assembly, encounters and simultaneity,” telling a “story” with a mixture of “material, mental and social” aspects (Lehtovuori 2010, 127–8). The temporary spaces generated by crises are reactions to an interruption of planned urban processes (Ferlenga 2006). They may reflect an “infrastructural collapse” (Furniss 2017, 302) and a state of weak planning, such that short-term tactics replace absent long-term strategies for meeting collective needs (Andres 2013). In coping with crisis situations such as the SWM crisis in BML, urban public spaces have been temporarily renegotiated. In this sense, temporary spaces challenge the idea of planned spaces (Groth and Corijn 2005), providing a temporal pause, an interruption to the crisis in people’s perception of filth and disorder. These spaces are “not static, but a shifting resource whose boundaries may change quickly over time as a result of social negotiation” (Brown 2006, 22). The actions, objects and encounters at play lead to a remodelling of public space, which is simultaneously “constituted and put at risk” (Lehtovuori 2010, 43). In such circumstances, material objects become actors of change affecting space: over time, the trash bag, with its traces of liquid, its invisible sensory flows or its burning, changes experiences and perceptions of a public space. In BML, in the absence of a functioning SWM plan, the

Beirut’s garbage crisis  89 a­ccumulation of garbage relentlessly continues, and requires a form of interruption—a ­spatiotemporal pause—to change this state. The tactic of building temporary and adaptable walls that visually separate waste functions as a temporal counterargument (Raynor 2018), a response to the unresolved crisis. Bags and walls then tell urban stories, blocking the sight of garbage and, generating a new atmosphere, they enact a temporary delay, a stalling and suspension of crisis. By temporarily masking garbage, they help the space appear sanitised, recalling the period of management before the crisis. Walls also change the dynamics of the public place, its rhythms and practices, and narrate the temporality and materiality of its objects in new ways (Lehtovuori 2010, 129; 2012); a new spatiotemporal imaginary of a “clean” city is generated. Simin Davoudi (2018) distinguishes between “imagination” and “imaginary” in urban planning literature. She draws on Edward Said’s insight that “the struggle over geography is not only about soldiers and cannons, but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (quoted in Davoudi 2018, 101). For Davoudi, “spatial imaginaries” result from a geographic and political struggle over “conceptions, perceptions and lived experiences of place” (101). Yet they are “often adopted and enacted as unproblematic representations of places of yesterday, today and tomorrow” (97), coming to function as “true representations of the ‘reality’ ” (98). In a crisis situation, the imaginary is a representation of ongoing tensions embedded in space and time. In BML, the struggle to persist in one’s everyday life amidst the unresolved crisis and the seemingly never-ending garbage accumulation was supported by a counter-imaginary of order and cleanliness, one that was ironically made by manipulating and enclosing the garbage itself. Over time, trash, walls, people and space created a “clean city” imaginary. A collective imaginary such as this affects common practices; it “produces a community, holds it together by giving it a temporary coherence and identity, and subjects it to change” (Davoudi 2018, 99–100; cf. del Carmen Morales, Harris and Öberg 2014). The constructed walls “enable and legitimate collective spatial practices” (Davoudi 2018, 101) by shifting boundaries that temporally differentiate spaces from each other: the dirty, unbounded spaces of permanent crisis from the clean, stable and protected ones. The walls therefore enable people “to see in a thing what it is not, to see it other than it is” (Castoriadis 1987, 81), “to imagine how we might be otherwise” (Yusoff and Gabrys, quoted in Davoudi 2018, 105). These walls triggered a particular temporal capacity and reorientation: they arrested the crisis, by making the garbage disappear, albeit in a fragile and temporary manner. The walls generated the curious effect of momentary forgetting: if the trash is out of sight, one acts differently. This chapter therefore examines the role of walls as urban objects and as a spatiotemporal resistance tactic, by outlining the relation between everyday practices, perceptions and actions in Beirut’s urban open spaces amidst crisis.

90  Christine Mady

The background Constituted in 1943, the Republic of Lebanon with its free market economy maintained its historical pluralism through a consociational government, which is based on the representation of the various politico-­sectarian communities, and consequent distribution of governmental roles. This had implications for stability, urban planning and other sectors (Mady and ­Chettiparamb 2016, 299). The civil war between 1975 and 1989 demolished ­Beirut’s centre, and caused social divisions along politico-sectarian lines. It left the country with a weak state and weak planning, where the provision of infrastructure operated across fragmented administrative entities, the relation of the central state to municipalities was loosely defined, and the population left with a sense of detachment and indifference to all that is public. In the absence of a strong state, a sense of belonging remained attached to the politico-­ sectarian community that managed to meet some collective needs (Mady and Chettiparamb 2016). Moreover, during the war, a laissez-faire attitude had prevailed in a country overshadowed by political instability. In 1977, the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) was established to address various pressing needs. Post-war endeavours focused on the reconstruction of Beirut’s centre, dealing with the displaced population and reconnecting the road network, while public spaces remained annihilated and neglected for a significant time period (Mady 2018). Planning was reduced to instating emergency plans to address pressing post-war needs, among them SWM in BML. Regarding SWM, several laws and decrees were issued in a series of attempts to determine responsibilities and address environmental concerns. Among them was the pre-war 1974 decree on the responsibility of municipalities for SWM (Massoud and Merhebi 2016). The need to raise awareness of common environmental concerns started with the 2002 decree attempting to change the perception of solid waste from being a burden to a “desired good with value” (Cornea, Véron and Zimmer 2017, 729). Yet within a highly fragmented society with strong communal belonging, these laws were often not implemented; each community refused to have waste in its territory. After the war, although municipalities were responsible for SWM, with some success stories outside BML, for example in Byblos (Massoud and Merhebi 2016), treatment and disposal remained largely unaddressed, partly due to austerity measures limiting municipalities’ budgets (MOE/UNDP/ECODIT 2011, 271). Municipal landfills and waste facilities continued to operate “on an ad hoc basis” while responsibility for the major landfills remained with the CDR (Massoud and Merhebi 2016, 6). These landfill sites served BML, the highest urban agglomeration in the country, with a concentration of services and tourism (Mattar et al. 2018). In 1997, an emergency plan was set up, with prolonged “emergency measures” extending until 2015 (MOE/UNDP/ECODIT 2011, 269–74), leaving the challenge of a consolidated SWM strategy essentially unresolved. The plan handed the collection, treatment and maintenance of the Naameh

Beirut’s garbage crisis  91 landfill site to the south of Beirut to a private company (Sukleen, then Sukomi, both under Averda Group) whose contract was consecutively renewed until its termination in July 2015 (MOE/UNDP/ECODIT 2011, 271). Unsupported by treatment plants, the Naameh site was expanded several times (MOE/UNDP/ECODIT 2011, 277). By 2001 this site had already reached its capacity, yet it kept operating until the crisis peak in July 2015 (Mikhael and Saadeh 2015). The tipping point The ministerial cabinet postponed bids for SWM in BML from December 2014 to January 2015 (Lakkis 2014a, 2014b), an impasse which was compounded by the closure of the Naameh landfill site for “some months” (Sidahmed 2015), which ended up being six months. This period coincided with a vacuum in the country’s presidency, partly paralysing the decisionmaking and executive apparatuses, owing to a lack of political consensus (MOE/UNDP/ECODIT 2011, 270). The overloaded landfill site became an eyesore, a large mound emitting foul odours (Mikhael and Saadeh 2015). Under pressure from demonstrating residents, supported by their political representatives, the landfill site officially closed on 17 July 2015. This stopped “Sukleen’s garbage trucks from adding to the oversaturated landfill” (Mikhael and Saadeh 2015, 3). In the absence of a deposit area, the closure affected solid waste collection in BML, and many municipalities disposed of the waste in streets and public spaces (Massoud and Merhebi 2016). The extent of the resulting SWM crisis was worthy of international media attention, which broadcast “iconic images of rivers of waste” (Furniss 2017, 301). Trash became the focus even in cultural milieus; one museum organised debates around “a tale of trash mountains, garbage rivers, and migratory birds” (Osseiran 2017). In a continuing political struggle, the government debated different possibilities, including exporting garbage, using incinerators or creating landfill sites (Wood 2015). All were met with resistance from the population, supported by various political parties (Baaklini 2018; Geha 2019; Issa 2015).

Temporary tactics The crisis, and the absence of a governmental SWM plan to deal with it, prompted a number of tactics, deployed at different spatiotemporal scales. These tactics emerged over different time-spans and included: hoarding, moving, reducing by burning or recycling, and the temporal pause tactic where walls were constructed. The first tactic employed by residents is reflected in the motto “time flies, waste stays,” which was used to explain the slow decomposition of solid waste in landfills and the need for different SWM strategies (Massoud and Merhebi 2016, 18). Municipalities shifted waste or camouflaged it in white bags (see Figure 6.1), hiding rather than treating it. These bags

92  Christine Mady

Figure 6.1  Garbage disguised in white bags along main roads. Source: Rita Nasr.

­ revented pedestrians from moving safely. In Beirut, one man was killed as p a trash-clogged pedestrian bridge forced him to cross a highway (The Daily Star 2015). The occupation of sidewalks by garbage piles over an extensive period transformed them into examples of what Lehtovuori calls “weak places”—those “forgotten, sidetracked, vacant and under defined urban spaces” whose potential can be realised in moments of crisis (2010, 2). In this case, they emerged as part of the dissociation from public responsibility that characterised the crisis. A second tactic practised by individuals was to move trash away from one’s community. One year after the crisis began, the government was still trying to advance landfill options, with tenders under review. It dealt with the situation in the interim by storing trash in parking lots near the proposed sites, or temporarily placing it in trucks ready to take off outside BML, while protestors blocked roads leading to quarries and other intended garbage-travel destinations (Mroueh 2015; Osseiran 2016). The deportation of garbage outside Beirut served only to shift the persisting problem to other sites, including mountain slopes and rivers (Wood 2015), and at other times to “unclear locations” (Saad and Barnard 2015). Newspaper coverage described the highlights of each day and included caricatures personifying trash bags as travellers invading various locations in and around BML. Ministers were concerned with resolving the issue to avoid facing “a much bigger problem” (Haboush 2016) in the future, alluding to politico-sectarian conflicts. At the country level, “the government never resolved the waste management problem—it just pushed the garbage out of

Beirut’s garbage crisis  93 sight” (Khawaja 2017). In 2017, the designated landfill sites were operational but were perceived as “time-bombs,”1 which warranted the return of trash to the streets as debates continued and garbage piled up (Obeid 2017). The third tactic adopted by some individuals and municipalities took the form of uncontrolled open-air dumping and burning (Massoud and Merhebi 2016, 8). Despite laws prohibiting it, illegal ad hoc burning persisted. As mountains of trash formed, activists started protesting to no avail, while various homegrown solutions surfaced and flourished. A number of NGOs saw an opportunity to promote recycling strategies in this crisis, and initiated projects that included recycling for plastic, paper, tin and glass (Ballout 2015; Massoud and Merhebi 2016).

The wall as temporal pause The fourth tactic adopted by residents in Beirut was the building of walls. Starting in October 2015, three months after the crisis peak, the author documented 20 walls that had emerged in three municipalities in Beirut’s eastern suburbs (see Figure 6.2). The research and documentation of the walls included mapping their locations, taking photographs of them, measuring their dimensions and inquiring about their materials and construction (see Table 6.1).

Figure 6.2  Map of the wall locations within the municipalities. Source: Rita Nasr.

Jdeideh

Nahr El Mot Jdeideh

Jdeideh

 1

 2

 4

Bouchrieh

Bouchrieh

Bouchrieh

 8

 9

10

Camil Chamoun

Camil Chamoun

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

Bouchrieh

 7

Camil Chamoun

November, 2015

Bouchrieh

 6

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

Date of construction

November, 2015

Al Madafen

New Jdeideh

Pierre Gemayel

Street name

  5a and 5b Dekwaneh Mirna Chalouhi

 3

Location

Wall #

Table 6.1  Attributes of the 20 documented walls Length (m)

Enclosing the street that links to the main road On the border of an empty lot

On the border of an empty lot

CMU and concrete block buttresses On the border of Antonine School parking On the border of an empty lot

95

12

90

75

118

  93 and 87

On the border of an 19 empty lot On the border of an 125 empty lot On the whole parking 70 border leaving the entrance On the pavement 13

Wall description

1.6

1.8

1.8

1.8–2

1.6

2 and 3

1.6–1.8

1.4–1.6

1.8

1.8

Height (m)

Municipality of Jdeideh Municipality of Dekwaneh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh

Municipality of Jdeideh Municipality of Jdeideh Municipality of Jdeideh

Constructed by

Secondary

Main

Main

Main

Secondary

Highway

Secondary

Secondary

Main

Main

Road type

94  Christine Mady

Industrial area

Industrial area

Jdeideh

Bouchrieh

Jdeideh

Jdeideh

Bouchrieh

Mar Roukouz

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Source: Christine Mady.

Location

Wall #

Camil Chamoun

Camil Chamoun

Camil Chamoun

Mar Takla

Barbar Abou Jaoude

Electricity company

Street name

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

November, 2015

October, 2015

October, 2015

Date of construction

On the border of pine land

On the border of an empty lot, with yellow writing On the border of an empty lot, including side walk On the border of a big storehouse

On the border of an empty lot, with a green cover On the border of an empty lot and abandoned building On the border of a cultivated lot

Next to the electricity station

Wall description

110

130

156

105

70

78

36

25

Length (m)

2

1.4

1.6

1.8

1.4

1.6

1.6

1.4–1.6

Height (m)

Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Boushrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh

Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh

Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh Municipality of Jdeideh and Al Bouchrieh

Constructed by

Secondary

Secondary

Secondary

Main

Secondary

Secondary

Secondary

Secondary

Road type

Beirut’s garbage crisis  95

96  Christine Mady

Figure 6.3  Strawberry seller sitting in front of a wall. Source: Rita Nasr.

The same walls were revisited in August 2018 to check their condition and impacts. Walls are naturally interesting urban objects in Beirut because of their role in the Lebanese wartime history, when they were constructed overnight as defence mechanisms to protect facades from bullets, or on streets to form demarcation lines (Khalaf 1998). Similarly, during the SWM crisis of 2015, walls became tactical resources, separating civic society protestors from internal security forces (Geha 2019). During the “you stink” protests, thousands of activists from different networks were mobilised in Beirut’s city centre, demanding shared accountability by authorities, and solutions for the SWM (Geha 2019). The localised tactic of building walls had the role of suppressing the reality of weak planning and addressing a political and geographic struggle. The walls became an important part of enduring the crisis and alleviating the situation in the short term. These walls enabled flexible and dynamic temporal pauses, which functioned quite literally as shields protecting open spaces and residents. These walls were most often built at the interstices of urban voids in these suburbs, or in weak places exposed by trash. They were time-markers, creating a new, temporary and contextspecific atmosphere conducive to cleanliness, contrasting what is defined and what is undefined, desired or not. Through the passage of time, the walls projected an imaginary of order and boundaries, re-establishing an urban rhythm and habits away from disorder, which enabled new encounters and modified the perceptions, experiences and practices of trash disposal.

Beirut’s garbage crisis  97 Based on the author’s research and documentation, the materiality of trash as a time-marker indicated that in areas where the walls were constructed, garbage was composed not only of food waste, but also of disposed electrical appliances and furniture, among other things, ranging from the ephemeral to the almost permanent. These have different disintegration time-spans, marking ongoing everyday activities with the passage of time. Garbage disposal locations varied but generally abutted road-edges, sidewalks and edges of empty lots, parking lots, agricultural land, school playground edges, cemeteries and one electric power plant (see Table 6.1). The materiality and persistence of the disposed objects were countered by the flexible boundaries of the walls and spaces, which adapted both spatially and temporally, and extended or contracted according to circumstances. This flexibility was evident in the walls’ materials—concrete masonry units (CMU); in their construction methods—stacking CMUs without mortar; in the variations in their dimensions; and in the signs, messages and graffiti that accompanied them. Several times, municipalities were quick in rebuilding walls that had been dismantled overnight to accommodate more waste, until gradually the dismantling stopped, and the location was no longer littered. The walls became an important spatiotemporal tactic for coping with a long-duration crisis within everyday life. They turned the distant dream of a crisis resolution into a reality where the crisis, though ongoing, was at least contained. There was a sense of solidarity and assurance in the assembly of walls that protected against the eyesore of waste and discouraged the passers-by from littering. Maintaining this type of new atmosphere required a different attitude towards solid waste disposal and a change in the habit of throwing things away indiscriminately in public spaces. The atmosphere shifted the perception of the context from a congested “dirty” place to a “clean” and accessible everyday public space. One example was the seated strawberry vendor, unaware of the trash heap behind him (see Figure 6.3). The walls provided a new urban perspective that countered the crisis with a new story that portrayed what a “clean” city requires: the consolidated action of the community to stop throwing indiscriminately in public spaces. Slowly, interest in the possibility of recycling gathered momentum, and some NGOs, specifically the Lebanesebased not-for-profit arcenciel, supported municipalities in initiating their SWM plans. The extent of the walls’ transformative effect was evident in the 2018 revisit. Although the crisis was ongoing, residents and municipalities had become aware of the need to work towards maintaining clean cities and finding alternatives to the disposal of rubbish in public spaces. The changes indicated an aversion towards throwing trash in locations along main and secondary roads where the walls were dismantled, and an awareness of maintaining clean public spaces. In some cases, walls were replaced by large trash bins or even flower beds (see Figure 6.4 and 6.5).

98  Christine Mady

Figure 6.4  Wall 10 in 2015. Source: Rita Nasr.

Figure 6.5  Wall 10 in 2015, replaced by a flower bed in 2018. Source: Rita Nasr.

The walls constructed along highways marked boundaries between municipalities, and persisted while the authority over SWM remained blurred (see Figures 6.6 and 6.7). In 2018, however, only three of the 20 documented walls remained standing.

Beirut’s garbage crisis  99

Figure 6.6  Wall 1 in 2015, persisting in 2018 (front view). Source: Rita Nasr.

Figure 6.7  Wall 1 in 2015, persisting in 2018 (side view). Source: Rita Nasr.

100  Christine Mady Reusing tyres, planting flowers and providing more bins were signs of proactive behaviour targeting positive change. The dismantling of some walls but not others signalled the persistence of communal boundaries and the fear of the crisis’ continuation in the absence of a national SWM plan.

Conclusion Within the context of a SWM crisis situation in BML, this chapter examined the role of garbage as a marker of under-defined public spaces and of temporary municipal walls as one waste disposal tactic among others. The history behind this crisis in Lebanon was explained, with the underpinning of a consociational government with a free market economy, and ongoing political instability. As in the case of SWM, this resulted in weak planning and fragmented decision-making that often benefited the private sector to the detriment of the public sector. The crisis reached its peak in July 2015 when BML’s public spaces were covered in garbage. In the absence of a national strategy, various coping tactics emerged within a context of fragmented communities. One tactic was the drawing of boundaries through the creation of temporary walls in Beirut’s eastern suburbs, separating trash from protected public spaces. The walls secured a temporal pause, which enabled a material and symbolic cleansing and a change in experiences and practices. By creating an atmosphere of clean spaces, these new encounters generated greater environmental awareness. The temporary construction of walls led to a sense that the crisis could be overcome at least at the local municipal level and had some impacts on social practices, for example, reducing indiscriminate littering in under-defined spaces and even encouraging recycling. The SWM crisis in the BML region is not resolved, only paused, and it was still being debated in summer 2019 (The Daily Star 2019), while other municipalities are actively seeking SWM solutions. Alongside burning and dumping “elsewhere” out of sight, BML remains dependent on landfills in surrounding areas, which will inevitably arrive at the same destiny of saturation and closure. Meanwhile, the tactic of constructing temporary walls, which over time succeeded in changing attitudes to garbage disposal in public spaces within some municipalities, continues. The 2015–18 assembly of temporary walls highlighted the public’s disengagement with the national crisis at large and with large and urban public spaces in particular, and demonstrated the potential of weak spaces to be utilised as tactical sites. The clean city imaginary enabled by the walls helped in reframing the crisis and raised awareness of the significance of individual and collective contributions to creating a clean urban environment. This imaginary can be recalled in a future crisis which is yet to come but probably destined to arrive at some point in time.

Beirut’s garbage crisis  101

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Rita Nasr for her support in the documentation of the walls.

Note 1 Just as the walls themselves evoked Lebanon’s wartime experience, so too a series of visual motifs of armed conflict, including that of the garbage “time bomb,” surfaced in the Lebanese press (BBC News 2015).

References Andres, Lauren. 2013. “Differential Spaces, Power Hierarchy and Collaborative Planning: A Critique of the Role of Temporary Uses in Shaping and Making Places.” Urban Studies 50 (4): 759–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098012455719. Brown, Alison. 2006. “Urban Public Space in the Developing World: A Resource for the Poor.” In Contested Space: Street Trading, Public Space, and Livelihoods in Developing Cities, edited by Alison Brown. Rugby: ITDG Publishing, 17–36. Carmona, Matthew, Claudio de Magalhães and Leo Hammond, eds. 2008. Public Space: The Management Dimension. London: Routledge. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. [1975] The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cornea, Natasha, René Véron and Anna Zimmer. 2017. “Clean City Politics: An Urban Political Ecology of Solid Waste in West Bengal, India.” Environment and Planning A 49 (4): 728–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16682028. Davoudi, Simin. 2018. “Imagination and Spatial Imaginaries: A Conceptual Framework.” Town Planning Review 89 (2): 97–107. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2018.7. del Carmen Morales, Margaret, Leila Harris and Gunilla Öberg. 2014. “Citizenshit: The Right to Flush and the Urban Sanitation Imaginary.” Environment and Planning A 46 (12): 2816–33. https://doi.org/10.1068/a130331p. Ferlenga, Alberto. 2006. “Inconsistent Vernaculars.” In Contemporary Public Space: Un-Volumetric Architecture, edited by Aldo Aymonino, and Valerio Paolo Mosco. Milan: Skira, 137–9. Franck, Karen A. and Quentin Stevens. 2007. “Tying Down Loose Space.” In Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, edited by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens. London: Routledge, 1–34. Furniss, Jamie. 2017. “What Type of Problem is Waste in Egypt?” Social Anthropology 25 (3): 301–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12421. Geha, Carmen. 2019. “Politics of a Garbage Crisis: Social Networks, Narratives, and Frames of Lebanon’s 2015 Protests and their Aftermath.” Social Movement Studies 18 (1): 78–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1539665. Groth, Jacqueline and Eric Corijn. 2005. “Reclaiming Urbanity: Indeterminate Spaces, Informal Actors and Urban Agenda Setting.” Urban Studies 42 (3): 503–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500035436. Haydn, Florian and Robert Temel, eds. 2006. Temporary Urban Spaces: Concepts for the Use of City Spaces. Basel: Birkhäuser. Khalaf, Samir. 1998. “Contested Space and the Forging of New Cultural Identities.” In Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City, edited by Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 140–64.

102  Christine Mady Knierbein, Sabine and Chiara Tornaghi. 2015. “Relational Public Space: New ­Challenges for Architecture and Planning Education.” In Public Space and Relational Perspectives: New Challenges for Architecture and Planning, edited by Chiara Tornaghi and Sabine Knierbein. London: Routledge, 1–11. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum. Lehtovuori, Panu. 2010. Experience and Conflict: The Production of Urban Space. Farnham: Ashgate. Lehtovuori, Panu. 2012. “Towards Experiential Urbanism.” Critical Sociology 38 (1): 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920511407222. Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia. 1996. “Cracks in the City: Addressing the Constraints and Potentials of Urban Design.” Journal of Urban Design 1 (1): 91–103. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13574809608724372. Mady, Christine. 2018. “Public Space Activism in Unstable Contexts: Emancipation from Beirut’s Postmemory.” In Public Space Unbound: Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition, edited by Sabine Knierbein and Tihomir Viderman. New York: Routledge, 189–206. Mady, Christine and Angelique Chettiparamb. 2016. “Planning in the Face of ‘Deep Divisions’: A View from Beirut, Lebanon.” Planning Theory 16 (3): 296–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095216639087. Massoud, May and Farouk Merhebi 2016. Guide to Municipal Solid Waste Management. Beirut: American University of Beirut-Nature Conservation Center. https:// greenarea.me/wp-content/themes/divi-child/reports/guide_to_municipal_solid_ waste_management.pdf. Mattar, Lama, Mohamad G. Abiad, Ali Chaak, Mohamad Diab and Hussein Hassan. 2018. “Attitudes and Behaviors Shaping Household Food Waste Generation: Lessons from Lebanon.” Journal of Cleaner Production 198 (10): 1219–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.07.085. Merrifield, Andy. 2012. “The Politics of the Encounter and the Urbanization of the World.” City 16 (3): 269–83. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2012.687869. Mikhael, Marwan and Lana Saadeh. 2015. Solid Waste Management in Lebanon. 29 August 2015. Beirut: BLOMINVEST Bank. http://blog.blominvestbank.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/08/Solid-Waste-Management-in-Lebanon.pdf. MOE/UNDP/ECODIT. 2011. State of the Environment Report 2011 (SOER). Beirut: Wide Expertise Group. www.undp.org.lb/communication/publications/downloads/ SOER_en.pdf. Raynor, Ruth. 2018. “The Formation of Value in Spatial Imaginaries.” Town Planning Review 89 (2): 112–16. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2018.7. Trancik, Roger. 1986. Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Online newspaper articles Baaklini, Suzanne. 2018. “Mobilisation Aujourd’hui Contre le Projet d’Incinérateur de Déchets à Beyrouth.” L’Orient le Jour [Beirut], 31 July 2018. www.lorientlejour. com/article/1127897/mobilisation-aujourdhui-contre-le-projet-dincinerateur-abeyrouth.html.

Beirut’s garbage crisis  103 Ballout, Dana. 2015. “Mountains of Trash are New Scourge Plaguing Lebanon.” The Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2015. www.wsj.com/articles/mountains-of-trashare-new-scourge-plaguing-lebanese-capital-1438335037. BBC News. 2015. “Lebanon Cartoons Vent Anger at Rubbish Crisis.” 24 August 2015. www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34042913. The Daily Star [Beirut]. 2015. “Garbage Deluge Claims its First Fatality.” The Daily Star, 14 September 2015. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2015/Sep-14/ 315100-garbage-deluge-claims-its-first-fatality.ashx?utm_source=Magnet%26utm_ medium=Entity%20page%26utm_campaign=Magnet%20tools. The Daily Star [Beirut]. 2019. “Beirut, Mount Lebanon Garbage Crisis on Sept. 1: MP.” 20 August 2019. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2019/Aug20/489983-beirut-mount-lebanon-garbage-crisis-on-sept-1-hamadeh.ashx. Haboush, Joseph. 2016. “Chehayeb Rules out Return of Garbage Problem.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 9 August 2016. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/LebanonNews/2016/Aug-09/366289-chehayeb-rules-out-return-of-garbage-problem. ashx. Issa, Philip. 2015. “Residents of Planned Dump Site Outraged by Trash Scheme.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 11 September 2015. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/LebanonNews/2015/Sep-11/314816-residents-of-planned-dump-sites-outraged-bytrash-scheme.ashx. Khawaja, Bassam. 2017. “Lebanon Needs to Clean up its Act.” Executive Magazine, 10 November 2017. www.executive-magazine.com/opinion/lebanon-needs-toclean-up-its-act. Lakkis, Hasan. 2014a. “Cabinet Passes off Waste Issue to Committee.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 22 August 2014. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/ Aug-22/268077-cabinet-passes-off-waste-issue-to-committee.ashx. Lakkis, Hasan. 2014b. “Cabinet Postpones Waste Treatment Decision to 2015.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 23 December 2014. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/LebanonNews/2014/Dec-23/282090-cabinet-postpones-waste-treatment-decision-to-2015. ashx. Mroueh, Wassim. 2015. “Government Trash Plan Faces Obstacles.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 29 July 2015. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2015/Jul29/308751-government-trash-plan-faces-obstacles.ashx. Obeid, Ghinwa. 2017. “Municipalities Union Appeals Decision to Close Costa Brava.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 8 February 2017. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/ Lebanon-News/2017/Feb-08/392762-municipalities-union-appeals-decision-toclose-costa-brava.ashx. Osseiran, Dala. 2017. “Talking Trash: Sursock Museum Guests Discuss Garbage.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 17 October 2017. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/LebanonNews/2017/Oct-17/422933-talking-trash-sursock-museum-guests-discuss-garbage. ashx. Osseiran, Nazih. 2016. “Mystery Surrounds Request for Secrecy on Landfill Tenders.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 9 June 2016. www.dailystar.com.lb/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=356047&mode=print. Saad, Hwaida, and Anne Barnard. 2015. “Government and Protestors in Lebanon Weigh Next Move in Trash Dispute.” New York Times, 24 August 2015. www. nytimes.com/2015/08/25/world/middleeast/protests-in-beirut-over-uncollectedgarbage-turn-violent.html.

104  Christine Mady Sidahmed, Mazin. 2015. “Ministers Spar over Garbage Bill, Machnouk Hints at Old Vote Order.” The Daily Star [Beirut], 10 January 2015. www.dailystar.com.lb/ News/Lebanon-News/2015/Jan-10/283610-ministers-spar-over-garbage-bill-machnoukhints-at-old-vote-order.ashx. Wood, Josh. 2015. “Out of Sight, out of Mind, but Lebanon’s Rubbish Crisis Hasn’t Gone Away.” The National [Abu Dhabi], 12 August 2015. www.­ thenational.ae/world/out-of-sight-out-of-mind-but-lebanon-s-rubbish-crisis-hasn-t-goneaway-1.58297.

Part III

Disposability and persistence

7 “All of them had been forgotten” Waste as literary symbol in the Arab world Tasnim Qutait In “Out of Time,” a short story by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli (2013), the narrator’s watch regularly stops working at the airport on the way back to Palestine. The watch becomes “unable to count time” during the “exhaustive interrogation” (61), a malfunctioning that the narrator describes as merciful: [p]erhaps my watch was trying to comfort me by making me believe that all that search and delay had lasted zero minutes. As if nothing had happened. Or perhaps it simply refuses to count the time that is seized from my life, time whose only purpose is to humiliate me and send me into despair; a suspension of time that is intended for the obstruction of pain. (62) Shibli’s story marks temporality as a central tool of governance. Implicit in the narrator’s assertion that this malfunctioning watch is “never late when counting every second of this other time,” is the recognition that temporality is multiple (62, emphasis added). The watch is unlike “a Swiss watch whose primary concern is to count time with precision” (61), in that it has an anthropomorphic ability to comfort the narrator by refusing to work, consciously not counting the wasted time at border control, when her time does not count. Such humiliating experiences, the narrator reflects, are a feature of a “marginalized, minor life,” (61) determined by a political order dictating whose life it is that is out of sync, whose time can be wasted. Waste has often been defined in spatial terms, as a polluting material that cannot pass through a certain boundary. In Mary Douglas’s (1966) often-cited dictum that “where there is dirt there is system” (36), dirt is defined according to binaries of pollution and purity, as “matter out of place” (44). Critical work on human disposability tends towards similar spatial terms, where, as Zygmunt Bauman describes it, the production of “wasted humans” is seen as “an inescapable side-effect of order-building (each order casts some parts of the extant population as ‘out of place,’ ‘unfit’ or ‘undesirable’)” (2003, 4, original emphasis). Temporality has

108  Tasnim Qutait tended to be a secondary category in the conceptualisation of wasted, surplus and disposable lives. This speaks to a larger issue, as the analysis of international politics has historically been “overtly pre-occupied with spatial rather than temporal relations” (Hutchings 2013, 11). However, as I will argue, the production of temporality in fiction encourages a focus on the time-related aspects of wasted/wasting life, and thereby complicates metaphors of unwanted lives as flows, tides or swarms invading secured, privileged spaces. Waste itself, as we see in the framing of this volume, is defined by a temporal logic. Thinking of waste can therefore help to shift the spatial focus of political analysis, along the lines Christopher Schmidt describes when he argues that waste can be “a lens for rethinking obdurate stumbling blocks in critical theory” (2014, 17). The paradigm shifts of ecocriticism are informed by the longevity and toxicity of waste, by the concepts of the Anthropocene, deep time and slow violence. There is increased attention to the temporal logic determining what is unvalued, given the recognition that waste is “a long way from stuff that ‘just is,’ but rather that it becomes” (Gregson and Crang 2010, 1028). If dirt is matter out of place, waste, Rachele Dini (2016, 5) argues, is “matter out of time,” something that is discarded, the remnant of what came before. In this chapter, I consider these temporal dimensions of waste and wasting as represented in a selection of recent novels that explore disenfranchised life in the Arab world as suspension, as being “out of time.” I draw together the focus on the temporal logic of waste with the current shift in the migration studies field beyond what Kerilyn Schewel (2019) calls the “mobility bias,” and towards immobility, paying attention to conditions of waiting (Hage 2009), suspension (Oelgemöller 2010) and “stuckness” (Jefferson et al. 2019). While migration has tended to be understood through dominant spatial metaphors of exclusion and belonging, the factors that determine movement are inextricable from ongoing time-related processes through which “ ‘surplus populations’ … now constitute a permanent ‘outside’ of capitalism” (Kasmir and Carbonella 2014, 10). In what follows, I explore the temporal dimensions of wasting life in novels set in the Arab world through aesthetic forms that interlink immobility with disposability. Waste and its management are understudied subjects in the Arab world (Zyoud et al. 2015). The 2015 garbage crisis in Lebanon has increased scholarship on waste and politics in the region. However, this work has largely focused on the crisis itself, even as waste spills over into cultural representation. The presence of material waste in aesthetic forms is, at the most basic level, a response to failures of waste management, as for example in Mounia Akl’s short film Submarine (2016), which imagines Beirut being evacuated after the residents are buried under mountains of garbage. The invocation of material waste in aesthetic form is both an indictment of waste management policies and a potent symbol of stagnant

Wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction  109 hopes and stalled futures. For Susan Morrison (2015), “waste literature enables culture to acknowledge what it has to deny,” including “bodily, cultural, and societal waste—material and metaphorical aspects of our world” (10). In contemporary Arabic literature, the invocation of waste reflects on the devaluing of human life as a temporal process. In Sayed Kashua’s speculative Let It Be Morning (2006), government services are cut when a Palestinian village is excluded from the new Israeli state, and sewage threatens to flood the villagers’ homes. In Mohamed Rabie’s Otared (2016), garbage is a recurring trope to excoriate the failures of the state, with garbage mounds accumulating to rise as “as high as the Giza pyramids” (223). In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018), a junk dealer collects the body parts of car bomb victims so each part “wouldn’t be treated as trash” but “respected like other dead people,” refusing to allow people to be relegated to forgettable, discarded things (27). The intersection of material waste with humansas-waste brings the readers’ attention to conditions of marginalised life as dictated by forces of immobility that are not only spatial but also temporal, highlighting that “we need to understand how temporality animates stuckness as an important dimension of confinement” (Jefferson, Turner and Jensen 2019, 1). In the following discussion, I explore the temporal processes through which things and people are rendered as waste, beginning with the permanent-temporary nature of the Palestinian refugee experience, as represented in a text that resists the relegation of this experience to history. In the second section of the chapter I consider a novel about the stalled journeys of illegalised migrants in North Africa, reflecting on the connection between refused movement (suspended time) and material refuse (discarded things). I conclude my discussion with the temporal dynamics of accumulation in a novel that depicts the pressures of bordering conflicts on a ­Jordanian frontier town. The three texts I will discuss are, needless to say, far from representative, and in my brief survey I can only provide some reflections towards thinking about waste in this context beyond what Morrison (2015) calls “Waste-ern culture” (xiii). However, in reading ­ together texts set in a permanently temporary refugee camp, in an increasingly precarious border town and in the limbos of sea and desert, I hope to cut across the categorisations of refugees, migrants and disenfranchised citizens to instead reveal the commonalities of their experiences.

Exception in the permanently temporary refugee camp The camp is the paradigmatic biopolitical space. In Giorgio Agamben’s analysis (1998), “the transformation of politics into the realm of bare life (that is, into a camp) legitimated and necessitated total domination” (120). The spatial form of the state of exception signals a self-justifying modality through the supposedly temporary measures of exclusion and containment.

110  Tasnim Qutait The temporal implications of exception becoming permanent is the subject of Elias Khoury’s Bāb al-Shams (1998), translated into English as Gate of the Sun (2006), which is set in a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. The novel is structured by retrospection, as the narrator Khalil keeps vigil by the bedside of his elderly mentor Yunes, retelling the history of the camp. However, his attempts at providing a chronological narrative are soon rerouted into digressions and embedded stories. Khalil reflects on the challenge to a coherent chronological narrative in a place where permanence, paradoxically, is equated with forgetting: “it was said that if we put actual roofs on our houses, we’d forget Palestine, so we put up zinc sheets” (220). Diachronic time is bifurcated, linear temporality constantly referring back to the expulsion from Palestine and the establishment of the camp as a supposedly temporary measure which has become permanent. Yunes, the comatose old man, is a powerful symbol for this unresolved, ever-present yet increasingly generationally distant displacement. As his mentor’s health deteriorates, Khalil fights to prevent him being taken to a nursing home where people “live a living death” (129). Against Khalil’s argument that “[Yunes is] a hero,” a doctor at the hospital treating Yunes offers the logic “[b]ut he’s finished.” The doctor then asks “how can we treat symbols? … There’s no place for symbols in a hospital. The place for symbols is in books” (158). There is a slippage here between the materially wasting body and the ongoing resonance of Yunes’s story as a nationalist hero. The symbolic power of what is otherwise considered defunct resonates with Morrison’s (2015) suggestion that “[w]ithout the material that is discarded, we cannot enter the realm of the metaphoric, of literature, and of the imagination” (8). Yunes in hospital is a wasting body that is “finished,” a reminder of mortality and of “how horrible we discover our bodies to be—a feeding tube at the top, a tube for waste below, and us in between” (41). However, Yunes’s story remains a powerful presence in the camp and in the text, where his wasting itself has a multifarious symbolic power. The temporal implications of the extended exception are encapsulated in the fear that this place “isn’t a camp, it’s the tomb of Palestine” (Khoury 2006, 467). The recurrence of past with present is materially signified by decay, trash and ruins, various forms of wasting which signify the temporal extension of exception. Khalil returns constantly to thinking about the camp’s “mass grave containing the victims of the 1982 Shatila massacre, where children play soccer and there’s rubbish all over the place” (31). He recalls the hasty mass burial of the bodies using quicklime and insecticides, marking an abnormal, urgent modality. In the novel’s present, this site has become mass grave, playground and dumping ground at once, and it is the accumulation of rubbish which marks the passing of time, since “memorials were impossible … we didn’t know what would happen to us tomorrow—whether the camp would remain where it is or not” (245). This uncertainty captures the sense of being

Wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction  111 in a permanently temporary space, the precarious temporality through which the refugee experience is defined. In Khoury’s monumental novel of the Palestinian refugee experience, the tropes of waste produce a narrative about unresolved conflicts, narratives that are meant to be “old narratives,” discarded and forgotten. Increasingly today, the Palestinian refugee experience is relegated to history, as an experience in the past, eliding ongoing processes of dispossession. In a debate about Palestine/Israel held at the Sydney Opera House in 2011, journalist Peter Hartcher argued against a “quick reversion to old narratives,” referring to the right of return as a discourse that must be discarded in order for a solution to be reached. In response, Ghassan Hage pointed out that “[a] Palestinian refugee is not a narrative” and that “as long as the narrative moves people … it’s a current narrative” (Ideas at the House 2011). There is a shift here, not only from the discursive to the material, but also from a linear temporality determining what must be forgotten in order for society to “move forward” to a re-conceptualisation of what is relevant as that which “moves people.” The exchange recalls Edward Said (2001) ­critiquing capitalist globalisation as “synthesis and the transcendence of opposites” in the face of continuing “social, historical, and epistemological contests over territory” (68). Towards the end of the novel, Khalil describes the camp changing as some of its original inhabitants leave, becoming a home to “Syrians, Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Indians” (436), surplus populations who are among the “constantly rising quantities of human beings bereaved of their heretofore adequate ways and means of survival” (Bauman 2003, 7). This broader experience of paradoxical immobility seemingly reflects a global making-permanent of exception where today “all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri” (Agamben 1998, 111). However, Khoury’s focus here is more specifically on the camp as the site for the recycling of wasted lives. As Kenneth Harrow (2013) identifies, “regimes of trash recycling discarded objects from one order to another” include shifting “worthless people from one community to another” (2). This logic differs somewhat from the Agambian conception of the expansion of “exception” populations, where the camp is the epicentre targeting the body politic in an autoimmune reaction (Esposito 2008). Here the camp does not expand but collapses, only to re-emerge elsewhere. The narrator anticipates that “[s]oon the bulldozers will come … to demolish the camp” and build an expressway to the airport, forcing the camp population to “start our exile over from scratch” (Khoury 2006, 436). The accelerated mobility of the expressway to the airport, contrasted against the cyclicality of starting over from nothing, underlines the implications of wasted lives as not only “out of place” but also “out of time.” Being rendered as refuse operates in part through being refused the accelerated mobility that characterises experiences of global interconnectivity.

112  Tasnim Qutait

(Un)grievable lives and stalled journeys The subtitle of Judith Butler’s Frames of War (2009), “when is life grievable?” is suggestive. Lives are understood to be grievable according to timerelated processes, through which “certain lives are perceived as lives while others, though apparently living, fail to assume perceptual form as such” (24). Once lives are suspended from a full recognition of humanity, this differential value determines the temporal experience of moving through borders intended to “regulate, rather than impede flows,” accelerating the movement of some while stalling others (Brown 2014, 104). In this section, I turn to a writer who represents the temporality of refused movement and the ongoing processes of consigning people to refuse. Abu Bakr Hamid Khaal’s novella Taytānīkāt Afrīqīyah (2008), translated into English as African Titanics in 2014, is not primarily a narrative about a doomed sea journey, as the title suggests, but rather about stalled journeys. An Eritrean dissident who settled in Libya, Khaal found life imitating art during the uprisings of 2011, when he was himself stranded at the Shosha camp at the Tunisia-Libya border, experiencing the intertwined temporal/spatial logic of suspension in North African countries which act as the guards at the gate of Fortress Europe. African Titanics is narrated from the perspective of an Eritrean man named Abdar, interweaving his journey with the stories of those he encounters, including Terhas, a young Eritrean woman, and Malouk, a Liberian storyteller and musician. In the opening pages, Abdar describes the disjoined temporality of post-colonial capitalism, hearing migration as a siren call amidst the “noises of [his] daily existence: the thunder of dynamite blasted through Eritrea’s mountains by the Italian workers from De Ponti and the milkman’s cries as he drove his donkey through the dingy alleyways” (3). This scene establishes a dissatisfaction with immobility against the assumption of a good life as “a form of imaginary mobility, a sense that one is ‘going somewhere’ ” (Hage 2009, 97). This distinction between mobility and immobility is established on a temporal basis: as Butler underlines: “hegemonic conceptions of progress define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own self-legitimation” (102). In Khaal’s novella, Abdar is already on the losing side of what Saskia Sassen (2010) calls the “savage sorting of ‘winners and losers,’ ” which is based not on “the ‘valuing’ of people as workers and consumers, but the expulsion of people and the destruction of traditional capitalisms to feed the needs of high finance and the needs for natural resources” (25). The lure of migration for Abdar is the hope that it will allow an undoing of being already constructed as a wasted life, which exists in opposition to the trajectory of progress and futurity. When Abdar and his fellow travellers pay a smuggler to take them across the desert, the temporal process of becoming-waste is exemplified, as during the difficult journey their status shifts from full humanity to something

Wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction  113 suspended in transit, “death rear[ing] its head from time to time, snatching away whomever it wishes, whenever it wishes” (61). Under these extreme conditions, Abdar describes how human waste, a powerful s­ ignifier for the abjection and obscenity of (post-)colonial domination (Anderson 2010, 172), becomes transformed into something of value, as saliva and then urine are carefully collected to stave off death. Meanwhile, human bodies are redefined as disposable, the dying thrown off the smuggler’s truck if they are deemed “on the way out” (35), reflecting the temporality conditioning capitalist value. As the journey becomes more difficult, Abdar switches into the second person to reflect on how the people he has come to know are “altered, no longer the people with whom you once shared food and laughter” (62). Significantly, this change is represented through the language of dehumanisation and through an inversion of the value of things. When Abdar reflects that “their jaws seem to stretch, primed to swallow you whole as they despoil corpses of random, valueless objects” (62), we understand this new avarice as stemming from the precarity of life, and an urgent need to hold onto a thing of value under conditions that devalue human life itself. Throughout the text, human disposability is linked with discarded things that were once valued commodities. As Michael Thompson puts it in Rubbish Theory (1979), “to understand value, we must study rubbish” (19). In an extended passage, Abdar lists what has been “left by previous travellers” in a smuggler compound (43): piles of clothes were strewn across the floor alongside heaps of bags of all shapes and sizes. … There were precarious piles of teacups, kettles and bottles. Broken watches, socks, wigs and used sanitary towels lay here and there. Bulging bags of sugar stood amidst a mess of shaving equipment, fake jewellery, makeup, dirty underwear and empty, foreignlooking cigarette packets. (42–3) The value of these objects shifts as they move from use to disuse. According to Arjun Appadurai (1986), commodities are “things in a certain situation, a situation that can characterize many different kinds of thing, at different points in their social lives” (13). In the same way as objects shift from valued possessions to being trash once left behind, once the deposits for the journey have been secured, the smugglers lock everyone inside the compound, sometimes forgetting to bring them food. The travellers’ value is constantly measured by sometimes comically arbitrary decisions, as when a policeman mishears Eritrea for Mauritania, his “dubious hearing” transforming the travellers “from illegal immigrants into Mauritanian citizens—with full rights to be in Tunisia” (89). A few pages later, in a flash forward, we hear how an immigrant is deported when his once-sympathetic employer is “convinced she’d heard Attiah’s—or Atya’s or maybe Atayya’s—name on the news and

114  Tasnim Qutait c­ oncluded he must be one of Bin Laden’s relatives” (82). Through his downgrading from well-liked employee to deportable subject, Attiyah becomes an embodiment of urban waste, which, according to Sarah Harrison (2016), “designates not only discarded things and degraded places, but also the devalued people that feature as both symptoms and symbols of postcolonial ­inequity” (3). This process highlights the precarity of life as an “illegal,” the suddenness of gaining or losing value in the eyes of those who hold power, which precludes the synoptic, coherent experience of moving forward in life. When the linear trajectory of the migrant journey stalls, the suspension of movement impacts the narrative structure. There are flashbacks and flashforwards, as well as folktales the travellers tell each other to pass the wasted time, breaking from a chronological linear trajectory to the richness of temporal representations in embedded songs and stories. These moments turn sites of refuse into what Hannah Arendt (1958, 198) calls the “space of appearance,” or “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me.” After listening to Malouk recount a story, Abdar describes how the stories left him “reeling, captivated by this first glimpse of the rich world of his imagination” (9). Suspension and transit, according to Christina Oelgemöller, can have positive connotations, thinking of (potential) migrants as “people inhabiting a space in which there is opportunity for reinvention rather than death” (409). Here I want to highlight how stories can mean inhabiting a different form of suspension, the richness of the story world imbuing the travellers’ wasted time with another temporality through the imaginary world. There is a cyclicality to Abdar’s account of his migration journey, which establishes from the outset a lack of ending, the sense he has of being “fated forever to continue his ceaseless roaming, and that he would never again escape the endless road” (4). The spatial markers here are inextricable from the cyclical temporality; it is unsurprising to read, towards the end, that Abdar is detained and sent back to Eritrea together with Terhas to attempt his journey anew. However, some of the others, including Malouk, do make it to the overcrowded boat that has become a paradigmatic image of the differential grievability of life. The narrative ends not with Abdar’s return to Eritrea but with the loss of Malouk’s body in the “liquid hell” (28) of the sea. Abdar tells us that “[a] veritable legend grew up” around his friend and that he dreams of Malouk “trying to strum his guitar even though its strings have been eroded by salt” (119–20). The image of the corroded guitar, the musical instrument turned to waste, becomes a lyrical symbol of life cut short, and it is with this symbol that the text ends, with “the latest of Malouk’s adventures” still unfolding in stories that haunt and nourish the living (120). The unrecovered body here is given a different, temporal valence as an unfinished story. African Titanics traces human disposability as a process mired in the management and control of time according to the differential value of life. As Michael Denning (2010) warns, the metaphors we use to speak of

Wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction  115 ­ isenfranchised people often elide the processes and mechanisms that cond struct such realities, as though “there really are disposable people, not simply that they are disposable in the eyes of state and market” (80). The wasting of lives, the “when” that determines grievability, highlights the temporal processes through which refused movement renders people as refuse, accumulating at the borders to our secured worlds.

Slow violence and the accumulating waste of war The pressures on frontline countries taking in refugees, and the diminished resources which are available to care for these growing vulnerable populations, are among the “long emergencies of slow violence” that Rob Nixon describes as occluded from the traditional understanding of emergency, requiring “stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention” (3). In this final section, I will discuss a novel that brings into imaginative focus the accumulating (material and metaphorical) waste of successive wars in the Arab world. Mother of All Pigs (2017) is the debut novel of Malu Halasa, a Jordanian-Filipina-American writer and journalist who has been covering the region for many years. Halasa’s novel, set in a border town in Jordan, focuses on the Sabas family, which includes Hussein the butcher, Samira the activist, and Muna, the half-Jordanian, half-Filipino great-niece (and authorial alterego) visiting from the U.S. Though the novel tackles a vast array of topics, there is sustained attention to waste throughout, including several passages narrated through the eyes of the eponymous Umm al-Khanaazeer, the “mother of all pigs,” who is smuggled from a garbage village outside Cairo to become the breeder sow for the Sabas business, their “porcine passport to wealth” (65). In my personal communication with the author, Halasa describes Umm al-Khanaaze, “born and bred in real waste” as a symbol for “the cheapness of life” in this region. In the same unpublished interview, Halasa highlights the temporal aspects of a wasted society, describing her novel as a representation of a place “weighed down by the past, maimed by injuries of time” (emphasis added). According to Halasa, “the lives of these characters, especially the women characters, are starved of personal agency, which also suggests on a society-wide level their inability to move forward or progress.” The notion of a society “maimed by injuries of time” speaks eloquently to lives stalled by slow violence. The novel derives much of its narrative tension from the accumulating pressures on a village that has “grown into a town” with the influx of refugees, facing “a demand that neither the springs nor communal cistern could meet” (123). Halasa explores the mounting tensions as “the town’s demographics started changing and Christians, historically the majority, were being outnumbered” (25), and as the Sabas family’s pig farm comes under opprobrium from religious authorities. As

116  Tasnim Qutait described in the novel, under these accumulating pressures, “normal” is something that is irretrievably in the past: everyone wants things to go back to normal, as though all those hundreds of thousands of people never died. And the nearly five million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, and the more than one million asylum seekers who fled to Europe. (151) The damage that slow violence inflicts is tied here to the proliferating consequences of war, as an event that is not limited to particular geographical and temporal boundaries. The temporal process of accumulating waste is materially represented in the novel through Abu Za’atar’s Marvellous Emporium, a store stocked with the castoffs of wars in the region. The aptly named Emporium begins to accumulate goods through the aid caravans supplying Palestinian refugee camps, and expands with the Lebanese civil war, the destruction of the “world class” capital Beirut whose “castoffs … effectively fuelled the lesser economies of other Arab nations for decades to come” (49). Highlighting the mutability of “waste,” understood as what is discarded, the store grows further with the Syrian conflict through “refugee women … desperate to sell their gold” (45). From one war to another, the objects pile up into accumulated layers of kitchenware; exotic imported foodstuffs (mainly Asian); sports, casual, and ready-to-wear—men’s, women’s, children’s, toddlers’, and newborns’; absurdly high high heels and flat, soledestroying trainers; festive decorations for all holidays … among thousands of other remarkable products and gadgets. (43–4) Halasa’s description of the store and of Abu Za’atar’s obsession with accumulation resonates with the concept of superfluity as elaborated by Achille Mbembe (2004), not only an aesthetics “premised on the capacity of things to hypnotize, overexcite, or paralyze the senses” but also “the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labor and life, people and things” (374). The expanding emporium of war is represented as a “monument” for Abu Za’atar’s life as someone who “hates to see waste, particularly if there was a way of turning it into profit” (47), concretising neoliberal accumulation. Here the once valued possessions of refugees represent not only the longevity of what is discarded but the sudden violent processes which, sometimes overnight, force people from conditions of abundance to scarcity, evidence of Abu Za’atar’s maxim that “peace is rarely as lucrative as war” (50). War of course leaves behind other forms of waste which cannot be turned into profit. Abu Za’atar is unimpressed by the leftovers of the U.S. army in Iraq, commenting that “the Americans flew in, assembled, killed,

Wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction  117 murdered, raped, and then dismantled, packed up, and flew off again, answerable to no one except their contractors. Only clutter and chemical dumps remained” (50). Underlying the suggestion of war as a time-limited event here is the reality that the “long involvement in Iraq” is not limited to the time U.S. forces were present on the ground: as Nixon (2011) describes, in “bracketing violence” we “routinely ignore ongoing, belated casualties” (14). Against the neoliberal logic of internalising profit and externalising risk, the “useless” chemical dump represents a literal internalising of risk and waste within the human body, the enduring of hazardous or toxic waste in time, infecting new bodies and environments. In Halasa’s novel, the chemical dump becomes a powerful symbol for how “every country has been affected … or … infected. So many lives wasted and for nothing” (87), the corrected word “infected” here suggests war spreading like a disease whose symptoms are an accumulation of wasted lives. The temporal forces that shape the devaluing of life inform one of the central plotlines in the novel, the Sabas family’s protection of Mustafa, a soldier wanted by Jordanian intelligence, who over the course of the narrative is gradually restored from the abjection of the fugitive to a governable subject. The soldier arrives in the town “unkempt and dirty” (79) from his life in hiding in the mountains and slowly achieves “a semblance of normal life,” as a subject of sovereignty who looks like he “knows his place” (124). The reference to knowing one’s place speaks to dominant models of spatial ordering, in this case shifting from a visually marked disposability to disciplinability. The need to know one’s place in the current world order is a symptom of what Samira the activist describes as a shared loss of citizenship, which funnels downwards from the global level, and significantly is temporally framed as forgetting: “[a]ll of them had been ­forgotten: the refugees by an apathetic world, Arabs by their own corrupt governments” (102). When Samira helps Mustafa assume a new identity, she symbolically removes the incriminating evidence of his former wasted life by “plac[ing] the soldier’s old clothes into a black plastic bag” (145) and then, significantly, “almost leaves without taking out the trash, then remembers … it is the details she needs to pay attention to” (145, emphasis added). This line, pointing out the need to pay attention to the details of waste, of what is left behind, has a didactic charge in a novel that has been meticulously cataloguing how we determine value. In my interview with the author, Halasa highlights that fiction offers an “emotional wellspring,” which “informs/touches/expands ideas and horizons” and allows for “the suspension of preconceived notions or stereotypes about people or places.” The ability to shed such preconceived perceptions suggests a process of unlearning, suspending judgement through engaging with stories which question what we determine to be waste. Harrison (2016) has described how new urban imaginaries centring on the “innovative ‘remediations’ of discarded things, degraded spaces and devalued people” can push towards such a suspension of preconceptions and urge a

118  Tasnim Qutait rethinking of how we understand waste (5–6). As I have outlined, Halasa asks the reader to direct attention to the longer frameworks of slow violence in what Nixon (2011) describes as a “spectacle-driven, 24/7 media life” (11). In the novel, the authorial alter-ego Muna, visiting from the U.S., describes how disengaged people have become, explaining this disengagement by suggesting that “[t]he Internet has turned all of us into isolated consumers. People watch and download what they like and ignore the rest. So there’s a refugee crisis—oh, I can buy a bikini” (186). This limited timespan is contrasted in the novel to the long span of human history, which brings our shared vulnerability to the fore. When Hussein critiques the town’s selective memory and resentment of the refugees, he suggests, as a corrective, that we need to think temporally to activate empathy: “[g]o back a few generations and someone somewhere is always fleeing or seeking sanctuary” (25). Against the geographical dynamics of ordering and bordering, thinking temporally pushes against our tendency to distance ourselves by sequestering some lives as wasted. Reflecting on the time-related processes that actually constitute the wasted life, allows us to consider the temporal logic determining what, and who, we determine to be without value.

Conclusion In thinking about the consequences of globalisation, one stumbling block is how we think about the forces that “cut across our conceptual boundaries—the terms and categories we use to think about the economy, the polity, the diversity of nation-states” (Sassen 2014, 215). In this chapter, I have analysed novels that represent the permanent-temporary conditions of ­ ­Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the stalled journeys of illegalised travellers in North Africa, and the accumulating waste of war in a Jordanian border town. The works considered here reimagine the connections between the experiences of refugees, migrants and citizens under conditions of immobility and disposability, contesting the dominant spatial focus on refused movement as a geographical (b)ordering. As I have explored, the aesthetic invocation of material and symbolic waste can turn our attention to what we would rather not acknowledge. When Lebanese artist Dona Timani titled a series of paintings “Paint a Vulgar Picture: Bordering and Othering in the Arab world” (2013), she insisted on an aesthetic vulgarity as a deliberate mode of representation that pushed the audience towards a critical examination of globalised life. Her representations of devalued lives suggest the future revolutionary potential of visual and verbal representations of what tends to be occluded. We see a similar but more explicit highlighting of the future in the opening lines of “Nothing Radical: A Prophecy” by the Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti, which predicts a radical change through a reorientation of aesthetic perspective, by representing a very different urban landscape:

Wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction  119 Great cities will fall The everlasting photographer Will dim the light of their skyscrapers Illuminating mice and garbage bags instead Which will shine like the domes of parliament. (2017, 43) The title of Al-Barghouti’s poem juxtaposes the large-scale temporal implications of prophecy with the seemingly modest yet radical impact of this shift in perspective. The photographer, and the artist more broadly, can invite us to interrogate our urban narratives, with their focus on the heights of power, and to instead turn our attention to the unexamined lives in the shadow of the skyscrapers. The symbolism of waste can contest established categories of value, and refocus our attention on the material realities of what Aihwa Ong (2006) describes as “[n]ew forms of governing and being governed and new notions of what it means to be human” which are “at the edge of emergence” (4). In a world where disenfranchised lives are framed through an overwhelming discourse that speaks of movement as crisis and people as surplus, literary narratives can push us beyond a securitising focus on flows and tides and swarms, to a consideration of the time-related forces shaping what and who has already been consigned to refuse, and thereby refused movement.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Warwick. 2010. “Crap on the Map, or Postcolonial Waste.” Postcolonial Studies 13 (2): 169–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2010.496436. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barghouti-al, Tamim. 2017. In Jerusalem: And Other Poems, 1997–2017. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. London: John Wiley & Sons. Brown, Wendy. 2014. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Denning, Michael. 2010. “Wageless Life.” New Left Review 66: 79–97. https://­ newleftreview.org/issues/II66/articles/michael-denning-wageless-life. Dini, Rachele. 2016. Consumerism, Waste, and Re-Use in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

120  Tasnim Qutait Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gregson, Nicky and Mike Crang. 2010. “Materiality and Waste: Inorganic Vitality in a Networked World.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42 (5): 1026–32. https://doi.org/10.1068/a43176. Hage, Ghassan. 2009. “Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality.” In Waiting, edited by Ghassan Hage. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing, 97–106. Halasa, Malu. 2017. Mother of All Pigs. Los Angeles: Unnamed Press. Harrow, Kenneth W. 2013. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hutchings, Kimberly. 2013. Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ideas at the House. 2011. “Israel & Palestine in The New Middle East.” [Podcast]. 19 June 2011. https://player.fm/series/ideas-at-the-house/israel-palestine-in-thenew-middle-east-naomi-chazan-ghassan-hage-peter-hartcher-saree-makdisiand. Jefferson, Andrew, Simon Turner and Steffen Jensen. 2019. “Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement.” Ethnos 84 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00141844.2018.1544917. Kashua, Sayed. 2006. Let It Be Morning. Translated by Miriam Schlesinger. London: Atlantic Books. Kasmir, Sharryn and August Carbonella, eds. 2014. Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor. New York: Berghahn Books. Khaal, Abu Bakr. 2014. African Titanics. Translated by Charis Bredin. London: Darf Publishers Ltd. Khoury, Elias. 2006. Gate of the Sun. Translated by Humphrey Davies. London: Vintage Books. Mbembe, Achille. 2004. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16 (3): 373–405. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-373. Morrison, Susan Signe. 2015. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oelgemöller, Christina. 2011. “ ‘Transit’ and ‘Suspension’: Migration Management or the Metamorphosis of Asylum-Seekers into ‘Illegal’ Immigrants.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (3): 407–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X. 2011.526782. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rabie, Mohammed. 2016. Otared. Translated by Robin Moger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saadawi, Ahmed. 2018. Frankenstein in Baghdad. Translated by Jonathan Wright. London: Oneworld Publications. Said, Edward W. 2001. “Globalizing Literary Study.” PMLA 116 (1): 64–8. www. jstor.org/stable/463641. Sassen, Saskia. 2010. “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation.” Globalizations 7 (1–2): 23–50. https://doi. org/10.1080/14747731003593091.

Wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction  121 Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schewel, Kerilyn. 2019. “Understanding Immobility: Moving Beyond the Mobility Bias in Migration Studies.” International Migration Review, April. https://doi. org/10.1177/0197918319831952. Shibli, Adania. 2013. “Out of Time.” Translated by Suneela Mubayi. In Seeking ­Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, edited by Penny Johnson, and Raja Shehadeh. Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 65–8. Schmidt, Christopher. 2014. The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, Michael. 1979. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zyoud, Sa’ed H., Samah W. Al-Jabi, Waleed M. Sweileh, Suleiman Al-Khalil, Shaher H. Zyoud, Ansam F. Sawalha and Rahmat Awang. 2015. “The Arab World’s Contribution to Solid Waste Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis.” Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology 10 (1): 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/ s12995-015-0078-1.

8 Lingering matter Materialities, temporalities and waste in clothes Elyse Stanes

Introduction It is hard to imagine a world without clothing. Clothes provide comfort, protection, belonging and gratification; they represent important expressions of individuality and personhood (Belk 1988; Crane 2012). And notwithstanding the known inequalities and injustices that saturate the length and breadth of the clothing supply chain, clothing is also a significant economic driver and employer, particularly for women (Cook et al. 2006; Mather 2004). But the material properties of clothes are increasingly gaining a reputation as environmental miscreants. Clothing, especially “fast fashion,”1 has come to exemplify the inherent wastefulness embedded in systems of mass production and consumption: cheap, flimsy, throwaway. The increasingly rapid cycles of clothing turnover, based on the endless “churn” of commodities, has also become representative of capitalist excess and waste more generally. Indeed, the enormity of clothing waste is staggering. It is estimated that over 100 billion new garments are produced each year (Remy, Speelman and Swartz 2016). More than half of fast fashion produced globally is thought to be disposed of within a mere 12 months of purchase (Remy, Speelman and Swartz 2016). In Australia, where this chapter was written, six tonnes of clothes are thrown away every ten minutes (War on Waste 2017). Every year, more than 500,000 tonnes of clothing from Australian households end up in landfill, and another 94,000 tonnes are exported to various locations across the Majority World (Milburn 2016). In the light of looming ecological catastrophe, concerns about the environmental impacts of the fashion industry have understandably been directed towards solving issues of waste via modernised production processes, reduced consumption, and investment in recycling, upcycling or more circular economies (see, for instance, Binotto and Payne 2017; Cobbing and Vicaire 2016; Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017; Norris 2019; WRAP 2017). The material recalcitrance of clothing and textiles is most visible in moments where practices of waste happen: as dormant

Lingering matter  123 objects in domestic wardrobes (Gregson and Beale 2004; Woodward 2007), in the movement of clothes towards car boot sales or second-hand stores (Gregson and Crewe 2003) or within transnational second-hand economies (Brooks 2015), and as detritus in landfill (Ross 2019). But although these moments represent the most obvious trajectories of clothing becoming waste, they also hide the elusive material properties of clothes, and what ultimately unfolds beneath their surface and contributes to other less visible forms of waste. We are accustomed to the idea of clothes as cultural and symbolic objects. However, in their movement from raw material or basic chemical structures to fibre, from textile to clothing and to discard, clothes also have “biological and chemical lives” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). The environmental dilemmas associated with clothing are more than a material problem of excess waste; they represent a temporal problem, too. This chapter breaks away from the epistemological fixation of clothing as discrete objects of waste. Clothes are never stable, finished commodities, but assembled items in transition (Stanes 2019). This chapter examines the lingering capacities of textile waste alongside the material and temporal endurance of clothes and their component materials. By introducing lesser known moments of clothing waste, these exposures unsettle the material geographies of clothing—at least in terms of the dominant tropes instinctively associated with clothing as fashionable objects in everyday life. These representations are a matter of concern because they are central to understanding the varied and complex relations that exist across the long temporal lifespan of clothing: across networks of production and manufacture, in how consumption is conceived, how discards and disposal might be managed, and how materials, in turn, can shape environments, humans and non-humans. The ideas that emerge in this chapter come from studying clothes as they become “undone,” and are pulled into and linger in other systems, scales and processes. The chapter asks: what kinds of influence do lingering materials have? What kinds of bodily, material and temporal responses can they evoke? What other kinds of material and ecological knowledges might we consider to be part of lingering beyond the object status of clothes themselves? To highlight the more hidden temporalities of clothing and clothing waste, examples are assembled from three vignettes of clothing transformation: discards from the production room floor, the travels of synthetic microfibres and the recycling of cotton textiles. Each vignette is drawn from my own ethnographic engagements with clothes to tell a story of unending and lingering material transformation. This approach seeks to decentre clothing as an object, and to reconsider the web of relations that exist between the structure of clothing, the materials from which it was made and the ongoing matter that remains in different forms long after its use.

124  Elyse Stanes

Pulling the thread: tracing outwards from the temporary assemblages of clothing The temporalities of clothing, as fashion, can move at dizzying speeds. Fashion represents a distinct temporality—ephemeral, superficial and transient (Crewe 2017, 117). In cycles of contemporary consumption, where the focus is on trends, aesthetics and seasonality, most fashion is produced for a particular moment in time.2 In positioning clothes and their composite materials as fashion, the material contingency of clothing has been omitted in academic scholarship (Stanes and Gibson 2017; Woodward and Fisher 2014). To date, a focus on the material make-up of a garment, the quality of its construction or the processes under which component materials are brought together has been sidelined. As a result, the idea of what a garment is, or can be, is often detached from its practical, material and temporal use. Until recently, there has been a general tendency in the humanities and social sciences to neglect materials (Ingold 2007; Küchler 2015). Materials have been deemed unsocial—“the raw stuff from which people would be able to shape cultural and social life, but in themselves not cultural” (Drazin 2015, xviii). My concern in this chapter is to uncover the multiple and overlapping temporalities that lie beneath the surface of clothes ­(Tolia-Kelly 2013). Materials are, quite simply, “the stuff that things are made from” (Ingold 2007, 9). Yet, as Ingold (2007) argues, particular material properties (including provenance and future unravelling) continue to be overshadowed by attention to objects. In clothes, for instance, consumers are more likely to pay attention to the aesthetics of an item rather than its material textures: if it is made of cotton or hemp, polyester or rayon, or multiple bits of thread, buttons or zippers (Ingold 2007; Stanes 2019). And embedded in this is a general assumption about the stability and ontological security of clothing—with the unit of analysis being garments as stable, finished and coherent objects. This chapter departs from this notion and conceptualises clothing (and various forms of waste) as a temporary assemblage of agentic materials in transition. Such assemblages exist in temporary coherence, awaiting further use and adaptation, and subsequent breakdown, ridding and decay (Crăciun 2015; DeSilvey 2006; Edensor 2011; Woodward and Fisher 2014). Understanding how clothes and their material components transform across production, wear and divestment is also linked to upstream relational geographies of resource extraction, production and manufacture (Castree 2004; Cook et al. 2006), as well as various stages of post-sale decomposition and decay across multiple scales and temporalities, and between bodies and other non-human actors and contact surfaces. A scholarly engagement with clothing waste and time can perhaps best start with Tim Ingold’s (2012) call “to think from materials, not about them” (437, emphasis in original). Materials, Ingold (2012) argues, “do not simply exist in time; they are the stuff of time itself” (427). For clothing, those

Lingering matter  125 times are multiple, and reflect the unfolding rhythms of clothing use, the production and manufacture of its component materials and of fashionable time. A focus on the materials from which clothes are made also offers a speculative and emergent approach to clothes that foregrounds garments as material projects that are always incomplete and transforming. Indeed, following Moser (2002), “there is no system—whether biological, technical, social, or historical—that does not produce remnants, remains, scraps, leftovers, that does not leave certain parts to decay” (102). And while the object or remnants of clothing waste may be moved or cleaned up from one particular area, there are various components of clothing that will continue to persist “in time.” In question is the longevity of some clothing materials (such as synthetic textiles, dyes or metals) and ways that clothing wastes challenge what might initially be seen as static, contained or fixed (Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010; Hawkins 2018). Rips, spills, leaks and breaks are all processes that can reintroduce component materials into environments and bodies. Rather than the visible notions of waste discussed earlier, this view sees waste as silent, invisible, unnoticed, unruly. Thinking about the time of materials in clothes enables, following Hawkins (2018), “a focus on the interactions between the historicity of objects or their social lives and the ways in which materials must also be considered as ­inherently lively” (93). Thus, it is an ambition of this chapter is to think about clothing in ways that recognise its “properties and possibilities” (Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010, 1067) and that might enable us to “elevate” and “enchant” the stuff of clothing waste (Hawkins 2006, 84). This breaks with thinking about clothes through singular frameworks, such as commodity or value networks, symbolism or in particular types of practice. Instead, I attempt to work with clothing in ways that “acknowledge its properties and capacities, the copresent entanglements of human and material, and the ways in which entanglements, properties, and capacities come together” in making temporal realities (Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010, 1067; Hawkins 2018).

Component materials that endure: temporal vignettes of unruly3 clothing assemblages The following vignettes are drawn from my own ethnographic experiences and engagements with clothes and clothing materials. Since 2012, I have traced the material biographies of clothes across time and space. I use these vignettes to show how larger and less tangible concepts of time, materiality and environmental impact work differently through various, and long-lived, lingering materials and material processes. Fragments of pre-consumer waste I walk into the cavernous loading dock at the Brooklyn Army Terminal to volunteer at FabScrap, a not-for-profit designed to meet the need of commercial

126  Elyse Stanes textile recycling in New York City. FabScrap works as a node of diversion—bringing in various clothing textile materials that otherwise ­ would have gone to landfill to a site that can be accessed by students, artists, local designers and crafters for reuse, and other local industries for recycling and repurposing (FabScrap 2019).4 In the FabScrap factory space I am confronted by a literal mountain of black plastic garbage bags filled with the remnants of clothing textiles (see Figure 8.1). It is an immense reminder that waste includes not only abandoned clothes, but also more intangible forms of waste: “the intangible waste of labor and creative energy expended to produce the garments” (Binotto and Payne 2017, 9). Each bag contains approximately 15 kg of varied textile wastes—portions, offcuts and samples of polyester, cotton, wool, viscose, leather, zippers and sequins. I take a bag from the bottom edge of the pile and move to a sorting table marked with tape and circled by various plastic tubs. In front of me are various codes that signify material pathways. A label marked with “PAN/PE/PES/PET/PL/PU” map types of synthetic clothing onto its next life (see Figure 8.2). I am given brief instructions: anything containing Spandex, Lycra or elastane (or anything that “feels like it can stretch”) cannot be reused and will move directly to landfill.

Figure 8.1  Pre-consumer textile wastes. Source: Elyse Stanes.

Lingering matter  127

Figure 8.2  Sorting textiles, FabScrap, August 2018. Source: Elyse Stanes.

My concern in this vignette, however, is not the movement of these textile objects from cutting room floor to FabScrap—but how the material components are handled as a form of waste, and by extension, how volunteers are trained to handle them. There is very little transparency across the

128  Elyse Stanes clothing industry to trace relations between material origins, fibre weaving, design and manufacturing—including the types of chemicals that are used in its production. This reality makes environmental and health impacts ­difficult to map and evaluate (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017). The scraps of waste at FabScrap are not benign. As textiles are cut, proprietary labelling removed, or material blends separated, tiny needles of fragments disperse. Once they are released from the warp and weft of fabric they all have the capacity to “capture humans” and move on to different environments (Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010, 1069). The fragments of clothing encountered at FabScrap represent the range of materials that are both tangled up in and unravel over the lifetime of clothing, alongside their unknown, invisible and volatile impacts. There are several reported impacts from the leakages of clothes: allergic reactions, respiratory diseases, increased rates of cancer in humans and accumulations in environments (Ellen ­MacArthur Foundation 2017). To be clear, tiny needles of textile fibres are not yet classed as a hazardous material. But it is the sheer diversity and uncertainty of these materials, and their toxic, chemical and lingering component materials which are of concern—but, equally, are difficult to trace and measure (Cobbing and Vicaire 2016; Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017). The time of these materials is diverse and persistent. Microplastics In a microplastics laboratory in Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands of the U.K., I am standing over a 12-litre bucket of soapy water while my colleague scrubs a pair of brightly coloured polyester pants. We are looking for the rate of fibre shed for polyester microfibres. Over half of clothing made and discarded globally each year now features polyester—a type of plastic that draws on toxic and finite resources including crude oil (Industrievereinigung Synthetic Fiber [IVC] 2019; Textile Exchange 2018). The annual production of polyester now exceeds 53 million metric tonnes globally (IVC 2019; Textile Exchange 2018). Global CO2 emissions from the fabrication of polyester reached 282 billion kilograms in 2015, almost triple that of cotton (Cobbing and Vicaire 2016). The defining qualities of polyester are its strength and durability. It is thought to have a material durability of approximately 200 years—which long transcends the aesthetic, cherished and purposeful life of clothes. Adding to this is that most wearers are unaware that they are wearing, and washing, plastics (Stanes and Gibson 2017). Indeed, the plastic provenance of polyester is easily obscured by trademarks and brand names: Polar Fleece, Lycra, Dacron. Sitting alongside the basic chemical make-up of synthetic (plastic) polyesters as poly(ethylene terephthalate) (also known as PET) are various other components in the form of monomers, additives and plasticisers. These help to draw out particular characteristics of polyester: light, vibrant,

Lingering matter  129 t­extured. Indeed, it is the chemical length of polyester with the addition of chemical additives that defines its plasticity: its strength, persistence and flexibility. As with other clothes, as polyester garments are worn on the body and washed, the weakening and fibre fatigue of textile filaments leads to more rapid breakoff, contributing to greater fibre release during laundering (Napper and Thompson 2016). This transformation—where polyester microfibres separate from the garment itself—contributes to what is commonly known as microplastics pollution. A single polyester garment can release over 1,900 microfibres fibres per wash (Browne et al. 2011). Depending on the types of synthetic textiles washed, a standard six-kilogram load of laundry can release between 137,951 and 728,789 microfibres (Napper and Thompson 2016). British journalist Lucy Siegle (2017) estimates that the inclusion of polyester in the daily clothes-washing routines of a population the size of Berlin (3.5 million people) is akin to releasing 540,000 plastic bags into the ocean per day. In the lab, as we filter laundered water, the red, blue, black and yellow fibres—all from the aforementioned pants—become visible. The fibre release from polyester is its harmful material persistence. Polyester’s longevity means that rather than breaking down in environments, as is the case with wool or cotton, polyester fibres—like the ones visible on filter paper—will be shifted around between terrestrial and aquatic environments rather than eliminated (Liboiron 2016; Rochman et al. 2019). In bodies of water, polyester microfibres act as absorbent vessels attracting oily chemicals such as pesticides and flame retardants (Liboiron 2016). When consumed by marine or aquatic life, both the original polyester monomer and the chemicals it has absorbed accumulate in tissue and travel across the food chain (Rochman et al. 2013). The temporality of polyester microfibres— with their persistent durability, relatively new arrival in the world and their popularity as a clothing textile—complicate, in the words of Liboiron (2016), “our understanding of their relations with other objects ‘in the wild,’ where they become part of bodies, ecosystems, consumer products, and landscapes” (96). The temporalities of polyester microfibres are siteless, unable to be contained. Microplastics will continue to move—between bodies of water, river embankments, landfill—persistently in time. Waste of this kind, as a product from the washing and care of clothing, sit curiously against other categories of waste associated with filth, dirt and cleanliness. The washing of clothes is deeply enrolled in the temporal conditions and sequencing of activities in daily life. Thus, even when polyester clothes are repeatedly used, much loved and cared for, the lingering and residual effects of polyester and its very plasticity continue to transform in use. Recycled textile materials Throughout my research, I maintained an archive of clothing labels and tags. At their most basic level, clothing labels and tags generally carry

130  Elyse Stanes information about the fibre type and care instructions. They might also include information on country of origin, price, size, technical performance, accreditations (such as fair trade or organic), manufacture or brand or health and safety warnings. But clothing labels are also important carriers between manufacture, consumption and discard. They are the “commodity bio­ graphies” of clothes (Cook and Harrison 2007, 40). They are a visual-material nexus that connects the (opaque) macro-geographies of the clothing industry—including production, manufacture and provenance—with the ­ everyday micro-geographies of haptic, embodied use and wear. Over the past decade, small-scale pro-environmental movements have mobilised across the clothing industry. Some manufacturers and brands have collaborated with design firms, NGOs and governments to experiment with new or novel form of regulation, governance, management and manufacture (Crewe 2017, 62). Increasingly, the marketing of “sustainable” clothing via labels and tags is used to illuminate these environmental credentials—which include the downcycling or recycling of waste materials. The types of transformations presented in recycled clothing represent a third type of waste temporality in clothing: the economic and brand value of material waste. In this vignette I reflect on these through the presentation of clothing labels attached to new clothing that features recycled materials. The reprocessing of waste feedstocks into new designs takes many forms (Binotto and Payne 2017; Norris 2019). Recent estimates suggest that 2 per cent of textiles are produced from recycled materials drawn from other industries, most famously from plastics materials such as PET bottles (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017; Norris 2019). The recycling of clothing’s constituent materials—such as cotton, wool and polyester—into new clothing is a concept only starting to have an impact on the fashion industry. At the time of writing, less than 1 per cent of clothing materials are drawn from closed-loop recycling in the textile industry (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017). The backstory of a garment’s utilisation of waste is most often seen on swing-tags and labels. Patagonia’s Responsibili-tee, for instance, is made in two types of material combinations—as a blend of recycled cotton and post-consumer recycled plastic bottle polyester (see Figure 8.3), or 100 per cent post-consumer recycled plastic bottle polyester. The label in Figure 8.3 illuminates a number of material inputs: plastic, cotton, water. Though the T-shirt is made of waste, it appears, and feels, new (Binotto and Payne 2017; Stanes 2019). The indication of repurposed and recycled materials emphasises the positive potential of waste for the clothing industry and challenges the notion that “waste” is fixed (Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010, 1065). The waste is still present in the material form, but has been revalorised and presented as new clothing. This gives the idea that materials are “physically and temporally limitless” (Hawkins 2018, 95). In this way, recycled materials in new clothes are mediated by “existing temporal grammars,” but also,

Lingering matter  131

Figure 8.3  A label from Patagonia’s Responsibili-tee. Source: Elyse Stanes.

in turn, do the work of mediating (Hawkins 2018, 96). It is the stuff of now, and an option for the future. Clothing made out of recycled materials, however, is not without its critics. Binotto and Payne (2017) lament that while brands such as Patagonia can be praised for moving towards a type of closed-loop system, the clothes produced actively conceal or absorb the wastes from which they are made. The masking of waste is, as Binotto and Payne (2017) suggest, “characteristic of a fashion system that privileges newness and first-cycle consumption” (11). In an era of disposability, the “freedom to consume” still implies a “freedom to waste” (Hawkins 2006, 29). While clothing labels highlight the processes by which materials can be (re)valued over time, they fail to explain how the materials of (recycled) clothes themselves matter for addressing wider environmental issues that exist across the fashion industry, and that extend across multiple scales and temporalities.

Concluding thoughts This chapter has not only focused on the surface layers of clothing, as objects, but also on the ways that we might encounter and apprehend

132  Elyse Stanes “things” as they come undone, or are variously pulled into other systems, scales and processes. I take seriously Tolia-Kelly’s (2013) call to look beneath the “surface geographies” of the materialities of objects to understand clothes as “processual, relational and distributed,” formed and unformed by their movements in and with social and physical situations (155). Clothes are a provisional gathering of matter and materials. They are never stable. Breaking fibres, creases, rips, bumps, tears and bobbles are all testament to clothing in a constant state of unfolding. Importantly, the ways that such materials are held together, as temporary assemblage, signals one moment in their productive lives as an object. Each of the vignettes provided here illuminates diverse implications for how we comprehend and can begin to tackle what can be done with clothing wastes. Despite a commitment from the humanities and social sciences to engage with the “ongoingness” of materials, much analysis remains within a problematic framing of “beginnings and ends” of how clothing is produced, and the resultant wastes at the end of the lifetime of a garment as a clothing object (Lepawsky and Mather 2010, 248). In part, this is because much of the analysis presupposes the movement of clothes as finished and whole commodities that are thought to subsequently live on in wardrobes, ­second-hand economies or landfill. The vignettes offered here show a far more unruly material and temporal lifespan of clothing and their component materials. A take-home message is that our understanding of what clothing is and does needs to shift to comprehend the hybrid, relational and persistent connections that the matter of clothes have with other places, people and non-humans. As the vignettes reveal, the objectification of materials—as whole objects—hides their persistence and strength. For polyester clothes, for instance, this includes its plastic beginnings, temporal resilience and its incessant polluting. Objects generate meaning not just in their preservation and persistence, but also in their undoing (Crewe 2011; Gregson, Watkins and Calestani 2010). Approaching clothes from their component materials can encourage different ways of thinking about origins and ends, across the various temporalities of wastes. For clothing and clothing materials, I contend that ­bringing attention to lingering and persistence can produce novel ethical, politi­cal and environmental understandings of the otherwise opaque geographies of clothes.

Notes 1 Fast fashion is often used to describe low-cost clothing sold on the high street. However, there are questions about what the descriptor “fast fashion” entails (Crewe 2017). In this chapter, fast fashion is defined not just as clothes in low to mid-range points of the market. It critically encompasses the general persistence of “geographical dissociation” in clothing (Crewe 2017, 7) i.e., the disconnect between the social, environmental and biological associations between wearers and their clothes.

Lingering matter  133 2 Temporalities of fashion also persist via the social life of the objects, as when people invest identity and emotions in them over time (Woodward 2007) or where the object gains a second life if passed on to friends, donated to charity shops or sold on via flea markets (Gregson and Beale 2004; Gregson and Crewe 2003). Some clothes are also produced for a particular moment in time—such as wedding dresses. 3 The notion of the unruly assemblages of clothing hints at spontaneity, liveliness, intimacy and care—which intersect variously with bodies, spaces, materials and practices. It describes the materials and practices embedded within clothing’s use: animated, heterogeneous, roughhewn and unpredictable. 4 Polyester, cotton and wool are sent on to other local industries to be shredded to create insulation, carpet underlay, shoddy blankets or furniture lining.

References Belk, Russell W. 1988. “Possessions and the Extended Self.” Journal of Consumer Research 15 (2): 139–68. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154. Binotto, Carla and Alice Payne. 2017. “The Poetics of Waste: Contemporary Fashion Practice in the Context of Wastefulness.” Fashion Practice: The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry 9 (1): 5–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 7569370.2016.1226604. Brooks, Andrew. 2015. Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and SecondHand Clothes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Browne, Mark Anthony, Phillip Crump, Stewart J. Niven, Emma Teuten, Andrew Tonkin, Tamara Galloway and Richard Thompson. 2011. “Accumulation of Microplastic on Shorelines Worldwide: Sources and Sinks.” Environmental Science & Technology 45 (21): 9175–79. https://doi.org/10.1021/es201811s. Castree, Noel. 2004. “The Geographical Lives of Commodities: Problems of Analysis and Critique.” Social & Cultural Geography 5 (1): 21–35. https://doi.org/10.10 80/1464936032000137957. Cobbing, Madeleine and Yannick Vicaire. 2016. Timeout for Fast Fashion. Hamburg: Greenpeace e.v. storage.googleapis.com/planet4-international-stateless/2018/01/6c35 6f9a-fact-sheet-timeout-for-fast-fashion.pdf. Cook, Ian et al. 2006. “Geographies of Food: Following.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 655–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506070183. Cook, Ian and Michelle Harrison. 2007. “Follow the Thing: West Indian Hot Pepper Sauce.” Space and Culture 10 (1): 40–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/12063 31206296384. Crăciun, Magdalena. 2015. “Bobbles and Values: An Ethnography of De-Bobbling Garments in Postsocialist Urban Romania.” Journal of Material Culture 20 (1): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183514564132. Crane, Diana. 2012. Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Crewe, Louise. 2011. “Life Itemised: Lists, Loss, Unexpected Significance, and the Enduring Geographies of Discard.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (1): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.1068/d16709. Crewe, Louise. 2017. Geographies of Fashion: Consumption, Space, Value. London: Bloomsbury. DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11 (3): 318–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068808.

134  Elyse Stanes Drazin, Adam. 2015. “To Live in a Materials World.” In The Social Life of Materials: Studies in Materials and Society, edited by Adam Drazin and Susanne Küchler. London: Bloomsbury, 3–28. Edensor, Tim. 2011. “Entangled Agencies, Material Networks and Repair in a Building Assemblage: The Mutable Stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36 (2): 238–52. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00421.x. Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 2017. A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future. www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/publications/A-NewTextiles-Economy_Full-Report.pdf. FabScrap. 2019. fabscrap.org. Gregson, Nicky and Vikki Beale. 2004. “Wardrobe Matter: The Sorting, Displacement and Circulation of Women’s Clothing.” Geoforum 35 (6): 689–700. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.03.014. Gregson, Nicky and Louise Crewe. 2003. Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Gregson, Nicky, Helen Watkins and Melania Calestani. 2010. “Inextinguishable Fibres: Demolition and the Vital Materialisms of Asbestos.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42 (5): 1065–83. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42123. Hawkins, Gay. 2006. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Hawkins, Gay. 2018. “Plastic and Presentism: The Time of Disposability.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5 (1): 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33291. Industrievereinigung Synthetic Fiber (IVC). 2019. “World Production of Chemical Fibres.” www.ivc-ev.de/de. Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Materials Against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127. Ingold, Tim. 2012. “Toward an Ecology of Materials.” Annual Review of Anthropology 1: 427–42. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920. Küchler, Susanne. 2015. “Materials: The Story of Use.” In Social Life of Materials: Studies in Materials and Society, edited by Adam Drazin and Susanne Küchler. London: Bloomsbury, 267–82. Lepawsky, Josh and Charles Mather. 2011. “From Beginnings and Endings to Boundaries and Edges: Rethinking Circulation and Exchange Through Electronic Waste.” Area 43 (3): 242–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01018.x. Liboiron, Max. 2016. “Redefining Pollution and Action: The Matter of Plastics.” Journal of Material Culture 21 (1): 87–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183515 622966. Mather, Celia. 2004. Garment Industry Supply Chains: A Resource for Worker Education and Solidarity. Manchester: Women Working Worldwide. www.yorku.ca/rajagopa/ documents/garmentsuppchain-www_education_pack.pdf. Milburn, Jane. 2016. “Aussies send 85% of textiles to landfill.” Textile Beat. 18 August 2016. https://textilebeat.com/aussies-send-85-of-textiles-to-landfill/. Moser, Walter. 2002. “The Acculturation of Waste.” In Waste-Sites Stories: The Recycling of Memory, edited by Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve. Albany: State University of New York Press, 86–106. Napper, Imogen E. and Richard C. Thompson. 2016. “Release of Synthetic Microplastic Plastic Fibres from Domestic Washing Machines: Effects of Fabric Type and Washing Conditions.” Marine Pollution Bulletin 112 (1–2): 39–45. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.09.025.

Lingering matter  135 Norris, Lucy. 2019. “Waste, Dirt, Desire: Fashioning Narratives of Material Regeneration.” The Sociological Review Monographs 67 (4): 886–907. https://doi. org/10.1177/0038026119854273. Remy, Nathalie, Eveline Speelman and Steven Swartz. 2016. “Style that’s Sustainable: A New Fast-Fashion Formula.” McKinsey & Company. October, 2016. www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/style-thats-­ sustainable-a-new-fast-fashion-formula#. Rochman, Chelsea M., Cole Brookson, Jacqueline Bikker, Natasha Djuric, Arielle Earn, Kennedy Bucci, Samantha Athey, … et al. 2019. “Rethinking Microplastics as a Diverse Contaminant Suite.” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 38 (4): 703–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/etc.4371. Rochman, Chelsea M., Cole Brookson, Jacqueline Bikker, Natasha Djuric, Arielle Earn, Kennedy Bucci, Samantha Athey, Mark Anthony Browne, A. J. Underwood, Jan A. van Franeker, Richard C. Thompson and Linda A. Amaral-Zettler. 2013. “The Ecological Impacts of Marine Debris: Unraveling the Demonstrated Evidence from what is Perceived.” Ecology 97 (2): 302–12. https://doi. org/10.1890/14-2070.1. Ross, Graham. 2019. “Australia Recycles Paper and Plastics. So Why Does Clothing End Up in Landfill?” Guardian, 27 August 2019. www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2019/aug/27/australia-recycles-paper-and-plastics-so-why-does-clothing-endup-in-landfill. Siegle, Lucy. 2017. “Fashion Must Fight the Scourge of Dumped Clothing Clogging Landfills.” Guardian, 30 July 2017. www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/jul/29/ fashion-must-fight-scourge-dumped-clothing-landfill. Stanes, Elyse. 2019. “Clothes-in-Process: Touch, Texture, Time.” Textile: Cloth and Culture 17 (3): 224–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2018.1548553. Stanes, Elyse and Chris Gibson. 2017. “Materials that Linger: An Embodied ­Geography of Polyester Clothes.” Geoforum 85: 27–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2017.07.006. Textile Exchange. 2018. Preferred Fibre Market Report. https://textileexchange.org/ downloads/2018-preferred-fiber-and-materials-market-report/. Tolia-Kelly, Divya P. 2013. “The Geographies of Cultural Geography III: Material Geographies, Vibrant Matters and Risking Surface Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 37 (1): 153–60. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0309132512439154. War on Waste. 2017. Television mini-series. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney, Australia. www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/war-on-waste/. Woodward, Sophie. 2007. Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford: Berg. Woodward, Sophie and Tim H. Fisher. 2014. “Fashioning Through Materials: Material Culture, Materiality and Processes of Materialization.” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 5 (1): 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1386/csfb.5.1.3_2. WRAP. 2017. Valuing our Clothes: The Cost of U.K. Fashion. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). 11 July 2017. www.wrap.org.uk/sites/ files/wrap/valuing-our-clothes-the-cost-of-uk-fashion_WRAP.pdf.

9 The landfill paradox Reflections on the temporalities of waste Yusif Idies

Talking about waste always means having to talk of time and temporality. Whether you think of persistent organic pollutants, durables like plastic, decay of nuclear waste, the lifetime after which consumer goods turn to waste and so on—waste is an intricately temporal phenomenon (e.g., Benford 1994; Davies 2018; Gray-Cosgrove, Liboiron and Lepawsky 2015; Ialenti 2013). Landfills represent a characteristic landmark of our “trasheconomy” (Prisching 2012), and the temporal aspects of waste become particularly apparent here. William Rathje discussed waste in archaeological terms (Rathje and Murphy 1992), and he was one of the first scholars to draw explicitly on the temporal relations of waste. Inventing the discipline of “garbology,” he treated landfills as archives which could reveal the various “lives” of the stored waste. Following this tradition, journalist Edward Humes (2013) turned towards the future to demand a more wasteconscious tomorrow. Josh Reno, meanwhile, immersed himself in landfills as a participant observer in long-term fieldwork, examining the different temporalities that overlap in the periodical procedures at a landfill (Reno 2015, 2016). What I find fascinating about this topic is the supposed opposition between circular time and linear time as well as their connotations. In terms of trash, circularity is often associated with modernity, progress, cleanliness and sustainability. Recycling and every representation of it—from the famous three arrows that are folded to a closed triangle to the more up-todate image of “cradle to cradle” (McDonough and Braungart 2009)—is recognised as an ideal worth striving for. Whether achieved through more intelligent waste management strategies or sophisticated end-of-pipe technologies, the goal of a closed-loop economy without any residue seems so self-evident that no further justification is needed. The closed cycle is regarded as the pinnacle of waste management. In contrast, linear processes of value loss and the transformation of useful things into waste are usually seen as imperfect, inadequate, unfinished— and thus in some ways simply “bad.” The faster the change from useful to useless takes place, the worse it is: disposable cups, for instance, are often regarded as the symbol of the throwaway society. The everyday use of

The landfill paradox  137 things with a short lifespan has a correspondingly pejorative meaning, which sometimes even leads to the stigmatisation of their consumers. Conversely, handcrafted consumer goods are perceived as durable, solid, professionally processed and their owners as sensible and with a good eye for fine things. The business of “Manufactum,” a German-based company titling itself the “department store of good things,” relies on exactly this presumption. Alongside my visit to one of the largest landfills in Germany, I want to reflect on the spatiotemporal contradictions of flowing and stocking, containing and dissipating waste. In the course of the walk through this site, it should become clear that recycling, zero waste, circular economy, cradle to cradle and so on wouldn’t work at all if there were no landfills. Dumping and depositing waste is the conditio sine qua non of every closed circle. Landfills thus continue to be the shady side of our “trash-economy”—residual spaces that show the flaws of our everyday lifestyle.

The rhythm of waste: dumping narratives Unsurprisingly, this negative connotation is mirrored by a deeply rooted aversion to landfills. Landfills are largely hidden from view; nobody wants a landfill near residential areas, and landfills are considered mostly as the infamous landmarks of recent environmental sins. When I visited the landfill, the technical manager—I will name him Harald—picked me up at a nearby train station. Still on the highway we were chatting a little bit, when just a few minutes before we reached the site (which I hadn’t seen yet) he asked me, “Can you see us already?” I said, “No.” “Excellent.” Short pause. “The less people recognise us, the better for us.” Then he explained that “they”—meaning in the first place the people working on the landfill, but in a wider sense generally everyone in the business of working with waste—had a bad reputation. They were the litterbugs, while the municipal garbage collectors, who every week pick up and empty the trash cans and take the rubbish away, were seen as the good ones doing a virtuous and useful job. Of course, the opposition here is exaggerated: We, the landfill people versus the rest of the world. But, seriously, the stigma attached to landfills made me think of this brief dialogue long after my visit. The business of garbage collection seems to have both negative and positive connotations. On the one hand, a widespread narrative of the garbage collector is that their work is in some way inferior. Robin Nagle (2013a) reports on her fieldwork as a sanitation worker in New York City, and how she became literally invisible the moment she put on her workwear, except for when people got angry or impatient, when hurrying through the rush-hour—or, even worse, when she was despised and mocked for just being a san (wo)man (16). On the other hand, a counter-­ narrative can be identified nonetheless: the sanitation worker is seen as an everyday hero, doing invaluable care work for the general public.

138  Yusif Idies He (or she) is the one who cleans up after you, who frees you from your trash, who makes sure that the lifestyle you are living may continue (Nagle 2013b). You’ll hardly find similar positive counter-narratives in the context of landfills. Almost no one highlights their contribution to the general public health; hardly anyone talks about everyday heroes, those workers who take care of, store and manage our waste. And no one appreciates that landfills enable us to carry on with everyday living and working. I do not want to set collection against depositing, but I wonder why there is some respect for waste collection, while the business of landfilling and processing waste is considered necessary at best? I think these differences have a great deal to do with the visibility and temporality of disposal. The disposal of waste is a periodic task: just as we have to take out our garbage regularly and empty our private garbage can into the semi-private garbage can, the sanitary workers ensure that the garbage is carried away. Just as we have to make sure to get rid of our discarded waste and to put it in the communal bin, workers take care of it by removing it further away. It is a contract between citizens and trash collectors, which organises a seamless flow of waste that makes trash invisible. In the periodical act of disposing and carrying, “we” perform the same job. We are equal, as we keep running the constant flow and removal of waste. In sorting different types of waste and in the vision of preparing waste for further processing, periodicity could be thought of as being part of a productive, useful metabolism. In this way, disposal is connected to the idea of regeneration and circulation. Ultimately, time is conceptualised here as cyclical—without any notions of eternity or “deep time” often associated with immobile waste. In sharp contrast, storing waste stands for the diametrically opposed temporal concept of in/finity. Whereas the total storage capacity of the landfill is definitely limited, the monitoring of the plant is a long-term matter which, strictly speaking, never ends: the waste ordinance requires a minimum of 30 years for waste management, but legally the treatment has to be sustained until no harm and no risks of hazard from the landfill can be expected. Modern waste’s central characteristic is its unpredictability (MacBride 2011); it is not only Harald therefore who suspects that waste treatment will be an endless challenge. Both finite capacity and infinite mission combine to make a rather pessimistic picture: the landfill proves that waste “just is” and “keeps coming” without temporal limits (Moisi 2018; Nagle 2013b; Reno 2016). As a site on which tonnes of waste are dumped, any idea of closed cycles or cyclical time has to be rejected: the place for “matter out of place” (Douglas) is an epitome of the end of things. The very fact that (in Germany) untreated waste has not been allowed to be landfilled since 2005 makes the existence of landfills all the more anachronistic. In this respect, landfills literally hold up a mirror to our society and each of its members. First, they show that even if we are capable of making waste invisible, we can’t deny its production; and second, that even if our

The landfill paradox  139 knowledge lets us start a remote exploration of Mars, we have no idea what to do with a significant part of our waste other than to simply bury it. Referring to long-enduring or even permanent kinds of waste, Carmella Gray-Cosgrove, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky (2015) argue that “[w]hile they may be spatially moved and ‘cleaned up,’ the hazardous or toxic substances themselves will continue to endure in time, which means remediation becomes an exercise in shifting materials in space rather than their elimination” (1). What appears most obviously in these contexts is the suspicious unproductiveness of waste, which Wagner points out by comparing non-circular landfill waste with the circular waste of agrarian origin (2012, 83–4). On the other hand, the in/finite aspects of waste are usually associated with unfathomable timescales, often experienced as disturbing or even uncanny in some way. How will waste behave in the future? What effects will this have on the environment? Who will care about waste in an uncertain future? How are dangers and harms communicated to generations in a faraway future (Benford 1994; Givens 1982)? Concepts such as the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2006), slow violence (Nixon 2011) or deep time (Benford 2000) illustrate these temporal issues and the problem at stake with modern waste: once in the environment, it will never cease. Reading the landfill as a text, its bottom line would just say: “Waste lingers, no matter what.” Perhaps a good deal of the aversion to landfills may derive from the difficulty of actually “seeing” the international business of waste disposal. So, let’s visit a landfill and encounter the respective temporalities at play.

Arriving at the landfill: locked up waste Arriving at the landfill, Harald first of all advises me that nothing may enter or leave the facility unnoticed. We walked in without any problems, but “usually,” Harald explained, “the procedure would be much more elaborate”: lorries or trucks are weighed, when entering the site and again when leaving the site; the carried waste has to be identified according to the Abfallverzeichnisverordnung, by which waste is classified into different families, sorts, types and sub-types of waste—organic, inorganic, inert, reactive, harmful, solid, in suspension, metal, to name just a few (Foucault would have enjoyed this particular “order[ing] of things”); based on a sample from every “first carriage,” the waste has to be verified: the carried waste must be shown to correspond with the expected waste. And of course, the origin of every carriage has to be documented. From a distance the landfill looks just like what a layperson would expect—a heap of trash. But standing on the fenced-off site and experiencing its finely tuned procedures, the “heap” turns out to be a much more elaborated and complex structure, which strongly reminds one of some kind of prison, a comparison that Wagner uses in his description of the average middle-European landfill (2012, 85). Spatially, the matter is locked up, as it threatens society and the environment both now and in an uncertain

140  Yusif Idies future. But figuratively, one could also understand the landfill as an imprisonment of cast-out matter, a relationship by which the centre manages what it rejects. Let’s take a closer look at the landfill, which is obviously a very specific type of space.

The structure Behind the entrance, it turns out that the landfill is way much more than just “the structure” itself (referring to the trash heap as the heart of the landfill). Instead the site consists of different parts, each of which has its own function: administration, MBT (mechanical-biological treatment plant), leachate purification plant, leachate basin, laboratory, and finally the structure as the central part of the landfill. Here, I want to focus particularly on this part. The structure itself also consists of different sections. When the landfill started in the early–mid-1990s, it was a dump for household waste from the nearby municipalities. This closed-down section of the structure still contains untreated household waste, which was dumped and compacted in many layers. In the next significant section, so-called DKII-Waste is disposed of— low hazard waste, which nonetheless can’t be recycled in any way and which has to be stored safely. Another large section of the landfill is reserved for DKIII-Waste: harmful materials or otherwise contaminated matter. Only a few landfills in Germany allow for the storage of hazardous waste. The implicit temporal aspects of the structure seem pretty banal at first glance. Since it is the terminal station for all the matter arriving there, the structure marks not only a drop-off zone, but also a drop-out zone: the material here is no longer part of a spatial or temporal system of flows, but has crossed the boundary between certain/defined time and undefined eternity. Still, it is instructive to look at the types of waste that have “dropped out.” The first thing that struck me when standing on the trash heap was that there were none of the signs typically associated with landfills—no seagulls or crows and, most notably, no awful smell. Knowing that since 2005 untreated “classical household waste” isn’t dumped there anymore, I wasn’t too surprised, but I was nevertheless perplexed. For one thing, this might have something to do with my own biography. When I was growing up in Frankfurt am Main, some of my close relatives lived on the southern outskirts of the city, only a few kilometres away from what was then Europe’s largest waste dump. So almost every visit to my cousins was associated with passing the dump by car or train. What I still remember is the breathtaking stench of the heap—the highway passed directly by the dump for several hundred metres, separated only by a fence. I never got used to this smell. A few years after they moved away and just a few years before the general stop to contaminated waste disposal, the facility was shut down. The other thing I asked myself was: what does waste consist of today; what can’t be recycled or incinerated?

The landfill paradox  141 In the course of our walk on the heap, Harald and I went along the different sections of the structure as its internal geography unfolded step by step: behind me, the closed-down section, marked by grass coverage and cylindrical components looming out of the trash heap in even intervals; under my feet, a mixture of excavation earth and compacted waste forms the “material background,” which at first sight can’t necessarily be identified as waste. Looking more carefully, here and there some remains of packaging, cans or plastic bags peek out of the ground; in one corner there are several small piles of mineral waste and/or slag (in one of them there are some rusty cans and other metal objects mixed in the slag), each numbered, which means—as Harald explained—that they have not yet been authorised, but will have to wait for the results of the laboratory to obtain their final authorisation to remain on-site; in another corner, a hole, rather looking like a small crater, filled up with sludgy, swampy ash-grey/black material and girded by a system of pipes and sockets: powdery combustion residues, mixed with liquids and pumped in the sinkhole in order to bind the dusty waste. My attention is also caught by some Bigbags (technical term: Flexible Intermediate Bulk Container) lying around as well as cubic waste bales packed in stretch film and piled up like giant building blocks; in between, several workers on their vehicles are doing their job, some of them dumping waste, some of them compacting the waste to build up the structure on which they stand (see Figure 9.1). According to Harald, all-inall the waste keeps coming in vast quantities, which in recent years even exceeded the anticipated annual storage. But why am I recounting this? Well, what all of the different kinds of trash there seem to have in common, is their uncommonness. It doesn’t look like household trash and the origin of most of the waste can’t be traced. Contrary to Rathje’s and Murphy’s (1992) theory of garbology, the waste here is stripped of its history and individuality. And therein lies its potential: it resists all attempts at moralisation, since it is decoupled from individual use and/or temporal and spatial affiliation. In this way, the waste (i.e., its creation) cannot be assigned to a particular individual way of life and cannot be used to prove a lack of awareness of the creation of waste or the like; instead, it may enable a rather systemic view, which unfolds in temporal terms. Let me briefly come back to the stretch film-cubes: they contain a material that we in the Western world are permanently surrounded by in huge quantities, though we hardly take notice of it: insulation material for houses. Normally hidden from view, it only becomes a visible matter of concern when buildings are constructed, renovated or demolished. Depending on which material is used (in many cases polystyrene or synthetic insulation wool) it cannot be recycled and has to be disposed of without any likelihood of decomposition. So compared to other waste, insulation may stand for what could be named slow waste, which, following the concept of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), withdraws itself from attention. With regard to the potentially hazardous components

142  Yusif Idies

Figure 9.1  Strechfilm waste cubes, being worked in the landfill. Source: Yusif Idies. Photo used with kind permission of the operating company.

in “sick buildings” (Murphy 2006), a major problem is that due to the time lag between bodily contamination and the onset of symptoms, it is very hard to prove a link to the original hazardous materials. This becomes particularly apparent when considering the latency of chemical infrastructures through which bodies are burdened and polluted over generations (Murphy 2013, 111–12). This kind of waste raises an important issue: waste is much more than an exclusively individual, small-scale and short-term issue. Instead, unusual waste reveals that we are living in a waste system to which we can rarely cut off our connections. Perhaps it is possible to reduce one’s personal consumption of plastic bags, packaging, disposable dishes or to substitute them with equivalent multi-use items. However, that would still not account for the invisibilities and/or shifting dimensions of waste. For example, the “paper-free office” would of course consume less paper and resources for production, but extended digital ways of processing in turn would shift the carbon emissions away from paper production towards the maintenance and energy provisions of server farms, the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial material infrastructure of the world wide web, and the electronic devices that are used for day-to-day communication.

The landfill paradox  143 The lesson one can learn here is that garbage doesn’t disappear. The simple materiality of waste requires that someone, somewhere, ultimately has to deal with it for some time.

Caring about leaks: landfill futures The relation between the landfill and the material of which it consists is an odd one: due to its spatial limits and storage capacity, the landfill as an institution has a defined lifespan, while its anthropogenic legacy—waste— lasts for an uncertain period of time. This raises the spectre of “deep time,” a temporal concept first proposed by the Scottish geologist James Hutton in the eighteenth century (Farrier 2016). With this concept, Hutton referred to timescales associated with planetary processes of erosion, sedimentation and so on that are beyond human imagination, and which may be directed to both past and future, as they have “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” (as cited in Farrier 2016, para. 10). With modern waste, like the waste lying and lingering in our landfills and dumps, anthropogenic legacies themselves are extending into deep time. The idea that humans are in this way absent-present actors in faraway futures culminates in recent discussions about whether the highly debated “Anthropocene” should attain ­official status as a geological epoch (e.g., Lewis and Maslin 2015). Accordingly, the responsibility for waste does not end simply when a landfill is shut down. On the one hand, the material is still highly reactive, particularly in “old” landfills or the older sections of landfills, which contain untreated household waste or other organic matter. On the other hand, landfills constantly release contaminants into the environment, in the present as much as in deep time. With this in mind, I want to briefly illuminate the multiple temporalities that the staff at the landfill have to deal with. Which “leaks” have to be addressed and taken care of? How do the landfill staff take care in the presence of uncertain developments in the future? When talking about leakages, it is not necessarily only in regard to chunks of solid waste. The most important leaks are governed by the gas wells and the leachate system: the aforementioned cylindrical components are gas wells, which collect the emerging methane from rotting processes in the mass of waste. This gas in turn is used to produce energy for operations in other sections of the landfill. Though this sounds like the ideal of a closed circle, there are at least two issues: (1) Even if the gas wells become more efficient, considerable losses of methane are still released into the atmosphere, where it has a 21 times stronger warming effect than carbon dioxide (EPA n.d.); (2) The reactive process is long-lasting, and it is mostly unclear at which point the waste has completely rotted and “disappeared.” Something similar applies in regard to liquid emissions: due to regular rainfall trickling down through the whole of the structure, the contaminated leachate has to be collected. The leachate in turn is treated in the nearby purification plant, from where the purified part is fed into the grid.

144  Yusif Idies However, two waste streams are split off here, which need further treatment: on the one hand, the purification plant consumes energy and partially ­hazardous chemicals (e.g., hydrochloric acid), while on the other hand, the concentrated leachate waste remains. This concentrate of the landfill waste is highly contaminated and therefore collected in the leachate basin, from where it is picked up by tanker trucks and disposed of in specialised dumps for landfill leachate. Standing in front of the Basin, Harald told me that you could view it as a curiosity cabinet of substances. Following Rathje and Murphy (1992), if landfills are archives, the leachate could be seen as the concentrated simulacrum of social living from the mid-1990s to date. In this way, the past literally leaks into the future: “[o]ur present sinks spill into the sinks of the future” (Gabrys 2009, 677). Landfills are containment tools that can handle and control waste in some ways and for some time. Nevertheless, failing is programmatic, as they cannot be closed hermetically and certainly not for all times. Instead, the described emissions exemplify what could be named “structural leaks”—and the search for the “ultimate sink” (Tarr 1996) continues. Against this background, I was curious to learn about how the “aftercare” of the landfill is organised. Although he was not uneasy about my questions, Harald explained that this topic was indeed interesting, but for him it was a rather “philosophical question.” In regard to leachate, for instance, he admitted that even when a landfill is sealed off with a thick plastic film you could think of several events (e.g., growing trees and their roots) causing rifts and ruptures and finally leakages. From a legal point of view, it seems a bit clearer at first glance: several phases are distinguished for landfill aftercare, each of which is assigned a defined duration. But even though these durations are still estimates, the “official” release from the post-operative care is orientated towards negotiated limits of emission. One could say, pointedly, that aftercare ends when the responsible authority decides so. What the operating company of the facility must do, however, is prevention management in financial terms. Taking care, then, means building up financial reserves, which are earmarked for any measures in the future to secure the landfill. In this way, uncertainty is tamed, while the obligations that are actually practiced and experienced are ones confined to the present. This became particularly evident when we talked about the landfill’s operating company as an employer. One of the most difficult jobs, Harald told me, was the communication of news about the inevitable shutdown of a landfill, such as when its carrying capacity is exhausted. As most of the employees at the landfill have blue-collar jobs, the closing of a site plainly means that they are losing their place of employment. Understandably, the company cares much more about the present treatment of waste than its uncertain futures. In the case of the visited landfill, the waste triggers a paradoxical urgency. A constant or even growing amount of annual depositing of waste would normally have to be seen as good news for those employed in the waste business; however, the more waste is deposited each year, the sooner

The landfill paradox  145 the landfill has to be shut down, which is currently an issue in managing the facility. Although the faraway future is considered, the day-to-day routines come to the foreground. Operating a landfill is about caring in deep time, while at the same time mastering the challenges of shallow time.

Conclusion Landfills manage to resolve the contradiction between the mobility and immobility of waste. They are temporally and spatially the antithesis of keeping things in flow, while at the same time ensuring the containment and flow of waste. With these ambiguous characteristics, the landfill epitomises the paradoxical structures of late capitalism, which squeeze out value from nearly everything at the cost of producing more and more waste. After all, the emergence of the ultimately worthless is inevitable. As MacBride (2011) succinctly puts it: “Garbage is the material artefact of a great range of steps prior to wasting. Its existence signals larger, more diffuse problems. In it, we see the last vestige of havoc wreaked by materials as they flow globally” (2). This ultimate remainder has by definition no temporal limit. Hence, in respect to time, absolute containment must fail—waste simply must be endured. The only way to exercise control, then, is to do our best to contain waste spatially in what must be a constant struggle against entropic forces that lead to dispersion and overflow (Folkers 2018). Although they are rather small in respect to both the scale and the attention they raise, these peripheral sites express a central contradiction— namely the infinite extraction of finite resources: “The logic of infinite growth implicit in capitalism and industrial progress craves magical and wondrous materials, which it requires as resources and leaves behind as waste” (Litvintseva 2019, 168). The landfill is the spatial and temporal proof of that logic.

References Benford, Gregory. 1994. “Comporting Ourselves to the Future: Of Time, Communication, and Nuclear Waste.” Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 17 (1): 91–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/1061-7361(94)90008-6. Benford, Gregory. 2000. Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. New York: Harper Perennial. Crutzen, Paul Joseph. 2006. “The ‘Anthropocene.’ ” In Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, edited by Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 13–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26590-2_3. Davies, Thom. 2018. “Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108 (6): 1537–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1470924. EPA [United States Environmental Protection Agency]. n.d. “Atmospheric Lifetime and Global Warming Potential Defined.” www.epa.gov/climateleadership/atmosphericlifetime-and-global-warming-potential-defined.

146  Yusif Idies Farrier, David. 2016. “Deep Time’s Uncanny Future is Full of Ghostly Human Traces.” Aeon, 31 October 2016. https://aeon.co/ideas/deep-time-s-uncannyfuture-is-full-of-ghostly-human-traces. Folkers, Andreas. 2018. “Stoffwechselstörung: Müll, Metabolismus, Materialismus.” In Die Grenzen der Dinge: Ästhetische Entwürfe und theoretische Reflexionen materieller Randständigkeit, edited by Lis Hansen, Kerstin Roose and Dennis Senzel. ­Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 239–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20315-3_11. Gabrys, Jennifer. 2009. “Sink: The Dirt of Systems.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (4): 666–81. https://doi.org/10.1068/d5708. Givens, David. 1982. “From Here to Eternity: Communicating with the Distant Future.” Et Cetera 39 (2): 159–79. Gray-Cosgrove, Carmella, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky. 2015. “The Challenges of Temporality to Depollution & Remediation.” S.A.P.I.EN.S. 8 (1). http://journals. openedition.org/sapiens/1740. Humes, Edward. 2013. Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash. New York: Penguin. Ialenti, Vincent. 2013. “Nuclear Energy’s Long Now: Intransigent Wastes & Radioactive Greens.” Suomen Antropologi: The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38 (3): 61–5. Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519: 171–80. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258. Litvintseva, Sasha. 2019. “Asbestos Inside and Outside, Toxic and Haptic.” Environmental Humanities 11 (1): 152–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7349466. MacBride, Samantha. 2011. Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McDonough, William and Michael Braungart. 2009. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: Vintage. Moisi, Laura. 2018. “ ‘The Garbage Keeps Coming’: Zur Politischen Performativität des Abfalls.” In Die Grenzen der Dinge: Ästhetische Entwürfe und theoretische Reflexionen materieller Randständigkeit, edited by Lis Hansen, Kerstin Roose and Dennis Senzel. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 195–220. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20315-3_9. Murphy, Michelle. 2006. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Murphy, Michelle. 2013. “Chemical Infrastructures of the St Clair River.” In Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, edited by Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas. London: Pickering & Chatto, 103–16. Nagle, Robin. 2013a. Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Nagle, Robin. 2013b. “What I Discovered in New York City Trash.” English transcript of TEDCity2.0, September 2013. www.ted.com/talks/robin_nagle_what_i_ discovered_in_new_york_city_trash/transcript. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prisching, Manfred. 2012. “Trash Economy. Abfallmaximierung als Wirtschaftsprinzip.” In Abfallmoderne: Zu den Schmutzrändern der Kultur, edited by Anselm Wagner. Wien: Lit Verlag, 29–43. Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. 1992. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

The landfill paradox  147 Reno, Joshua. 2015. “The Time of Landfills.” Discard Studies. https://discardstudies. com/2015/09/25/the-time-of-landfills/. Reno, Joshua. 2016. Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill. Oakland: University of California Press. Tarr, Joel. 1996. The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective. Ohio: University of Akron Press. Wagner, Anselm. 2012. “Deponie.” In Ortsregister: Ein Glossar zu Räumen der Gegenwart, edited by Nadine Marquardt and Verena Schreiber. Bielefeld: transcript, 83–8. https://doi.org/10.14361/transcript.9783839419687.83.

Part IV

Longue durée and intergenerational time

10 The waste of time Elizabeth Graham, Dan Evans and Lindsay Duncan

Introduction In this chapter, we use archaeology to introduce a new dimension to perceptions of waste that draws also from soil science and environmental engineering. We start by connecting our view with generally accepted concepts of waste. We then expand on our perspective and discuss potential implications for the disciplinary imperatives of both archaeology and soil science, and for common assumptions about dirt and soil. Finally, we present the interim results of experimentation with a model, known as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) (European Commission 2010; European Environment Agency 1998; Finnveden et al. 2009; ISO 2006a, 2006b). LCA is a tool employed in modern assessments of potential environmental impact, from bio- and renewable energy (e.g., Cherubini and Strømman 2011; Pehnt 2006; Sander and Murthy 2010) to construction (Vilches et al. 2017) to landfill (Nielsen and Hauschild 1998, 158). In our case, the archaeological site, along with its dark soils and vegetation, represents the end-result or impact, and our interest is in reconstructing what led to the impact. Our initial aim is to use the data recovered on the origins and constituents of past deposits to understand the processes of site formation, because the “site” as we know it today is defined by the impact of past discard behaviours. Our ultimate goal is to be able to contribute to the management of modern buried waste as well as the management of human burial by contextualising decay processes in “archaeological” or long-term timeframes. Internalising the significance of this long-term context will require changes in social and cultural attitudes. In addition, taking such changes on board highlights the fact that the management of waste is an ecological problem rather than simply a soil or engineering one.

Waste as an end and a beginning Dictionary definitions of “waste” abound, but our concern is with unwanted matter or material left after use or otherwise lost (Hawkins 2006; Scanlan 2005). From the traditional archaeological perspective, discarded or

152  Elizabeth Graham et al. lost objects or materials are “out of sight” in that they require excavation. When recovered, however, they are identified no longer as something discarded or lost but instead as something “found.” What was waste long ago receives a new life in artefact classification according to material, function or form. From the original object to its remains, the time that we attribute to the trajectory of decay creates renewed value in its passing. From our less-than-traditional point of view, decay and time play even greater roles as regards their effects on objects and materials from the past, because what is discarded, left, lost, buried or excreted can lose discreteness and become part of the matrix of a find rather than the find itself. The relationship between humans and waste in this perspective is so deeply marked by time that few would recognise the matrix as ever having been waste at all. Instead, what was once refuse, human excrement, an abandoned house or a body looks like soil. Waste in this circumstance is both an end (what people disposed of) and a beginning (a growth medium for plants and trees) with time as the powerful vector of transformation. Yet, “disconnect” rather than transition or mutability characterises our thinking regarding ends and beginnings, disposal and generation, discard and production. Strasser (1999, 108–9) characterises this disconnect as a social and historical product of the twentieth century, by which time “waste” had come to refer to material destined for disposal (by the city or the municipality) as a process entirely distinct from production, consumption and use. Scanlan (2005) implies that we do, in fact, make the connection between waste and what becomes of it (as well as what becomes of us), but on a subliminal level; as a result, we separate ourselves from waste (or “garbage” in Scanlan’s terms) because waste serves “as a stark reminder of what we really are” (Scanlan 2005, 12). Separation from waste is reinforced further by our commodity culture (Benjamin 1999 and Buck-Morss 1991 as cited in Hawkins 2006, 129), which acts to deny the inevitability of organic change (ageing, decay) through “the cult of the new and the worship of youth” (Hawkins 2006, 129). That organic change via decay and time connects ends to beginnings is the thrust of our chapter. We are building on Hawkins’s (2006, 123–8) and Phillips’s (1999) model/metaphor of the earthworm and its transformative activity—“fundamental to the making and remaking of the world” (Hawkins 2006, 124)—by returning to the subject of the soil.

Digging up dirt When we seek to determine why the debris and waste from human activity have not been studied for their contributions to soil building or soilenhancing properties, several thoughts come to mind. The first is that the term “waste” itself reflects a lack of interest in—and the maintenance of distance from—whatever we discard or excrete (Douglas 2002). When we throw something away, we follow it at most to the trash bin outside our

The waste of time  153 house or building. At that point, most people do not want to know where rubbish piles up or how it is treated. Conveniently, rubbish is carried away in trucks, and faeces and urine are flushed down wastepipes or deposited at a distance from household activity. Waste is something to be whisked away, buried or sealed and, most important, forgotten. Archaeologists should have cottoned on to the importance of waste— beyond artefacts—long ago, because they have to dig to find things. Bits and pieces of objects from past centuries or millennia are not normally lying around on the surface, except in some caves or when brought to the surface by root or animal action. The fact that things get buried is taken for granted rather than questioned. “Backdirt” or “loose” dirt rather than “soil” are the terms used by archaeologists to refer to what is dug up and carried away in buckets or wheelbarrows to reveal material remains. This practice makes clear that “dirt” has a particular connotation—something to “keep out of sight, out of mind” (Montgomery 2008, 2). “Soil” has higher status as a term. When not carried off as “dirt,” soil can be studied for its strata or for its cultural/environmental material content; but such studies are directed at what we can learn about the past, not the present.

The past over the present Archaeologists focus on what people have accomplished in the past. The discipline developed around the recovery of the remnants of the past: tools, ceramics, houses, monumental architecture, burial accompaniments, and the dead, either whole or in parts. Skeletons are studied for burial patterns, for evidence of diet or disease, isotopes or radiocarbon dating. Soils and sediments are put through sieves, or cores are taken for macro- or microbotanical remains, which can, when identified, provide us with evidence about the composition of the past environment, or what people were eating or growing. The decay of tools, architecture, or cadavers is to be lamented as “poor preservation.” Granted that decay processes lie at the core of taphonomic studies, which evaluate the extent to which decomposition affects organisms after death (Blau 2014). Animal, plant and human remains form the core of taphonomic studies, although artefacts are sometimes included. Taphonomic data are utilised, however, to enhance recovery of information about human activity in the past but not to help determine how the decaying remains of human activity have contributed to the character of the developing soil matrix; and it is the soil matrix that has implications for modern agriculture. Another reason why the decay products of human activities have not been a subject of study is a critical theme of this volume: time. Once decayed, the constituents of decay are not recognised as anything other than natural in origin. The biblical phrase “dust to dust” comes to mind (Genesis 3:19 KJV). If enough time passes and a building or a body disintegrates, it loses its identity. There are techniques, such as chemical testing or

154  Elizabeth Graham et al. soil micromorphology, that can detect the former presence of a building or a body. Phosphorous testing has been used, for example, to detect the possible presence of ancient markets (Coronel et al. 2015; Dahlin et al. 2007), but the aim of the exercise is to learn more about the people of the past. The contribution of phosphorous to the character of the surface soil that has subsequently formed, the long-term effects on soil microbial communities and the consequences for nutrient retention, or the length of time involved for post-occupational strata to accumulate are not matters on which archaeologists or soil scientists have traditionally focused. The exception is studies of the Amazonian terra preta or “dark earths” (ArroyoKalin 2014; Glaser and Woods 2004). Amazonian dark earth studies tend, however, to be concerned with dark earths as a reflection of Precolumbian Indigenous people’s manipulation of the environment. In our case, although Precolumbian practices are of interest, our focus is less on identifying practices and more on qualifying and quantifying the waste and decay of what the practices produced.

Nature over culture If we leave humans aside for the moment, soil science recognises that soils derive partly from the denudation of rocks and partly from the decomposition of plants and animals (Schaetzl and Thompson 2015, 8) through ­processes, both real and metaphorical, of “wearing, decay, transience and dissolution” (Viney 2014, 3). Thus soil, like waste, is “an acknowledgement of time’s passing” and makes time an “explicit, tangible thing of thought” (Viney 2014, 3). At a more mundane level, the temporality of soil formation— “how fast does soil grow?” (Stockmann, Minasny and McBratney 2014, 48)—has been one of the more difficult issues for soil scientists to tackle since the study of pedogenesis (soil formation) began (Jenny 1941). Although water covers two-thirds of Planet Earth, the Germanic-­ language origins of the word “earth” reference the ground or land in some way, and not the sea. Perhaps the bias towards earth is not surprising, since humans are a land-dwelling species and are greatly if not wholly reliant on the earth’s soils for sustenance. Despite this essential link between soils and humankind, the pioneers of soil science did not seek to elucidate the nexus between humans and soils. Instead, the founders of the discipline aimed to “conside[r] the soil purely as a natural body,” overtly declaring that the science should have “little regard for its practical utilization” (Lyon and Buckman 1946, 1). A century on, it is now unquestionably clear that soils are, and have always been, a fundamental global resource that plays a key role in alleviating many of the burgeoning pressures that confront society: food, water and energy security, the abatement of climate change, the safeguarding of ecosystem diversity and the protection of human health (McBratney, Field and Koch 2014). Soil science has today become an applied science and, as Richter (2007, 8) suggests, one that should embrace

The waste of time  155 “all of the human relations with soils and the global environment.” Human relations with soils, however, are deteriorating. In many areas of the world, soils are degrading owing to human activities, and accelerated erosion, compaction, pollution and contamination are truncating the soil’s longevity. The role of humans is absent in the five factors of soil formation: climate, organisms, relief, parent material and time (Schaetzl and Thompson 2015, 283–93). Amundson and Jenny (1991) suggest that human influence is encapsulated within the organism factor. Others have argued that humans have the capacity to alter all five factors of soil formation (Bidwell and Hole 1965). Human capacity to accelerate or retard processes within the soil system by changing soil micro- and meso-climates is well established, as are the effects of removing native vegetation in favour of crop production, re-configuring hillslopes to terraces and accelerating the weathering of ­ parent material through fertiliser use. For all of these examples, the emphasis is on how human activity affects soil development (Capra et al., 2015; Schaetzl and Thompson 2015, 6). In other words, the soil mass under study has derived from natural processes (from alluvium and colluvium to glacial till and weathered bedrock), and human activity has only modified its biological, chemical, physical and hydrological make-up. Soil science recognises that in addition to acting as modifiers of soil, humans can contribute to soil formation by adding materials. Plaggen soils—a man-made soil using heather and manure—produced in several European countries (Blume and Leinweber 2004) bear out that extraneous materials can be added to thicken existing soil profiles, although there is great variation worldwide concerning the types of material deposited, the methods and rates of deposition and the justification for these additions (Giani, Makowsky and Mueller 2014). In northeast Scotland, the addition of turves, dung, midden material, calcareous sand and seaweed, or a combination thereof, contributed to a gradual increase in the depth of soil surface and sub-surface layers (Davidson and Simpson 1984). Accumulation rates are believed to have reached 1.9 cm yr–1 (Davidson, Harkness and Simpson 1986), giving rise to mounds of up to 4.3 metres in thickness. In the Netherlands, similar practices led to soils thickening up to 1.3 mm yr–1 (de Bakker 1979). Conry (1974) suggests four objectives that justify the historical adoption of plaggen agriculture, of which replenishing nutrients and improving soil physical properties are two. Giani and colleagues (2014) diversify the objectives, citing enhancements to soil health such as greater living space for fauna, enhanced buffer for contaminants and greater carbon store. Denevan and Turner (1974) suggest, in addition, that thickening soil profiles allows easier and deeper root growth and expansion. The motivations behind plaggen agriculture are, therefore, diverse and require an explicit examination of local context. There is, however, one common denominator, which is that additions were made to existing soil profiles in order to enhance soil quality and productivity. Here, we propose that human-made

156  Elizabeth Graham et al. products in the form of waste and discard can contribute to the process of pedogenesis itself.

The research at Marco Gonzalez Our research is focused on a Maya archaeological site, called “Marco Gonzalez,” situated on a coral island or “caye” off the coast of Belize ­ (Aimers et al. 2016; Emery and Graham 2003; Graham 1989; Graham and Pendergast 1989; Simmons and Graham 2016; Stemp and Graham 2006; Williams, White and Longstaffe 2009) (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2). The soils at Marco Gonzalez present a conundrum for traditional soil science. The enigma is palpably clear when one inspects the underlying bedrock: pleistocene limestone with dissolution features (caves and sinkholes), well-developed karst and a thin layer of unconsolidated carbonate sediments (Dunn and Mazzullo 1993). Carbonaceous bedrock—limestone, in particular—is often associated with very thin residual soil because the weathered material is either soluble in water or insoluble and washed off rock into fissures, joints and caves (Schaetzl and Thompson 2015, 19). The soils at Marco Gonzalez, on the contrary, are up to three metres thick (see Figure 10.3). What are the parent materials from which such relatively thick soils formed? The remains of human activities at Marco Gonzalez stretch over a period of about 2,000 years and comprise domestic rubbish, abandoned houses, human excreta, human burials, fish and animal bones, tools, construction material, and household and industrial products and their debris (see Table 10.1). Archaeological investigations in 2013–14, sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust (Graham et al. 2017; Macphail et al. 2017), point to these remains as potential parent materials. The constituents of the discarded materials and waste products are those defined by science, such as quartz or iron or calcium carbonate (Aimers et al. 2016; Pope 2018). They occur, however, in products (artefacts) either made by humans (e.g., pottery, plasters and stuccos, building materials, clothing, adornments, paper products) or used and concentrated by them (e.g., shell, bone, stone). Material remains (ecofacts) are also present owing either to human transport—as in the case of bones discarded as fish were prepared for salt preservation and export—or to what people chose to eat and drink. As artefacts, ecofacts, and buried cadavers decay, the constituents enter the soil or sediment matrix and are available to contribute to soil formation. There are several interesting implications. One is that people can have transported the products or their components very long distances from the sources of raw materials, and hence, through decay processes, minerals become deposited far from where they occur naturally. Another is that the chemistry and mineralogy of the deposits will reflect, to a significant degree, human ­ cultural actions and choices.

Source: Map drawn by Panos Kratimenos.

Figure 10.1  Map of Belize showing location of Ambergris Caye and Marco Gonzalez.

The waste of time  157

Source: Elizabeth Graham.

Figure 10.2  Marco Gonzalez from the air.

158  Elizabeth Graham et al.

The waste of time  159

Figure 10.3  Soil profile, Marco Gonzalez. Source: Elizabeth Graham.

Table 10.1  Marco Gonzalez chronology Belize Chronology Dated evidence to date from MG is shaded Period

Time

Modern Late British colonial British colonial Early British colonial Late Spanish colonial Early Spanish colonial Terminal Postclassic Late Postclassic Middle Postclassic Early Postclassic Terminal Classic Late Classic Early Classic Terminal Preclassic Late Preclassic Middle Preclassic

1981–present 1964–1981 1862–1964 1660s–1862 1648–1708 1544–1648 1492–1544 1350–1492 1200/1250–1350 960/1000–1200/1250 750/800–960/1000 600–750/800 250–600 ad 1–250 300 bc–ad 1 600–300 bc

Source: Elizabeth Graham.

160  Elizabeth Graham et al. A third implication is that the conditions ­generated by hundreds of years of human occupation will be reflected in a particular ecology—animal and plant communities that have adapted to and benefited from human activities (Glanville-Wallis 2015) and have in turn contributed to sediment and soil characteristics. Although its soils, and the vegetation they support, distinguish Marco Gonzalez from its surroundings, the site is only one of many on Ambergris Caye (Guderjan 1995; Guderjan and Garber 1995; Simmons et al. 2018) that exhibit modern surface soils with higher fertility than is characteristic of soils that form naturally over reef stone (Graham 1998, 2006). Of primary interest is the considerable depth of the deposits revealed in the stratigraphic profile. What the profile represents is not simply soil enrichment but a kind of soil production that would not have occurred had people not lived, littered and died here over centuries. The implication, somewhat contrary to the dicta of the circular economy (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017) or environmental advocacy, is that discard and the ­creation of waste should be considered a key behaviour of potentially sustainable practices.

Impact Our discussion thus far has been about our hypothesis that degradation and decomposition of waste contribute to sedimentary material and increased soil mass. The time depth entailed in this sort of transformation can be considerable: decades at least, but more probably centuries. The disposal of waste in our short lifetimes—the acts by which we place once-­ useful things or substances out of sight and mind—nonetheless has environmental impacts that are important to consider. Shorter-term degradative effects that accompany long-term environmental enhancements must be addressed, because waste materials become an intrinsic part of an on-site ecosystem by contributing to the chemical, physical and biological nature of the locale. How do we determine the relationship between the legacy of waste disposal and the on-site ecosystem? Methods already exist that are used for modern environmental impact assessments (e.g., Ivanova et al. 2015; Nahvi et al. 2018). Our interests and our pilot study at Marco Gonzalez differ in key ways, however, from attempting to determine, for example, the impact of mining waste. In the Marco Gonzalez case, the impact is observable: the modern presence of dark earth and a deep profile, with soils that are commonly dug up by local residents and transported to their gardens. In this circumstance, the question is not “What will the impact be?” but “How did the impact come about?” The field research at the site in 2013–14 was directed at recovering data that would enable us to characterise the nature of the deposits through time to determine their contribution to the ­constituents of the modern surface and sub-surface soils. No study such as

The waste of time  161 ours has been attempted before, and we had no model to follow. It turned out that archaeological recovery methods, most of which require either hand extraction or fine sieving, were not sufficient to identify the full suite of potential constituents. Nonetheless, through detailed analyses of the fractions from sieving and flotation (Duncan 2019), examination of sediment cores and interpretation of thin sections taken from soil profile column samples, we were able to identify the remains and residues of a number of activities that contributed to the chemistry, mineralogy and soil mass at the site (Graham et al. 2017). What appears to the naked eye to be soil or sediment reflects multiple floors, refuse stamped into surfaces, quartz sand that was once pottery temper and massive deposits of ash and carbon resulting from the heating of brine in vessels to drive off water as part of salt processing (Macphail et al. 2017). Additionally, among the ­Precolumbian Maya, sub-floor burials were a common practice, and their decay and decomposition, especially from the late eighth through early tenth century, seem to have contributed greatly to the character of the soils that bury the salt processing debris. LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) was identified as a potential analytical tool for Marco Gonzalez because it is materials-led. Although our ultimate goal is tracking what produced modern soil conditions, our first step was to investigate the shorter-term degradative effects from past waste disposal. LCA is applied widely outside of archaeology to create decision-support tools and to contribute to planning and policy (European Environment Agency 1998, 29). It examines the entire life cycle of a product as a system, and accounts for and quantifies all inputs (products, materials or energy that enter a system, including raw materials) (ISO 2006a, 3–4), outputs (products, materials or energy that leave a process) (ISO 2006a, 4), and interior transfers of raw materials, products and energy (ISO 2006a, 4). The method requires, as we have learned since the 2013–14 field season, a high level of quantification that is best achieved with integration in the planning stages of fieldwork. Although our recovery methods were not sufficient to produce the necessary level of quantification, we nevertheless performed a preliminary LCA using data sourced from the excavations, whereby the product was waste, and outputs were defined as emissions from waste degradation. The results suggested that the Early Classic period—with mixed domestic and salt production evidence—was a potentially large contributor to short-term ecosystem degradation (Duncan 2019), but it will be necessary in future to develop more specific on-site models for the LCA based on our understanding of the decay and deposition conditions. An understanding of impact scale can be achieved with increased sampling across the site area, and the inclusion of the quantification requirements of LCA into fieldwork strategies, so that data are available across the deposits for different scales and datasets.

162  Elizabeth Graham et al.

Conclusions The synergies between archaeology and soil science and environmental engineering offer a unique perspective on the long-term legacy of waste and human discard behaviours. An archaeological site on a coral island in Belize may seem an odd platform from which to study the transformation from waste to soil, but there are good reasons for the choice of site. On a coral island, natural soil parent materials are limited to calcium carbonate, and it is easier than it is on the mainland to identify exotic constituents. The humid tropics are environments in which decay of materials that seem “permanent” in temperate climes can be more readily observed. People living in the tropics are aware of the effects of decay processes in their own lifetimes, whereas in temperate or dry climates, decay, particularly of the built environment, is “out of mind.” The humid tropics therefore act as a kind of laboratory. It is also true that the lack of the grazing animal complex in the Neotropics may have created optimum conditions for soil building, perhaps as concomitants of a largely vegetable-based indigenous diet and a significant dependence on trees and forest products. Not least, the Maya area offers a long and well-documented occupation history with a refined chronology, which should help to answer the question of how fast the soils grow. Thus, in this setting, contemporary challenges that are very much in our sights and on our minds, such as food and water security or global land degradation, may best be met by considering the temporalities of what we so often keep out of sight and out of mind: waste.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge all those who contributed to The Leverhulme Trust Project at Marco Gonzalez (RPG-2013–204), which explored the role of past human activity in structuring modern landscapes and soils: Julia Stegemann, Co-PI; Richard Macphail, Simon Turner, John Crowther, Richard Whittet, Cristina Rosique, Elma Kaye, Eduardo Barrientos, Denver Cayetano, Phillip Austin, Jan Brown and Manuel Arroyo-Kalin. Research into urban waste and soils has been facilitated by the U.K. Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through its support for the Precolumbian Tropical Urban Life Network (TruLife) conceived and ­ headed by Benjamin Vis with Christian Isendahl (co-PI), Karsten Lambers and Graham. We also acknowledge support from the Institute for Sustainable Research, UCL; the Institute of Archaeology, NICH, Belize; and the Environmental Research Institute of the University of Belize.

References Aimers, James, Kay McCarron, Scott Simmons, Elizabeth Graham, Elizabeth Haussner, Dori Farthing and Satoru Murata. 2016. “An Expedient Pottery Technology and its Implications for Ancient Maya Trade and Interaction.” In Perspectives

The waste of time  163 on the Ancient Maya of Chetumal Bay, edited by Debra S. Walker. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 149–61. Amundson, Ronald and Hans Jenny. 1991. “The Place of Humans in the State Factor Theory of Ecosystems and Their Soils.” Soil Science 151 (1): 99–109. Arroyo-Kalin, Manuel. 2014. “Amazonian Dark Earths: Geoarchaeology.” In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. New York: Springer, 168–78. https://doi-org. ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_2252. de Bakker, H. 1979. Major Soils and Soil Regions in the Netherlands. Wageningen: Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation. Bidwell, O.W. and F.D. Hole. 1965. “Man as a Factor in Soil Formation.” Soil Science 99 (1): 65–72. Blau, Soren. 2014. “Taphonomy: Definition.” In Enyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith, 7235. New York: Springer. https://link.springer.com/refer enceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-0465-2_132. Blume, Hans-Peter and Peter Leinweber. 2004. “Plaggen Soils: Landscape History, Properties, and Classification.” Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science 167 (3): 319–27. https://doi.org/10.1002/jpln.200420905. Capra, Gian Franco, Antonio Ganga, Eleonora Grilli, Sergio Vacca and Andrea Buondonno. 2015. “A Review on Anthropogenic Soils from a Worldwide Perspective.” Journal of Soils and Sediments 15: 1602–18. Cherubini, Francesco and Anders Hammer Strømman. 2011. “Life Cycle Assessment of Bioenergy Systems: State of the Art and Future Challenges.” Bioresource Technology 102 (2): 437–51. Conry, M.J. 1974. “Plaggen Soils. A Review of Man-Made Raised Soils.” Soil and Fertilizers 37 (11): 319–26. Coronel, Eric G., Scott Hutson, Aline Magnoni, Chris Balzotti, Austin Ulmer and Richard E. Terry. 2015. “Geochemical Analysis of Late Classic and Post Classic Maya Marketplace Activities at the Plazas of Cobá, Mexico.” Journal of Field Archaeology 40 (1): 89–109. Dahlin, Bruce H., Christopher T. Jensen, Richard E. Terry, David R. Wright and Timothy Beach. 2007. “In Search of An Ancient Maya Market.” Latin American Antiquity 18 (4): 363–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/25478193. Davidson, Donald A. and Ian A. Simpson. 1984. “The Formation of Deep Topsoils in Orkney.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 9 (1): 75–81. https://doi. org/10.1002/esp.3290090108. Davidson, Donald A., Douglas D. Harkness and Ian A. Simpson. 1986. “The Formation of Farm Mounds on the Island of Sanday, Orkney.” Geoarchaeology 1 (1): 45–59. https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.3340010106. Denevan, William M. and Turner, B. L., II. 1974. “Forms, Functions and Associations of Raised Fields in the Old World Tropics.” Journal of Tropical Geography 39: 24–33. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Duncan, Lindsay M. 2019. “Archaeological Deposits, Environmental Impact and Local Soil Formation at Marco Gonzalez, Belize.” PhD diss., Institute of Archaeology, University College London. 2 vols. Dunn, Richard K. and S.J. Mazzullo. 1993. “Holocene Paleocoastal Reconstruction and its Relationship to Marco Gonzalez, Ambergris Caye, Belize.” Journal of Field Archaeology 20 (2): 121–31. https://doi.org/10.1179/009346993791549183.

164  Elizabeth Graham et al. Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 2017. “Concept: Circular Economy.” www.ellenmac arthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/concept. Emery, Kitty F. and Elizabeth Graham. 2003. “Marine Resource Availability and Use at Marco Gonzalez, Belize.” In Transitions in Zooarchaeology: New Methods and New Results, edited by Kathlyn Stewart. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Nature, 68–102. European Commission—Joint Research Centre—Institute for Environment and Sustainability. 2010. International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook— General Guide for Life Cycle Assessment—Detailed Guidance. First edition March 2010. EUR 24708 EN. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. https://eplca.jrc.ec.europa.eu/uploads/ILCD-Handbook-General-guide-for-LCADETAILED-GUIDANCE-12March2010-ISBN-fin-v1.0-EN.pdf. European Environment Agency. 1998. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): A Guide to Approaches, Experiences and Information Sources. Environmental Issues Series No. 6. Copenhagen: European Environment Agency. Finnveden, Göran, Michael Z. Hauschild, Tomas Ekvall, Jeroen B. Guinée, Reinout Heijungs, Stefanie Hellweg, Annette Koehler, David Pennington and Sangwon Suh. 2009. “Recent Developments in Life Cycle Assessment.” Journal of Environmental Management 91 (1): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2009.06.018. Giani, Luise, Lutz Makowsky and Klaus Mueller. 2014. “Plaggic Anthrosol: Soil of the Year 2013 in Germany: An Overview on its Formation, Distribution, Classification, Soil Function and Threats.” Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science 177 (3): 320–9. https://doi.org/10.1002/jpln.201300197. Glanville-Wallis, Francesca. 2015. “ ‘Of Crabs and Men’—Artefact Analysis of Residual Waste Deposits, and a Preliminary Investigation into Crab Bioturbation at Marco Gonzalez, Belize.” Third-year dissertation, BSc, Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Glaser, Bruno and William I. Woods, eds. 2004. Amazonian Dark Earths: Explorations in Space and Time. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Graham, Elizabeth. 1989. “Brief Synthesis of Coastal Site Data from Colson Point, Placencia, and Marco Gonzalez, Belize.” In Coastal Maya Trade, edited by Heather McKillop and Paul F. Healy. Peterborough, Ontario: Trent University, Occasional Papers in Anthropology No. 8, 135–54. Graham, Elizabeth. 1998. “Metaphor and Metamorphism: Some Thoughts on Environmental Meta-History.” In Advances in Historical Ecology, edited by William Balée. New York: Columbia University Press, 119–37. Graham, Elizabeth and David M. Pendergast. 1989. “Excavations at the Marco ­Gonzalez Site, Ambergris Caye, Belize.” Journal of Field Archaeology 16 (1): 1–16. Graham, Elizabeth, Richard Macphail, Simon Turner, John Crowther, Julia ­Stegemann, Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Lindsay Duncan, Richard Whittet, Cristina Rosique and Phillip Austin. 2017. “The Marco Gonzalez Maya site, Ambergris Caye, Belize: Assessing the Impact of Human Activities by Examining Diachronic Processes at the Local Scale.” Quaternary International 437: 115–42. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.08.079. Guderjan, Thomas H. 1995. “Maya Settlement and Trade on Ambergris Caye, Belize.” Ancient Mesoamerica 6: 147–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536100002157. Guderjan, Thomas H. and James F. Garber, eds. 1995. Maya Maritime Trade, Settlement, and Populations on Ambergris Caye, Belize. Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos. Hawkins, Gay. 2006. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

The waste of time  165 ISO [International Organization for Standardization]. 2006a. ISO 14040: Environmental management—Life Cycle Assessment—Principles and Framework. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization. ISO [International Organization for Standardization]. 2006b. ISO 14044: Environmental Management—Life cycle Assessment—Requirements and Guidelines. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization. Ivanova, Diana, Konstantin Stadler, Kjartan Steen-Olsen, Richard Wood, Gibran Vita, Arnold Tukker and Edgar G. Hertwich. 2015. “Environmental Impact Assessment of Household Consumption.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 20 (3): 526–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12371. Jenny, Hans. 1941. Factors of Soil Formation: A System of Quantitative Pedology. New York: McGraw Hill. KJV Standard. King James Version online. www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/. Lyon, T. Lyttleton and Buckman, Harry O. 1946. The Nature and Properties of Soils: A College Text of Edaphology. New York: Macmillan. Macphail, Richard I., Elizabeth Graham, John Crowther and Simon Turner. 2017. “Marco Gonzalez, Ambergris Caye, Belize: A Geoarchaeological Record of Ground Raising Associated with Surface Soil Formation and the Presence of a Dark Earth.” Journal of Archaeological Science 77: 35–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jas.2016.06.003. McBratney, Alex, Damien J. Field and Andrea Koch. 2014. “The Dimensions of Soil Security.” Geoderma 213: 203–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2013.08.013. Montgomery, David. 2008. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nahvi, Ali, Amin Daghighi and Sara Nazif. 2018. “The Environmental Impact Assessment of Drainage Systems: A Case Study of the Karun River Sugarcane Development Project.” Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science 64 (2): 185–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/03650340.2017.1340641. Nielsen, Per H. and Michael Hauschild. 1998. “Product Specific Emissions from Municipal Solid Waste Landfills.” The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 3: 158–68. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02978824. Pehnt, Martin. 2006. “Dynamic Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Renewable Energy Technologies.” Renewable Energy 31 (1): 55–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene. 2005.03.002. Phillips, Adam. 1999. Darwin’s Worms. London: Faber and Faber. Pope, Carly. 2018. “Analysis of Coconut Walk Unslipped Pottery: Implications for Late Classic Maya Salt and Ceramic Production in Coastal Belize.” Master’s dissertation, Institute of Archaeology, UCL. Richter, Daniel deB. 2007. “Humanity’s Transformation of Earth’s Soil: Pedology’s New Frontier.” Soil Science 172 (12): 957–67. https://doi.org/10.1097/ss.0b013e 3181586bb7. Sander, Kyle and Ganti S. Murthy. 2010. “Life Cycle Analysis of Algae Biodiesel.” The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 15: 704–14. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11367-010-0194-1. Scanlan, John. 2005. On Garbage. London: Reaktion. Schaetzl, Randall J. and Michael L. Thompson. 2015. Soils: Genesis and Geomorphology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmons, Scott E. and Elizabeth Graham. 2016. “Maya Coastal Adaptations in Classic and Postclassic Times on Ambergris Caye, Belize.” In Trading Spaces: The

166  Elizabeth Graham et al. Archaeology of Interaction, Migration and Exchange, edited by Margaret Patton and Jessica Manion. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Chacmool Archaeology Conference, Chacmool Archaeology Association, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, 167–80. Simmons, Scott E., Tracie Mayfield, James J. Aimers and W. James Stemp. 2018. “The Maya of Ambergris Caye and Their Neighbors.” Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 15: 229–39. Stemp, W. James and Elizabeth Graham. 2006. “Ancient Maya Procurement and Use of Chipped Chert and Chalcedony Tools at Marco Gonzalez, Ambergris Caye, Belize.” Lithic Technology 31 (1): 27–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/01977261.20 06.11754404. Stockmann, Uta, Budiman Minasny and Alex B. McBratney. 2014. “How Fast Does Soil Grow?” Geoderma 216: 48–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2013. 10.007. Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Vilches, Alberto, Antonio Garcia-Martinez and Benito Sanchez-Montañes. 2017. “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Building Refurbishment: A Literature Review.” Energy and Buildings 135: 286-301. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, Jocelyn S., Christine D. White and Fred J. Longstaffe. 2009. “Maya Marine Subsistence: Isotopic Evidence from Marco Gonzalez and San Pedro, Belize.” Latin American Antiquity 20 (1): 37–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S104566 3500002509.

11 Crip Time and the toxic body Water, waste and the autobiographical self Ally Day

Introduction: the Crip Time of climate change In October of 2018, the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a dire warning: if drastic change in carbon emissions is not made within the next 12 years, irreversible climate change will happen (IPCC 2018). For some, this is the near future—news reports talk of this moment as happening faster than we thought.1 For others who have experienced environmental destruction more intimately, this change is here, this change was yesterday. Our relationship to this moment in time will vary depending on our proximity to fresh water and ocean water, poverty, illness and disability—a constellation of intersecting tensions that differentially deploy disaster and debility.2 In order to help us think about climate change and disability, I turn to three contemporary nonfiction writers, all of whom write of an intimate relationship with water and disability. The poetry of Leah Laksmi PiepznaSamarasinha (2015a), along with her memoir Dirty River (2015b), allows us to think through the histories of colonial occupation through the industrial harnessing of the Blackstone River, on the east coast of the United States, and its eventual degradation. Once the site of New England commerce and wealth, the Blackstone is now a synecdoche for industrial waste and pollution. For children like Piepzna-Samarasinha and myself who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s on the Blackstone’s shores, the Blackstone also begs us to think about how in the twenty-first century, this nineteenth- and twentiethcentury centre of production becomes the site of autoimmune illness. The second nonfiction writer I turn to is Sandra Steingraber and her investigative memoir, Living Downstream (2010). Steingraber is an environmental scientist who, growing up on Lake Michigan’s watershed, becomes a survivor of bladder cancer in her 20s. Steingraber explores the roots of cancer-causing environmental destruction, by exploring the mismanagement of one of the U.S. Great Lakes. One of the culprits that polluted Lake Michigan’s watershed is industrial farm run-off from twentieth-century industrial farming practices. I juxtapose Steingraber’s experience with my own experience of living on another U.S. Great Lake, Lake Erie, and its 2014 cyanobacteria

168  Ally Day crisis that caused 500,000 people to live without drinkable water. As a result of this 2014 water crisis, in 2019, citizens of Toledo, myself included, passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the first legislation in the United States granting rights to an environmental body. Like Piepzna-Samarasinha’s meditations on autoimmune illness and factory waste on the east coast, Steingraber’s investigations and my own experience living on the Great Lakes, the site of 20 per cent of the earth’s fresh water, allows us the opportunity to explore the slow percolation and lasting effects of contamination. Finally, the third nonfiction writer I turn to is Kristen Iversen, an investigative journalist who grew up drinking, and swimming in, the polluted groundwater of Rocky Flats, a central site of the United States’ “nuclear war archipelago” located in Colorado. In her memoir, Iversen (2013) investigates several Rocky Flats fires that eventually led to the closing of the facility and the bankruptcy of property in an area that was considered the height of Cold War American economic freedom. At the same time that Iversen is exploring these nuclear facility disasters, she is also writing about the pervasive cancers and autoimmune illnesses in her own community, including the mysterious and debilitating symptoms she experiences more than 20 years after moving away from Rocky Flats.3 Taken together, these three writers move us geographically across the United States, following the linear timeline of U.S. colonial occupation from Massachusetts to the American West, exploring eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrial factory waste, nineteenth- and twentieth-century farm waste, and late ­twentieth-century nuclear waste. All of these writers call into question how the irreversibility of climate change is a future consequence; while carbon dioxide is one waste product that causes irreversible damage to the planet’s health, other waste products have similar irreversible and dangerous consequences. Exploring this relationship between waste, water and human bodies reminds us, in disability studies scholar Stacy Alaimo’s words, that [T]oxic bodies insist that environmentalism, human health, and social justice cannot be severed. They encourage us to imagine ourselves in constant interchange with the environment and, paradoxically perhaps, to imagine an epistemological space that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge. (2010, 22) Focusing on the relationships Piepzna-Samarasinha, Steingraber and Iversen have to water and waste also leads us to carefully consider the relationship of individual bodies to time and disability. In my conclusion, I turn to a key conceptualisation in critical disability studies, Crip Time, to explore how exposure to environmental toxins is a kind of slow violence (Nixon 2011) enacted on the human body. I suggest that this requires us to think differently about cause and effect, contagion and illness, human debility and planet precarity and what disability studies scholar Kelly Fritsch calls

Crip Time and the toxic body  169 “intracorporeal emergences” (2017, 375). Crip Time is a useful theoretical tool for unpacking this relationship and tension between waste, water and individual bodies; moreover, my exploration also leads me to propose a complication and new formulation of Crip Time for critical disability studies scholars. If we think about Crip Time as a kind of communal time, contingent upon physiological and ecological bodies in constellation with one another, then we move beyond the individual crip and toward a communal crip future, which, of course, for some, is already here.

Part I: Black(stone) River In her memoir Dirty River (2015b), Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes as a queer disabled femme of colour coming of age in an industrial east coast city—Worcester—in the 1980s.4 The memoir centres on experiences of trauma and the anarchist feminist communities she developed and immersed herself in as part of her activist and healing work. Peipzna-­ Samarasinha’s work is haunted by this city,5 and while we begin in other places—New York City, Toronto, Detroit—it is Worcester for whom the memoir is named and where we find ourselves, in Chapter 8, beginning again in the middle: “What there is in Worcester in the ’80s and ’90s is Dunkin’ Donuts and empty red brick factory buildings, vacant lots and triple-deckers, a mall, working-class hair salons, Honey Farms, mini-marts, and smoke shops” (2015, 63). Piepzna-Samarasinha writes of a town that has moved beyond its erstwhile prosperity, a town once central to early capitalism: Union Station was a big, beautiful, Greco-Roman monster building built back in the day when people took trains. It had been abandoned since the 1970s but if you snuck up to where it sits, where 280 meets 495 at the overpass, and got your eye close to a gap in the boards over the windows, you could see how maple seedling saplings shot through the floorboards. (2015b, 64) Yet Chapter 8, “A Story of a River,” begins with another kind of beginning, linking the birth of Worcester to the industry of the Blackstone River,6 now funnelled in culverts under the city: No one’s really sure where the Blackstone River is. It’s a big dirty industrial river that’s underground every single place it is, stuck in a culvert because it’s too nasty to be above ground … This dirty town is here because of the Blackstone River. It’s where the Industrial Revolution was born. A lot of the earliest factories were built here. A lot of factories shut down. But the lead and asbestos and steel stays in the soil, and the water is fucked from all the chemicals. (2015b, 63)

170  Ally Day In the chapter, Worcester becomes a synecdoche for the river. In the beginning, the Blackstone River is secret and hidden, having been industrialised with architecture that remained abandoned by the time Piepzna-Samarasinha’s family arrives: That’s what it was like in Worcester—all fucked up with empty red brick warehouses, but some people take those over, rent them for super cheap, and make crazy installations, do things. Time’s passed it by … Worcester was the secret inside of the world. It was the beautiful in abandoned. (2015b, 68) Central to the idea of Worcester as synecdoche for the Blackstone River is a particular understanding of time—Worcester is a place out of time, cripped by time. Worcester also emerges in Peipszna-Samarasinha’s poetry, where the author positions herself as a “hard femme” character formed from the waste of the Blackstone River: When I left Worcester, I took the smirk I learned from the sidewalk with me, the girl gang of wild weed trees busting through every vacant lot like a bank robbery kicking down the door with the grin of getting everything for free. (2015a, 3) Here, in her free-form poem, her lines run with little end stops, erratic like a weedy forest. The image of the young forest, out of place and out of time, mirrors the images of Union Station in her memoir: My city a broken   beautiful bitch with a necklace of junk trees blooming   from her throat. (2015a, 3) While in the first lines the speaker in this poem leaves Worcester, in the end she assures readers that Worcester is still “my city”; the repetition of consonants (“broken,” “beautiful,” “bitch,” “blooming”) juxtaposes what is waste with what is beautiful as the city itself becomes personified. The city stands as a synecdoche for a human body. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Bodymap (2015a) collection brings the readers back to the Blackstone. “Dirty River Girl” compares “the kids who went away” in “every queer-of-colour community” to an underground river; these kids, we learn, are affected by disability and trauma. The underground river

Crip Time and the toxic body  171 7

becomes the dirty river: “The Blackstone River has been put to work like/ our working-class women’s bodies, worked and worked to make/someone else money, til she worked to rags, thin and worn” (2015a, 32). Here the river becomes personified, compared with the traumatised women in ­Piepzna-Samarasinha’s community. But the river is not simply a metaphor for trauma; it is always also a material source of disability and illness: In 1983, my mother could recite the thirty-three cancer-causing/­ compounds in Worcester’s water. The city’s fathers insisted that the/ water was fresh and clean, but all we knew was that you could smell/the chlorine thicker than a pool before you turned on the tap. (2015b, 32)8 Peipzna-Samarasinha’s poem references the cancers and autoimmune conditions in her community; the time between exposure and illness is a Crip Time. Time out of place, an out-of-placeness that emerges because of the tension between bodies and the environment.

Part II: Great Green(algae) Lake(s) Published in 2010, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment is Sandra Steingraber’s investigative memoir about environmental toxins in the United States, beginning with her home in central Illinois and moving outward to other U.S. geographies. She begins by telling her readers that it has been 30 years since her first diagnosis of bladder cancer, which happened between her sophomore and junior years of college: When I left the hospital, I went back to my college dormitory, resumed my life as a biology major with a side interest in poetry, and began mucking around in the medical literature. I was curious about the series of questions my young, new-to-the-area urologist had asked me a few days after my surgery. Had I ever worked in a tire factory? Any exposure to textile dyes? What about employment in the aluminum industry? (2010, xii) Steingraber considers these inquiries as a white middle-class college student, someone who had never worked in factories. Her cancer is out of place and harkens backward to a time of early twentieth-century industry. We learn quickly that she discovers that the root of her cancer is the industrial chemicals flowing into the Illinois River, downstream from Lake Michigan. With her Introduction, she immediately holds accountable the systemic practices of chemical dumping and industrial farm run-off, as well as the inadequate systems of regulation: “Of the 80,000 synthetic chemicals now in use, only about 2 per cent have been tested for carcinogenicity and,

172  Ally Day since 1976, exactly five have been outlawed under the Toxic Substances Control Act” (2010, xii–xiii). Steingraber consistently reflects upon practices of waste, understanding the current systems of cancer prevention based on “personal responsibility” to be another kind of waste—a wasted neoliberal effort. “The environment keeps falling off the cancer screen,” Steingraber writes, describing how in the last decades of the twentieth century several states, including Illinois, began cancer registries to track epidemic diagnosis but failed to fund the equally important hazardous substances registry (2010, 49–50). In the meantime, bladder cancer, particularly in young people, is on the rise. Steingraber’s investigative memoir expands Nixon’s (2011) theory of slow violence and Puar’s (2017) theorisation of debility to the ecological body in times of environmental crisis. In a chapter called simply “Water,” Steingraber moves between scientific analysis of drinking water contaminants and her own familial history of living downstream from Chicago’s urban contamination. As we move backward through her family’s relationship to the land and through policy regulation documents, we learn something about the contemporary out-of-time quality of drinking water regulation. There are 90 contaminants currently regulated in drinking water, but there are 216 identified breast carcinogens alone. More curious than this numerical difference is how contamination is measured: it is measured over the course of a year and regulated based on a yearly average. Yet, during particular months—for instance, in the Spring when farmers are using various carcinogenic weed killers on their corn and soy crops—because of the reliance on a yearly average, the spike in contaminants is not notable. Steingraber writes: Biologically speaking, we live only in the present. Our bodies do not respond to contaminants on the basis of averages; they must cope the best they can with the load of contaminants already received as well as those streaming in at any given moment. If, during a period of April through June, a girl living in rural Illinois drinks enough weed killer to overwhelm her body’s ability to detoxify it, and if, as animal evidence suggests, these chemicals are capable of altering the development of her breast tissue, then the damage has been done, regardless of what happens during the months of August, October, or January. (2010, 194) Therefore, the contamination of drinking water is time-specific and the regulation is out of time—the two exist in crip tension with one another. And of course, one does not develop cancer within the same month as the exposure of carcinogens but years later, producing a Crip Time lapse, similar to Peipzna-Samarasinha’s experience with autoimmune illness. In the present, the contamination is the body of water; in the future, the contamination is the human body; and the cripness is the way that these two bodies are affected out of sync with one another.

Crip Time and the toxic body  173 This quality of time being out of sync emerges in relation to another Great Lakes water contamination crisis. In August of 2014, Lake Erie and the Toledo Metropolitan area made national headlines when 500,000 people were left without any drinking water for more than three days due to a toxic algae bloom that had entered the city’s drinking water.9 This large outbreak of cyanobacteria contains a toxin called microcystins which can cause liver failure, particularly rapidly in dogs and cats, and more gradually in humans. In the weeks that followed, the Toledo community would become much more familiar with this toxin and the greater health of Lake Erie; we will learn that this type of bacteria, according to coverage by the New York Times, actually contains “prehistoric organisms” now on the rise because of modern agricultural run-off and fossil fuel production (Wines 2014). What interests me here is the way that the cyanobacteria are described as out of time, out of place; they are ancient yet newly dangerous, they work slowly on human bodies (in some cases) but more quickly on smaller animal bodies; no amount of boiling and filtering will get rid of the bacteria; all we can do, as Toledo residents, is wait. And once this particular crisis has subsided, we, in Toledo, wait again—every summer, watching rainfall totals and record-breaking temperatures and hoping that the summer’s algae bloom won’t float into our water supply. Some national journalists call this kind of waiting “the new normal” (Lee 2014). This new normal can be attributed to both industrial farm run-off and rising global temperatures, a combination of which creates the perfect conditions for cyanobacteria to develop. I want to suggest that the cyanobacteria exist in Crip Time, a kind of flexible time, a bending of time, a resistance to normative time, a kind of time in conflict (Kafer 2013; Price 2011; Samuels 2017). I am interested in how the body of cynobacteria exists in Crip Time, how Lake Erie might be considered, itself, a toxic body existing in Crip Time, and how Toledo residents, in relation to Lake Erie, also exist in Crip Time—an extension of a toxic body, each resident a kind of to-be-toxic body. These bodies work as a constellation through and within Crip Time. After several years of community conversation and environmental exploration of the best ways to reduce the growth of cyanobacteria in Lake Erie, Toledo made national headlines again. In February of 2019, Toledo citizens voted to pass the Lake Erie Bill of Rights and were the first constituency in the United States to grant rights to a natural entity. As Williams (2019) outlined: The peculiar ballot question comes amid a string of environmental calamities at the lake—poisonous algal blooms in summer, runoff containing fertilizer and animal manure, and a constant threat from invasive fish. But this special election is not merely symbolic. It is legal strategy: If the lake gets legal rights, the theory goes, people can sue polluters on its behalf.

174  Ally Day While it was a landmark in environmental policy, the creators of the Bill never expected it to be effective; immediately upon passing the Bill the city of Toledo was sued by Drewes Farms Partnership, who argued that the Bill would hurt farmers, a claim that has been upheld by a local judge (Henry 2019). The Lake Erie Bill of Rights continues to be framed in the media not as a landmark for future environmental protection, but as a wasted piece of legislation that cannot protect the lake in the present. We could say the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is a product of, and exists in, Crip Time.

Part III: Red(scare) ground water In 2013, journalist Kristen Iversen published Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, a memoir of living near and working in the most notorious nuclear power installation in the United States. Iversen’s memoir moves back and forth between her personal experience and the experience of a nation building a complex nuclear archipelago during the Cold War. These experiences do not easily align to a seamless narrative for readers but instead create a difficult, complex narrative structure where threads only sometimes weave together. Iversen writes carefully about the slow and persistent process of nuclear environmental contamination, juxtaposing this with the quick and dangerous contamination of individual bodies exposed to plutonium in several different Rocky Flats fires, such as the Mother’s Day fire of 1963 that opens the memoir. In this chapter, Iversen writes of her own family Mother’s Day dinner—she is five years old, they are in an Italian restaurant—interspersed with journalistic accounts of folks who were involved in the nuclear disaster in 1963. The chapter ends: Years later, when Kristen Haag is eleven, she comes home with a bump on her knee. Like other children in the neighborhood, she rides horses across the windswept fields, swims in Standley Lake … In May, doctors discover a malignancy and the leg is amputated. By Christmas the cancer has killed her. (2013, 62–3) Iversen tells us of Kristen’s ashes being found after laboratory analysis to be riddled with plutonium, of how Rocky Flats drains directly into Standley Lake, how plutonium settles in the mud and soot on the lake bottom, contaminating the water table, slowly debilitating the residents at an individual and population level, creating a constellation of crip bodies in Crip Time. All in her opening chapter. Throughout the memoir, Iversen writes in two simultaneous temporalities: when writing as an investigative journalist, she is in the present day with a consciousness about the nuclear destruction of Colorado’s water and land; when writing of her childhood and teen years growing up in Rocky

Crip Time and the toxic body  175 Flats, she writes with a disbelief of Rocky Flats’ toxicity. Despite patterns in her family of “chronic exhaustion, fever, swollen lymph nodes” (2013, 135), it is not until she meets her boyfriend in college, after moving away from Rocky Flats, and learns of his activism against the nuclear plant that she begins to trade disbelief for scepticism and, finally, for journalism. This merger of temporalities and consciousness comes when she returns home from college to take her own job at Rocky Flats (2013, 140–50). The temporalities merge for Iversen as the open-ended effects on her body merge with the open-ended effects on the land. Eventually, Rocky Flats closes. The land upon which Rocky Flats was developed becomes a site of federal protection, a seemingly pristine landscape with plutonium contaminating its soil and ground water; meanwhile, the town surrounding Rocky Flats is abandoned. These bankrupt properties, once symbolic of Cold War American supremacy, are now suspended in Crip Time. Iversen writes, “The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences. The land, too, carries the burden of all its changes. To truly see and understand a landscape is to see its depth as well as its smooth surfaces, its beauty and its scars” (2013, 338).

Conclusion—Crip Time, slow violence and toxic water Together, Piepzna-Samarasinha, Steingraber and Iversen offer an ontology of slow violence, a term first introduced by Rob Nixon to conceptualise how violence is never contained within one particular moment but is “incremental and accretive” (2011, 2). They also provide insights into debility in the context of nuclear and environmental destruction that ­ expand disability theory beyond neoliberal personhood, reinforcing the utility of critical disability studies in the theorisation of the ecological body. Analysing how these authors relate to water in their autobiographical texts allows us to see how we can avoid using disabled human bodies as individual cautionary tales, something disability theorist and environmental activist Eli Clare cautions us about. Cautionary tales breed pity and incentivise cure (Clare 2017a, 7–17; 2017b, 242–65) and individualise a problem that exists in Crip Time. As scholar Julie Sadler reminds us, “These toxins have lives beyond their initial deployment and continue to affect the population beyond their initial targets” (2017, 350). This chapter is in conversation with Sadler, as well as Victoria M. Torres-Vélez’s work about U.S. Navy war infrastructure in Puerto Rico (2017, 313–33) and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials’s work on the aftermath of U.S. bombing missions in Laos (2017, 290–312). This work highlights the imperative to investigate U.S. colonial and neocolonial occupation and the effects of the U.S. war industry on the lives of those living decades after initial exposure. Crip Time becomes a useful theoretical tool for understanding how bodies of water and human/animal bodies live in relationship to one another. We can

176  Ally Day expand conceptualisations of Crip Time towards thinking about it as a communal kind of time—it is never a time inhabited by a singular body but a time inhabited by a constellation of bodies moving around, within, and beyond one another.

Notes 1 For example, a New York Times headline on 7 October 2018 was “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as early as 2040.” www.nytimes. com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html. 2 Jasbir Puar (2017) frames and mobilises “debility” as a “disruption” (xv) to the category of disability, necessary because of the way disability rights “recognizes some disabilities at the expense of other disabilities that do not fit the respectability and empowerment models of disability progress” (xvii)—a term particularly relevant to those bodies impaired by U.S. imperialism. 3 I am telling another story here, one through endnotes. Endnotes insist on a kind of crip reading—using the wasted space of the margins, disrupting the flow of the main narrative, providing tension—another narrative body in constellation. Endnotes exist in Crip Time. They are also, in some ways, the “wasted” text—the material that cannot fit into the main story. 4 This, too, is my city. Leah’s experience and my experience will overlap by a few years, but when she leaves at 18 for bigger cities, I am still in elementary school. 5 I am using the term “haunting” specifically in reference to black feminist theorist Avery Gordon’s (2011) influential work Ghostly Matters. More recently, Gordon revisited her use of the term haunting, writing: “Haunting was the language and the experiential modality by which I tried to reach an understanding of the meeting of organized force and meaning because haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life … I used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind field comes into view” (2011, 2). 6 Indeed, a 1917 history of Worcester tells us that Worcester was successfully “settled” by white men after a third try in 1685, when saw and grist mills were set up on the Quinsigamond Plantation in order to provide potash to settlers in Boston and Cambridge. Later, this city would become a centre for the textile and shoe industries (Washburn 1917, 7–14). 7 Which is also, of course, a displaced river. 8 This is where my story begins. My family moves to Worcester when I am one year old; my sisters and I all experience lead poisoning, a fact told to me casually by my father in the midst of another water crisis, this time in Flint, MI. Years later, my sisters, mum and I experience chronic autoimmune conditions. We joke that it is in the water. It’s a bad joke. 9 Again, I insert myself into this story, into the margins: it is the beginning of August 2014; my partner and I have just arrived in our new rental in a new city. We arrive well past midnight and let ourselves into our new place, blow up an air mattress and settle our ageing pups into their much more comfortable therapeutic beds. We wake early the next morning to a loud knock on our door. When I open

Crip Time and the toxic body  177 it, I meet our landlord, who has two cases of bottled water and says, “Good morning. Don’t drink the water. Don’t brush your teeth. Don’t wash your hands. And don’t, whatever you do, don’t let your dogs drink the water.”

References Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clare, Eli. 2017a. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clare, Eli. 2017b. “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 242–65. Fritsch, Kelly. 2017. “Toxic Pregnancies: Speculative Futures, Disabling Environments, and Neoliberal Biocapital.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 359–80. Gordon, Avery. 2011. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands 10 (2): 1–21. Henry, Tom. 2019. “Judge Rules Toledoans for Safe Water Group Can’t Help City in Lake Erie Bill of Rights Lawsuit.” The Blade [Toledo]. 9 May 2019. www.­ toledoblade.com/local/environment/2019/05/08/judge-toledoans-safe-water-canthelp-lake-erie-bill-rights-lawsuit/stories/20190508131. IPCC. 2019. “IPPC 2018: Summary for Policymakers.” In Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-­ industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty, edited by Valerie Masson-­ Delmotte, Zhai Panmao, Hans-Otto Pörtner, Debra Roberts, Jim Skea, Priyadarshi R. Shukla, Anna Pirani, Wilfran Moufouma-Okia, Clotilde Péan, Roz Pidcock, Sarah Connors, J.B. Robin Matthews, Yang Chen, Xiao Zhou, Melissa I. Gomis, Elisabeth Lonnoy, Tom Maycock, Melinda Tignor and Tim Waterfield. Geneva, Switzerland: World Meteorological Organization, 3–24. Iversen, Kristen. 2013. Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats. New York: Random House. Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Lee, Jane. 2014. “Driven by Climate Change, Algae Blooms Behind Ohio Water Scare are New Normal.” National Geographic, 10 June 2014. https://news.national geographic.com/news/2014/08/140804-harmful-algal-bloom-lake-erie-climatechange-science/. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah L. 2015a. Bodymap. Toronto, Ontario: Mawenzi House Publishers. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah L. 2015b. Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home. Vancouver, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press.

178  Ally Day Price, Margaret. 2011. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sadler, Julie. 2017. “War Contaminants and Environmental Justice: The Case of Congenital Heart Defects in Iraq.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara, 2017, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 338–57. Samuels, Ellen. 2017. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37 (3). Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. 2017. “Prosthetic Ecologies: (Re)Membering Disability and Rehabilitating Laos’s ‘Secret War.’ ” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara, 2017, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 290–312. Steingraber, Sandra. 2010. Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Torres-Vélez, Victor M. 2017. “Reification, Biomedicine and Bombs: Women’s Politicization in Vieques’s Social Movement.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara, 2017, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 313–37. Washburn, George G. 1917. Industrial Worcester. Worcester, MA: The Davis Press. Williams, Timothy. 2019. “Legal Rights for Lake Erie: Voters in Ohio City Will Decide.” New York Times, 17 February 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/us/ lake-erie-legal-rights.html. Wines, Michael. 2014. “Behind Toledo’s Water Crisis, a Long-Troubled Lake Erie.” New York Times, 4 August 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-bantoledo-says-its-water-is-safe-to-drink-again.html.

12 Wasting seas Oceanic time and temporalities1 Elspeth Probyn

Timelines Sometimes things happen fast: In 2015, Christine Figgener, a marine conservation biologist, filmed her team removing a plastic straw from a sea turtle. The video (Sea Turtle Biologist 2015) is shot close-up as they use pliers to try to pull something out of its nose. Blood streams down the turtle and the music swells. Finally, out pops a mangled plastic straw. As of November 2019, her clip had garnered over 38 million views on YouTube. As Figgener states, the straw and the turtle connected people viscerally: “You were able to show the suffering of a creature that was affected by a straw that someone had disposed of. Definitely that was an object that passed through human hands and made its way to the ocean” (quoted in Rosenbaum 2018). In the space of a year, campaigns with catchy titles such as “The Last Straw” ensured that individuals and multinationals were straw aware. The cry for bans created its own backlash as disability groups pointed out that straws are necessary for many people. After the death of a British woman impaled by a metal straw, Kim Sauder, a Toronto-based blogger and PhD student in disability studies, wrote that “A straw ban is nothing but environmental theatre … The greatest accomplishment of the straw ban is genuinely the bigotry it has emboldened against disabled people” (quoted in Vigdor 2019). As many have reported, “eight million tons of plastic flow into the ocean every year, and straws comprise just 0.025 per cent of that” (Gibbens 2019), a fact of which Figgener is quite cognisant. While she is the poster mother of the poster child, she wants to finish her dissertation on the migration patterns of Olive Ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea). Sometimes things happen all the time: Even in the middle of a drought in New South Wales, it sometimes rains in Sydney. Short violent squalls wash the city into the ocean. Every year, 500 billion litres of storm water—the equivalent of the amount of water in Sydney Harbour—flushes into the ocean dog shit, human pee, oil, fertiliser, pesticides, licit and illicit drugs (paracetamol, cocaine and anti-depressants), nitrogen and phosphorous (Cormac 2015). The Sydney Basin is a drowned valley with three main catchments. From the air it looks like fingers forged into land, and “estuarine

180  Elspeth Probyn influence extends approximately 10 kilometres inland along major river systems” (McDonald 2008). On the basis of the abundance of Indigenous rock art, Jo McDonald (2008) describes the area as a “Dreamtime2 Superhighway.” Before colonisation, the waterways and the people of Sydney flowed differently. The Indigenous linguist Jakelin Troy (1994) recounts that “The [Indigenous] Sydney Language word [for] man means both ‘fisherperson’ and ‘ghost,’ a link which may have been suggested by the ghostly figures of people fishing and cooking in their canoes by moonlight.” Over the years, the rivulets have been framed in by concrete, hampering the ability of banks to act as filter-systems. The Harbour is barricaded by sea walls that help to deaden what should be a dynamic ecosystem. There is little to slow the slew of chemicals that pour into the ocean. Urban water expert Ian Wright calls attention to urban stream syndrome. The streams and rivers running through many of our cities are getting sick: not just from the pollution and waste carried by stormwater into gutters and drains, but from another, unexpected source—the concrete pipes and infrastructure carrying the water. (Wright 2012) This is a largely invisible and unnoticed everyday occurrence. Sometimes things happen very slowly: As we’ve seen, throwing chemicals, heavy metals and anything else into the ocean is a quotidian affair. Humans and non-humans are thoroughly imbued with this chemical cocktail: “Every person in the world now carries a body burden of chemicals that did not exist before 1940” (Gore et al. 2014, 23). Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), BPA and phthalates, are now detectable in serum, fat and umbilical cord blood in humans around the globe (Gore et al. 2014, 2). What is particularly concerning is that people can pass on their “chemical load”: “There is now evidence that EDCs induce changes to germ cells—precursors to sperm and egg cells—making their effects heritable not just to one’s own children, but also to grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and beyond” (Gore et al. 2014, 16). In addition, and as I will explore, relatively recent work in environmental epigenetics suggests that the mercury ingested by women will seep its way through to deform the reproduction of future generations of daughters.

Interwoven time While I have separated them, of course these three temporal strands interweave and co-exist. I want to build on these different currents, and further extend an understanding of how, what and where “the ocean returns” what we throw into it (Probyn 2018). As Charne Lavery (2017) has described,

Wasting seas  181 “the ocean has long been considered the ideal location for the disposal of waste.” In some of the most expensive areas of Sydney, old pipes “spit out four million litres of untreated waste from 10,500 people each day, as well as toilet paper, sanitary products and wet wipes” (Eddie 2018); it is pumped from the high cliffs to the seas below. Astonishingly, the denizens of these uber-expensive eastern suburbs put up with the plume of their waste as it swims out to the open sea (some say that they have resisted proper sewage treatment which might force higher development in the area). At least it’s their own children’s nappy wipes that mingle in the surf below the mansions. Messy stuff: we throw waste into the ocean and hope it disappears, or at least that ownership is washed away in the polluted seas. In her essay about “submarine futures,” Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2017) resuscitates an old sense of the word “vicissitudes,” as “reciprocation and return” (39). In what follows I chart how waste returns but most often in a nonreciprocal manner. There is much unevenness here—of time, temporality, geography and justice. I want to draw out the mutabilities—to use the current sense of vicissitudes—and the differential temporalities of more-than-human action. While the literature on time and temporality is vast, for my argument it is the emphasis on the ebbs and flows that is central: to return to the Ancient Greek understanding, “Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal” (Smith 2013, 377). As Daniel Smith elaborates in his considered account of time and temporality across philosophy, the Ancients differentiated temporality from time. In this sense, temporality was movement, whereas time “was subordinated to eternity, to the non-temporal” (2013, 378). The very physicality—the movement—of the oceans, their ebb and the flow and ceaseless currents, has deep temporal effects. Tides are one of the most reliable phenomena in the world. Every six hours tides come in and every six hours they retreat. Of course, they are tied to the moon, which rises 50 minutes later each day, giving us a “real” lunar day of 24 hours and 50 minutes. One of NASA’s projects, “The Perpetual Ocean,” is an animation that visualises ocean surface currents around the world. A voiceless clip shows the amazing perpetual movement of the ocean from data collected across several months. It is in many ways more moving than the clichéd image of the “blue planet” because it shows how we are connected and disconnected by oceanic movement. These connections are hard, but not impossible, to render visible. As DeLoughrey (2017) writes, “Unlike terrestrial space—where one might memorialize a space into place—the perpetual circulation of ocean currents means that the sea dissolves phenomenological experience and diffracts the accumulation of narrative” (33). DeLoughrey’s area of study is the Caribbean and she has written at length about the particular ways in which these “seas are ‘choked’ with the visible remnants of living history” (35). In her rumination on the poetry of Derek Walcott, she writes, “[The Caribbean] is a

182  Elspeth Probyn living graveyard in which the submarine ruptures narrative articulation, breath” (35). The temporalities of this marine graveyard are complex, belonging not only to the past but also simultaneously to unknown futures. In her discussion of the sea sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor,3 DeLoughrey argues that “the ocean as medium can symbolize the simultaneity or even collapse of linear time, reflecting lost lives of the past and memorializing— as an act of anticipatory mourning—the multi-species lives of the future of the Anthropocene” (36). The theme of the collapse of linear time is further theorised by Stacey Alaimo, who argues that the Anthropocene compresses and reworks time in several twisted and intertwined ways: “The synchronic depth and breadth of the oceans present a kind of incomprehensible immensity that parallels the diachronic scale of anthropogenic effects” (2017b, 107). Alaimo’s formulation of “abysal temporalities” (2017a, 153) draws on a number of scientific experts, including Callum Roberts, who notes that “the oceans have changed more in the last thirty years than in all of human history before” (quoted in Alaimo 2017a, 153). This is mind-boggling—30 years is not even a drop in the ocean’s time. This juxtaposition brings the infinite into the finite; the background becomes the foreground. The far-off is suddenly now. In his excavation of ideas about deep or geological time, David Farrier (2016) describes how “deep time is not an abstract, distant prospect, but a spectral presence in the everyday.” The idea of deep time was described in 1788 (although named by an American 200 years later) by the Scottish geologist James Hutton. Known as the father of modern geology, Hutton was in a boat near Siccar Point off Edinburgh when he noticed differences in the rock formation of the promontory. His research discovered that the two types of rock stuck together were in fact separated by 65 million years. His travelling research companion, John Playfair, went on to publicise Hutton’s findings, and is ­oft-cited as saying: “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time” (quoted in Farrier 2016). In Farrier’s (2016) equally evocative phrase, through human action “we are conjuring ourselves as ghosts that will haunt the very deep future.” These ideas zoom in on how human activity reworks the spatiality of time, as our waste creates unseen and unknown but nevertheless real consequences: [T]he compressed time of the Anthropocene seas puts us under pressure, weighs us down with the recognition that even as human impacts may be colossal, human understanding of marine ecologies and species, especially those of the deep seas, is miniscule. Indeed, the not-yet-nornever-to-be-discovered marine species that (must) have become extinct due to anthropogenic causes—which elude capture by human knowledge systems but nonetheless cannot elude the unintended effects of human actions—would be apt icons for the Anthropocene seas. (Alaimo 2017a, 154)

Wasting seas  183 Alaimo’s phrasing is of particular interest: “the not-yet-nor-never-to-bediscovered marine species that (must) have become extinct.” This summons one of my favourite tenses in French—le futur antérieur, the future anterior— ce qui aura été: that which will have happened. Many years ago (1992), I championed it as the tense of feminism. For instance, we have to believe that, say, abortion rights will have been permanently entrenched in law, or that domestic violence will have been abolished. Open to an uncertain future, the future anterior pivots on actions in the past: “This mode cannot speak a static present; thinking in the ‘as if’ throws us forward, not into the securities of a definite future but into the practicalities of getting from here to there” (1992, 511). At that time, I offered it as a hopeful mode: “working in the momentary tense of ‘as if’ carries with it the imperative of an ‘optimism of the will’. As Dick Hebdige (1985, 39) puts it, ‘we have to go on making connections, to bear our witness and to feel the times we’re living through’ ” (Probyn 1992, 511). I am older now and not so hopeful. Elsewhere, Alaimo (2017b) uses the case of acidic oceans, and their effects on “billions of tiny shelled creatures” (89). Thinking with their dissolving shells, she argues, “means dwelling in the dissolve … It is to expose oneself as a political act, to shift toward a particularly feminist mode of ethical and political engagement” (2017b, 114). Riffing on Richard Doyle’s (2011) celebration of the “ecodelic,” a term he uses to evoke experiences of awed immersion within a larger ecosystem or the cosmos, she veers towards a celebration of “posthumanist trans-corporeality” (2017b, 114) with its emphasis on the permeability of bodies and places. This seems to be at odds with her argument that the future of the seas will have been those of the ancient past: The Anthropocene seas will be paradoxical, anachronistic zones of terribly compressed temporality where, it is feared, the future will ­ move backwards, into a time when the oceans were devoid of whales, dolphins, fish, coral reefs, and a multitude of other species, but jellyfish (and algae) proliferated. (Alaimo 2017a, 158) In this description, despite the wonderful conceit of the future backing into the past, we seem to bypass the present moment. The actuality of her other example, that of dissolving shells in acidic seas, gives a clearer sense of timelines, and topical timeliness. This present is witness to deadened realities, not ecodelic sensations. In one account of the die-off of oysters: “the larvae suddenly began dying by the billions … The seawater pumped into the hatcheries is so corrosive that it eats away the young oyster shells before they can form” (Sreenivasan, n.d.). Ocean acidity wreaks havoc on the two interrelated sides of oyster farming. Seemingly overnight, the oyster hatcheries were nearly wiped out as the oyster seeds died. And the young oysters

184  Elspeth Probyn farmed in the American Pacific Northwest died because the highly corrosive water contained little food for them—they basically starved to death in their efforts to find nutrients to build their shells. It turned out that weather conditions drew up highly acidic water from the deep, from long ago: “Because of the way the ocean circulates, the corrosive water that surfaces off Washington, California and Oregon is the result of CO2 that entered the sea decades earlier” (Welch 2013). The ocean is regurgitating centuries-old carbon: “Since the Industrial Age, the planet’s oceans have stored up to 30% of human CO2 output” (Katz 2019). Sea water, especially in the Arctic, is growing more acidic as the ice cap melts, releasing carbon. The releasing of ages-old carbon has the effect of speeding up time: “In the past 200 years alone, ocean water has become 30 per cent more acidic—faster than any known change in ocean chemistry in the last 50 million years” (Smithsonian Institution 2018). According to the Smithsonian Institution’s Ocean Portal Team of scientists, Such a relatively quick change in ocean chemistry doesn’t give marine life, which evolved over millions of years in an ocean with a generally stable pH, much time to adapt … What we do know is that things are going to look different, and we can’t predict in any detail how they will look. Some organisms will survive or even thrive under the more acidic conditions while others will struggle to adapt, and may even go extinct. (Smithsonian Institution 2018) Other reports are blunt: “Pteropods—tiny shelled snails also known as ‘sea butterflies’—fully dissolve in water that is acidifying,” turning “warm, fresh, and sour,” according to a Norwegian researcher (Stedmon, quoted in Katz 2019).

Mercurial time Thus far we have considered how temporality consists of shifting sets of relationships of proximity. Elsewhere, I give a somewhat different twist to this term, which normally merely refers to closeness. Following on from Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey, I argued: [I]t is clear that neither space nor time per se constitute the major site of anxiety for us; rather, it is the changing nature of relations of proximity that has become the central site of concern and intensity. The question of “how close?” or “how far?” animates thinking about a range of issues: from personal issues and identifications, geo-politics and economics, the changing nature of the imbrication of the “private” and the “public,” the “global-in-the-local.” (Probyn 2001, 174)

Wasting seas  185 In this way, relations of proximities are both temporal and geographical. For instance, CO2 from the past surges forward and upward from deep cold waters and dissolves seashells in the present. This is just one aspect of the cleavages of time and temporality. While geologic deep time tells us that such cleavages are not uncommon in the history of the planet—for instance, Hutton’s findings demonstrate that rock formations may be composed of rocks separated by 65 million years—what is remarkable is how temporal and geographical proximities are being rearranged and speeded up in our anthropocentric moment. I now want to turn to the ways in which mercury’s mutating movement through the ocean further twists geography and temporality. As Becky Mansfield writes, “mercury is an excellent emblem of emerging thinking about the nature of life” (2019, 181). Mercury is a shape shifter. As Mansfield notes, “aquatic bacteria turn elemental mercury into the organic compound methylmercury. Although all forms of mercury are hazardous, methylmercury is particularly harmful to health and development” (2019, 182). This is especially true for women as mercury can cross the placenta and deeply affect the foetus. More worrying still is the fact that exposure to methylmercury can harm a woman’s germ cells that produce gametes. Even if the woman is not pregnant, if she does have a daughter, her cells will be affected, as will those of her grand-daughter and her great-grand-daughter. Advances in environmental epigenetics, a discipline that “describes the study of heritable alterations in gene expression” (Bombail, Moggs and Orphanides 2004, 51), reveals that what happens in the present reworks the future in ways we have not fully come to terms with. Epigenetics looks to the ways that environmental conditions can produce effects in what genes do. Several social scientists have taken up epigenetics with alacrity as well as critical hesitation because it seems to promise proof of the “viscous porosity” of human and environment (Landecker 2011; Landecker and Panofsky 2013; Meloni, quoting Tuana, 2019, 159). Mansfield’s recent ­ work on mercury follows through from her long-term research on fishing. Along with co-author Julie Guthman (Guthman and Mansfield 2013; Mansfield and Guthman 2015; Mansfield 2018), Mansfield explores the implications of the epigenetic effects of mercury, which demonstrate “the openness of the body to socio-environmental influences” (2019, 181). As she emphasises, “mercury materialises connections between global environmental change and toxicity, between planetary and bodily processes” (2019, 181). The most notorious case of mercury poisoning occurred in Minamata, Japan, where people and animals were severely poisoned, with a range of horrendous effects, including death. Investigations began in 1956 and finally the poisoning was tied to the ingestion of heavy metals. This was due to the release of methylmercury in the industrial wastewater from the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory, which continued from 1932 to 1968. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated in shellfish and fish in

186  Elspeth Probyn Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea, which when eaten by the local populace resulted in mercury poisoning. (Encyclopedia of Earth 2009) It took several decades for an agreement to be reached, but in 2017 the Minamata Convention on Mercury took form.4 The U.S., U.K. and ­Australia are among the countries that have yet to ratify it. Mercury is central to illegal gold mining, or what is also called artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). While the combustion of fossil fuels—coal-fired power plants—is a major source of mercury, according to the UN Environmental Program, small-scale gold mining is the largest single source of mercury emissions, accounting for more than 35 per cent of the global total (Esdaile and Chalker 2018, 6906). Illegal or artisanal gold mining occurs in over 70 developing countries, notably in Asia, in parts of Africa and in South America. It’s estimated that 13 million people work directly in mining with another 80–100 million reliant on the trade, be they shop keepers, sex workers or traders. In 2019, during the trade-wars between China and the U.S., bullion “surged 18% over three months to the highest in six years” (Lombrana, Biller and Njinimo 2019). In Peru, the sixth-largest global source of gold, of which 90 per cent is illegal, the profits are estimated to be USD$2.9 billion, higher than drug trafficking (River of Gold, n.d.). The mines are often left over from colonial rule, or ones that multinational companies have abandoned because they are no longer profitable. With little equipment, and no permits, individuals and families scrape the soil for whatever flecks of gold remain. They combine this with mercury to form an amalgam, and then the mercury is burned off, leaving a small lump of gold (Topsfield and Rosa 2017). The smoke enters the atmosphere as well as immediately into the lungs of the miners and their families, and the water used in the process percolates into the ground water. The scale of this form of hard and dangerous labour is immense and seems to be growing. And, of course, there is no predictability as to where and whether those involved will be lucky. As Spiegel et al. (2018) put it, mercury is an “agent of poverty”: “In lieu of pay checks and predictability the miners place an all-in bet, staking bodies and lives on a gamble” (Hoffman 2017). Once the mercury enters the ecosphere, it moves effortlessly around the world: “After milling mercury with ore, microbeads of mercury are dispersed in the fine sand and water and can be carried far from the mine when discharged in water courses” (Esdaile and Chalker 2018, 6911). When it rains, it falls into the ocean or rivers and the mercury metabolises to form methylmercury and attaches to marine plants. Phytoplankton then become a rich source of methylmercury for herbivore fish, which in turn become the food for animals higher in the food chain (Lee and Fisher 2016, 1656). Once in the food chain, mercury moves easily ever higher up the trophic scale to where humans tend to graze. This is especially the case for long-living prey fish, who have accumulated a history of industrial mercury over their

Wasting seas  187 existence. Highly valued Bluefin tuna embody a living history of their ingestion of methylmercury. Elaine Baker (2017) and her colleagues note: The majority of human exposure to mercury comes from the consumption of seafood. Fish eat contaminated algae and other vegetation that convert mercury into its most toxic form—methylmercury. Once ingested, fish protein retains more than 90% of the methylmercury. These fish are in turn eaten by other fish and so the mercury content progressively increases as you move up the food chain—a process known as biomagnification. This renders Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism “you are what you eat” profoundly sinister: “No longer ontologically separate from the environment, we are now open to it in ways that are seen as an existential threat” (Mansfield 2012, 352).

Folded geo-temporalities Maurizio Meloni argues that “epigenetic temporality folds in on itself, bringing together in present biological time a multiplicity of generations” (2019, 159). As I noted, it remakes relations of proximity and folds together far-flung regions of the world. Nordic Indigenous people are overwhelmingly affected by mercury poisoning through their preferred diet of the offal of whales and seals, and mercury is now recognised as the leading cause of neurotoxicity in people living further south in urban Nordic centres. Nordic people have some of the highest consumption of fish, which is good for omega-3 levels but not for the intake of mercury. Bellanger et al. (2013) have calculated the costs to the Nordic nations for the loss of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) in children affected by their mothers’ diets containing large amounts of methylmercury. In a somewhat astonishing exercise, they have calculated that the value of the loss of one IQ point is between 17,000 and 20,000 euros. They hope to use this economic reckoning to persuade Scandinavian nations to fund a programme to stop Indonesians using ­ mercury in mining. In a study of mercury, economic and IQ loss in developing nations, Trasande et al. (2016) “suggest that loss of IQ from mercury exposure and its impact on earning potential … amount to $77.4 million in lost annual economic productivity” (234). However, as Mansfield argues, Indigenous people have been at the forefront of fighting back (Arquette et al. 2002; Harper and Harris 2008). For decades, communities affected by mercury (and other pollutants) have called for and conducted research, developed new models of risk, demanded evidence-based fish consumption advisories, and insisted that advisories are never a solution: only clean-up is a solution. (Mansfield 2019, 183–84)

188  Elspeth Probyn In conclusion, I want to return to the three scenes with which I opened this chapter. To recall, I contrasted the ways in which some environmental campaigns, such as those about plastic straws, can seemingly erupt overnight and quickly change people’s consumption habits. Multinational companies are now “awake” to making what are, in the scheme of things, small changes, and so Starbucks promises to eradicate plastic straws, potentially using more plastic in the process (Mahdawi 2018). On the other hand, pumping sewage into the ocean is a quotidian affair even in very affluent parts of the global north. And finally, chemicals and mercury leak into the future and mutate the offspring of women. Drawing on the arguments of Alaimo and DeLoughrey and others, I have offered different descriptions of the mutabilities of time and space. We can clearly understand how notions of linear time are eaten into by the changes our waste effects. What Alaimo calls “compressed time,” I reframe as speeded-up time. To return to the notion of vicissitudes—conceived of simultaneously as reciprocation, return and mutability—it is clear that temporality itself has become mutable. Relations of proximity are profoundly rearranged when mercury from one part of the planet affects Indigenous people at the top of the earth. What does this mean for us now, for forms of thought and action? In contrast to the hyper-digital speed of certain environmental campaigns, the Indigenous demands for “clean-up” described by Mansfield (2019) act in a different formulation of time. To return to the temporalities of Dreamtime stories, this is to bring the past to the present to the future. We need to bring to the fore these differential temporalities of our wasting seas as inspiration for our actions now.

Notes 1 My deep thanks to the editors for their meticulous and generous editing. 2 The term “dreamtime” encompasses several central elements for Australian ­Indigenous people, and varies across groups. Dreamtime stories represent law, religion and reality. As one description points out, it is seen as “going from the past to the present to the future all at once, so it is something that sits outside ordinary timelines” (Japingka Aboriginal Art 2019). 3 Jason deCaires Taylor is a British artist who fashions life-sized sculptures out of a sustainable concrete-like material and places them on the seabed where they become living artificial reefs. Some of his most notable works are in the Caribbean, where they act as memorials to all those who died in the “Middle Passage” through the slave trade. 4 According to the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, the Convention “requires Parties to address mercury throughout its lifecycle, including its production, its intentional use in products and processes, its unintentional release from industrial activity, through to ­end-of-life aspects including waste, contaminated sites, and long-term storage” (Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, n.d.).

Wasting seas  189

References Alaimo, Stacy. 2017a. “The Anthropocene at Sea: Temporality, Paradox, Compression.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann. London: Routledge, 153–61. Alaimo, Stacy. 2017b. “Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves.” In Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 89–120. Arquette Mary, Maxine Cole, Katsi Cook, Brenda LaFrance, Margaret Peters, James Ransom, Elvera Sargent, Vivian Smoke and Arlene Stairs. 2002. “Holistic Risk-Based Environmental Decision Making: A Native Perspective.” Environmental Health Perspectives 110 (s2): 259–64. Baker, Elaine, Kristina Thygesen and Charles Roche. 2017. “Why we Need Action on Mercury—Now.” GRID-Arendal, 10 October 2017. https://news.grida.no/ why-we-need-action-on-mercury-now. Bellanger, Martine, Céline Pichery, Dominique Aerts, Marika Berglund, Argelia Castaño, Mája Čejchanová, Pierre Crettaz, et al. 2013. “Economic Benefits of Methylmercury Exposure Control in Europe: Monetary Value of Neurotoxicity Prevention.” Environmental Health 12 (3). https://doi.org/10.1186/1476-069X-12-3. Bombail, Vincent, Jonathan G. Moggs and George Orphanides. 2004. “Perturbation of Epigenetic Status by Toxicants.” Toxicology Letters 149 (1–3): 51–8. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.toxlet.2004.01.003. Cormac, Lucy. 2015. “Where does all the Stormwater go after the Sydney Weather Clears?” Sydney Morning Herald, 1 May 2015. www.smh.com.au/environment/ where-does-all-the-stormwater-go-after-the-sydney-weather-clears-20150430-1mx4ep. html. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2017. “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene.” ­Comparative Literature 69 (1): 32–44. Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. n.d. “Minamata Convention on Mercury.” Accessed 30 March 2020. www.environment.gov.au/protection/ chemicals-management/mercury. Doyle, Richard. 2011. Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Eddie, Rachel. 2018. “Last Sewage Pipes Dumping Waste into Sydney Coastline to Close.” The New Daily, 4 November 2018. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/ nsw/2018/11/04/last-sewerage-pipes-dumping-waste-sydney-coastline-close/. Encyclopedia of Earth. 2009. “Minamata Disease.” http://editors.eol.org/eoearth/ wiki/Minamata_Disease. Esdaile, Louisa J. and Justin M. Chalker. 2018. “The Mercury Problem in Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining.” Chemistry: A European Journal 24 (27): 6905–16. doi:10.1002/chem.201704840. Farrier, David. 2016. “How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.” The Atlantic, 31 October 2016. www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/aeon-deep-time/505922/. Gibbens, Sarah. 2019. “A Brief History of How Plastic Straws Took Over the World.” National Geographic, 2 January 2019. www.nationalgeographic.com/ environment/2018/07/news-plastic-drinking-straw-history-ban/. Gore, Andrea C., David Crews, Loretta L. Doan, Michele La Merrill, Heather Patisaul and Ami Zota. 2014. Introduction to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals ­

190  Elspeth Probyn (EDCs): A Guide for Public Interest Organizations and Policy-Makers. Endocrine Society. www.endocrine.org/-/media/endosociety/files/advocacy-and-outreach/ important-documents/introduction-to-endocrine-disrupting-chemicals.pdf. Guthman, Julie and Becky Mansfield. 2013. “The Implications of Environmental Epigenetics: A New Direction for Geographic Inquiry on Health, Space, and Nature-Society Relations.” Progress in Human Geography 37 (4): 486–504. Harper, Barbara L. and Stuart G. Harris. 2008. “A Possible Approach for Setting a Mercury Risk-Based Action Level Based on Tribal Fish Ingestion Rates.” Environmental Research 107 (1): 60–8. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2007.05.008. Hoffman, Danny. 2017. “Toxicity.” Somatosphere, 16 October 2017. http://somatosphere. net/2017/10/toxicity.html. Japingka Aboriginal Art. 2019. “Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories.” https://japingkaab originalart.com/aboriginal-dreamtime-stories/. Katz, Cheryl. 2019. “Why Rising Acidification Poses a Special Peril for Warming Arctic Waters.” Yale Environment 360, 24 October 2019. https:// e360.yale.edu/features/why-rising-acidification-poses-a-special-peril-for-warmingarctic-waters. Landecker, Hannah. 2011. “Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism.” BioSocieties 6 (2): 167–94. doi: 10.1057/biosoc.2011.1. Landecker, Hannah and Aaron Panofsky. 2013. “From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 39: 333–57. https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev-soc-071312-145707. Lavery, Charne. 2017. “Drift.” Somatosphere, 14 December 2017. http:// somatosphere.net/2017/drift.html/. Lee, Cheng-Shiuan and Nicholas S. Fisher. 2016. “Methylmercury Uptake by Diverse Marine Phytoplankton.” Limnology and Oceanography 61 (5): 1626–39. Lombrana, Laura Millan, David Biller and Felix Njini. 2019. “As Gold Surges, So Does Illegal Mining Tied to Crime and Illness.” Bloomberg, 13 August 2019. www. bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/as-gold-surges-so-does-illegal-miningtied-to-crime-and-illness. Mahdawi, Arwa. 2018. “Starbucks is Banning Straws—But is it really a big win for the Environment?” Guardian, 23 July 2018. www.theguardian.com/business/2018/ jul/23/starbucks-straws-ban-2020-environment. Mansfield, Becky. 2012. “Race and the New Epigenetic Biopolitics of Environmental Health.” BioSocieties 7 (4): 352–72. Mansfield, Becky. 2018. “A New Biopolitics of Environmental Health: Permeable Bodies and the Anthropocene.” In The Sage Handbook of Nature, edited by Terry Marsden. London: Sage, 216–34. Mansfield, Becky. 2019. “Mercury.” In Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, edited by the Antipode Editorial Collective. Antipode Foundation Inc. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 181–5. Mansfield, Becky and Julie Guthman. 2015. “Epigenetic Life: Biological Plasticity, Abnormality, and New Configurations of Race and Reproduction.” cultural geographies 22 (1): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014555659. McDonald, Jo. 2008. Dreamtime Superhighway: Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange. Canberra: ANU Press. Meloni, Maurizio. 2019. Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics. London: Routledge.

Wasting seas  191 Probyn, Elspeth. 1992. “Technologizing the Self: A Future Anterior in Cultural Studies.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 501–11. Probyn, Elspeth. 2001. “Anxious Proximities: The Space-Time of Concepts.” In Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, edited by Jon May and Nigel Thrift. London: Routledge, 171–86. Probyn, Elspeth. 2018. “The Ocean Returns: Mapping a Mercurial Anthropocean.” Social Science Information 57 (3): 386–402. https://doi.org/10.1177/05390184187 92402. River of Gold. n.d. https://riverofgoldmovie.com/. Rosenbaum, Sophia. 2018. “She Recorded that Heartbreaking Turtle Video. Here’s What She Wants Companies like Starbucks to Know about Plastic Straws.” Time, 17 July 2018. https://time.com/5339037/turtle-video-plastic-straw-ban/. Sea Turtle Biologist. 2015. “Sea Turtle with Straw up its Nostril: ‘NO’ TO PLASTIC STRAWS.” YouTube video. 10 August www.youtube.com/watch?v= 4wH878t78bw. Smith, Daniel W. 2013. “Temporality and Truth.” Deleuze Studies 7 (3): 377–89. doi: 10.3366/dls.2013.0118. Smithsonian Institution. 2018. “Ocean Acidification.” April. https://ocean.si.edu/ ocean-life/invertebrates/ocean-acidification. Spiegel Samuel J., Sumali Agrawal, Dino Mikha, Kartie Vitamerry, Philippe Le Billon, Marcello Veiga, Kulansi Konolius and Bardolf Paul. 2018. “Phasing out Mercury? Ecological Economics and Indonesia’s Small-Scale Gold Mining Sector.” Ecological Economics 144: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.07.025. Sreenivasan, Hari. n.d. “Ocean Acidification’s Impact on Oysters and Other Shellfish.” Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [United States]. Accessed 30 March 2020. www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/ story/Ocean+Acidification%27s+impact+on+oysters+and+other+shellfish. Topsfield, Jewel and Amilia Rosa. 2017. “The Real Price of Gold in Lombok: Indonesian Women with Toxic Mercury Levels.” Sydney Morning Herald, ­ 6 October 2017. www.smh.com.au/world/the-real-price-of-gold-in-lombok-indonesianwomen-with-toxic-mercury-levels-20171005-gyuy5q.html. Trasande, Leonardo, Joseph DiGangi, David C. Evers, Jindrich Petrlik, David G. Buck, Jan Šamánek, Bjorn Beeler, Madeline A. Turnquist and Kevin Regan. 2016. “Economic Implications of Mercury Exposure in the Context of the Global Mercury Treaty: Hair Mercury Levels and Estimated Lost Economic Productivity in Selected Developing Countries.” Journal of Environmental Management 183, pt. 1: 229–35. Troy, Jakelin. 1994. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the ­Australian Dictionaries Project and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. https://williamdawes.org/docs/troy_sydney_language_ publication.pdf. Vigdor, Neil. 2019. “Fatal Accident with Metal Straw Highlights a Risk.” New York Times. 11 July 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/world/europe/metal-strawsdeath.html. Welch, Craig. 2013. “Sea Change.” Seattle Times, 12 September 2013. https://apps. seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-perilous-turn-overview/. Wright, Ian. 2012. “Concrete Pushing Urban Water Quality ‘Over the Edge.’ ” Ecos Magazine, 13 February 2012. www.ecosmagazine.com/print/EC12187.htm.

Part V

Collisions and multiplicity

13 Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future On the temporalities of two postnuclear sites1 Aleksandra Brylska It sometimes felt to me as if I was recording the future. (Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future)

This chapter examines cultural perceptions of two post-nuclear sites, which I treat as examples of what Chapin and Starfield (1997) termed “novel ­ecosystems”—ecosystems composed of new combinations of native and introduced species that no longer depend on human intervention (Pearce 2015, 106). The term and concept have gained currency among ecologists and in the environmental humanities, especially via the work of Richard J. Hobbs and colleagues (2006, 2013). As Pearce (2015) notes, these degraded sites are paradoxically important for the preservation of natural species: recently messed up and novel ecosystems already dominate huge areas of the planet. There are billions of acres of abandoned landscapes across the world: former forests, degraded pastures, poisoned or radioactive badlands, urban wasteland, and places where farmers simply gave up and walked away. They are where a huge amount of surviving nature lives. (156) The novel ecosystem concept is strongly connected to time on two levels. The first can be called ideological. Novel ecosystems undermine a traditional conservationist imaginary of ecosystems as static and unchangeable (Pearce 2015), showing that the environment is a dynamic phenomenon and that changes introduced by invasive species or human interaction can be valuable. The second level relates to perceptions and experiences of temporality itself—novel ecosystems are bound to their own distinct, novel and complex sets of non-human temporalities. Attending to the processes occurring in this kind of environment allows us to become more attuned to new kinds of time perception. The chapter focuses on the toxic environments of two post-nuclear sites—the radioactive zone in Chernobyl (Ukraine) and Washington State’s

196  Aleksandra Brylska Hanford Nuclear Reservation—arguing that they are novel ecosystems in which the radioactive waste introduced by humans paradoxically enables those spaces to develop biologically. They offer some of the best examples of how non-human ecosystems thrive in the absence of any human activity, despite high toxicity rates. This grants them the paradoxical status of being both “degraded” and “valuable” (sometimes even “pristine”). Further, these sites also challenge our perception of waste, that is, what is disposable and what is worth preserving. Moreover, they are underpinned by complex new—almost unthinkable—temporalities. Each site came into being differently (one as a result of catastrophe, the other as a way of dealing with a nuclear clean-up), but they are both marked by the stigma of radioactive toxicity and thus regarded as wasteland. By examining how these spaces have developed and how their fauna and flora are perceived both in popular media and in some scientific scholarship, it becomes possible to reflect on their political and cultural status. I argue that because they still have the status of radioactive wastelands and are somehow insulated by a more-than-human timescale, new ecological realities are able to emerge. This represents quite a change in emphasis, since until now Chernobyl and the Hanford Site have above all been regarded in the context of the impact of radioactivity on human health, with particular focus on the level of contamination of those spaces and the cultural and political impacts on society (Brown 2019b; Cram 2016). As they are difficult to incorporate in the widespread cultural narrative of “unspoilt” nature, often the positive aspects of these spaces are either omitted or regarded as random and nonimportant. But it is important to consider radioactive waste and toxicity in relation to their potential, and not only as dangerous by-products of human activity.

Writing into the future Following William Viney (2014, 3), one could argue that time is central to an understanding of waste: Waste frequently requires a sense of how time has somehow passed, paused or is no longer available to us through the things that surround us. With our recognition of waste comes an acknowledgement of time passing, its power to organize notions of wearing, decay, transience and dissolution and its power to expose that organizing function, to disclose how things are imbued with a sense of duration, punctuation and intermission that makes time an explicit, tangible thing of thought. Radioactive waste breaks the linear passage of time, gesturing immediately towards some vision of the future. When radioactive contamination appears in the form of a nuclear explosion, for example at a power plant,

Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future  197 we begin to think about the time which is yet to come, not the time that has passed. This time is marked by calculations that predict the time left before the final decay of radioactive isotopes: a time when the affected spaces, organisms and objects will no longer be dangerous, and it will be possible to reclaim them. The emphasis on the future aspect of radioactive waste is particularly evident in Michael Madsen’s 2010 documentary Into Eternity: A Film for the Future. The story is about the world’s first permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste, currently being built in Finland. As Madsen writes in his Director’s Note: The ONKALO project of creating the world’s first final nuclear waste facility capable of lasting at least 100,000 years, transgresses both in construction and on a philosophical level all previous human endeavors. It represents something new. And as such I suspect it to be emblematic of our time—and in a strange way out of time, a unique vantage point for any documentary. (Quoted in Madsen 2011) In this claim, and throughout the film, the clash between the present time and the unimaginable future is the most distinctive feature of the whole project. It is present not only in the story of building something designed to last many thousands of years, but also in the problem of finding the right language for the future—how to communicate the radioactive waste’s presence for numberless future generations to come. As Peter Van Wyck (2005, xvi) notes, signage around nuclear waste is inherently paradoxical, riven by the tension between the need to highlight the waste but also to hide it. Thus the storage facility in Finland has the message: “This place is dangerous. Go away!” (61). The example of the nuclear waste storage presented in Madsen’s film shows that radioactive by-products not only disturb the human understanding of time, but also prevent suitable narratives from emerging, ones that might help us understand their complex material and discursive impacts. Crucially, radioactivity functions on more-than-human scales, which makes any plans for the future impossible. Isotypes take an impossibly long time to disintegrate—thousands of years (International Atomic Energy Agency 2010). This timescale creates a cognitive void in which the perception of reality is suspended in constant expectation, deprived of the memory of the past on the one hand, and oblivious to the present on the other. This is evident in the radioactive spaces themselves, in which the ruins of past human life exist next to the developing rich ecosystems, which eventually also take over places that previously belonged to people. In a radioactive society, which lives under the constant threat of nuclear destruction on the one hand but on the other is already contaminated by previous nuclear weapon tests, the past loses its power to determine the future. The future—something non-existent (Beck 2004, 45)—replaces the

198  Aleksandra Brylska past as the reason for all activities and experiences. Most of that future is fictional, as Jacques Derrida (1984, 28) pointed out, because it exists only on the level of literature and in media representations. In this sense, radioactive waste becomes atemporal because, narratively speaking, it exists only in the future (that may never come), whereas in reality it is slowly disintegrating, though this process eludes humans. It becomes a weird heritage, passed down not to remember the past but instead to ensure a future for the coming generations (Harrison 2016, 172). This heritage is stored and protected not because it carries important meanings about the past. Rather, those monuments are graded, to make any future (not destroyed by nuclear catastrophe) possible. This idea of a paradoxically atemporal heritage is explicitly expressed in Timothy Morton’s (2013) claim that we should use radioactive waste to create monuments of contemplation that constantly remind us of its legacy and our material entanglement with toxicity: Nuclear Guardianship has suggested encasing plutonium in gold, that precious object of global reverence and lust, rather than sweeping it away out of view. Encased in gold, which has the advantage of absorbing gamma rays, plutonium could become an object of contemplation. Set free from use, plutonium becomes a member of a democracy expanded beyond the human. (121) As I suggest here, radioactive waste has the potential to be not only a problem for unimaginable time, but also a solution in creating more-­than-human modes of coexistence where natural ecosystems flourish. Radioactivity disrupts the normative perception of human/non-human relationships, because it introduces other modes of existence in the present, where environments flourish on the sites created by toxic by-products of human activities. This phenomenon shows that the real agency of nuclear waste is not in the future but right now. This change of timescale enables me to examine ongoing processes of radioactive wasteland-objects, which can reveal the paradoxically “positive” potential of toxicity. It becomes paramount to refocus on non-human realities entangled in the radioactive present, working with radiation for the future, not only toward it.

Chernobyl: the never-ending richness of catastrophe The Chernobyl accident, which occurred on 26 April 1986, was a disruption of time on a scale unseen before. It was the embodiment of all fears of nuclear destruction aroused during the Cold War period. A literally apocalyptic tone appeared in the Ukraine almost immediately, as people tried to interpret the catastrophe. Only a small number of people in the officially atheistic Soviet Union owned a bible or believed in the supernatural. However, shortly after the Chernobyl explosion, a number of bible owners

Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future  199 observed that in the Book of Revelation in the passage about a burning star (18:11), the word polyn appears, which from a botanical point of view is related to Chernobyl (chornobyl is a traditional name for wormwood) (Mycio 2005, 15). Suddenly, the biblical prophecy began to take on a new meaning: wormwood now meant radiation that promised a nuclear apocalypse destroying the world. This rumour spread at an amazing rate throughout the USSR and reached as far as Washington. However, when the catastrophe came, it did not herald the apocalypse because the environment looked ostensibly as though nothing had changed. Radiation defied reason, and the apocalypse was quiet and invisible. In interviews with and personal testimonies by those affected directly by Chernobyl (Brylska 2018), there is a kind of astonishment that although the greatest technological disaster of the period had taken place, reality itself did not seem to change. One example of this difficulty of comprehension is provided by the short film The Children of Chernobyl. Made in 1991 by the Polish Film Chronicle—a 10-minute-long newsreel shown in Polish cinemas which typically served as a propaganda tool of the government of the People’s Republic of Poland (Cieśliński 2006, 5)—the film is devoted entirely to the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, showing the catastrophe itself as well as the “normal” life of the Ukrainian and Belarusian people who lived in proximity to the plant. It includes several testimonies from the victims of the catastrophe about their experience of the event as well as the perception of the radioactive space. The film documents one remarkable phenomenon: in the local town of Pripyat, the natural environment flourished after the disaster, as if the catastrophe had never happened. As one woman recalls: somehow, right away the trees started blooming, the apple blossoms were like large rose petals, it was beautiful, it was very krasivo [beautiful] and somewhere in five days they started talking about the fact that there was a failure, that the situation is stabilized, everything is slow, you can drink milk, you can walk. (Children of Chernobyl 1991) Chernobyl’s nature began to elude human cognition because it appeared to remain unchanged. The film included images of the burning power plant alongside flowering meadows and thick forest landscapes. This visual incongruity stemmed in part from an inability to depict the reality that emerged as a result of the accident, which existed simultaneously with an ongoing enchantment with the area’s bountiful but now contaminated beauty. Eventually, though, Pripyat became another ghost town, scarred by empty settlements of grey blocks, where laundry hangs to this day, battered by sun and rain. Trains are stopped mid-journey, rusting and dilapidated, and parks that once were full of people are now overgrown with wild vegetation. Space is punctuated by radioactive graveyards such as burial mounds in which radioactive objects, machines, or entire houses are left

200  Aleksandra Brylska decaying. It is a landscape of settlements demolished by looters, bitten by the teeth of time, and finally reclaimed by vegetation and animals. The zone functions on the edge of materiality and spectrality, where the ruins of civilisation become “sites of reverse futurism” (Freeman 2014, 59), embodying the fallen dream of human progress. The most expressive example of this is the ruin of the destroyed nuclear power plant itself, which has become a monument to the disaster. Covering the destroyed reactor with a sarcophagus becomes a performative gesture of burial; the decay of isotopes is like the decomposition of a dead body. This monument (tombstone), being in constant disintegration, demands an ongoing bond: the sarcophagus, which deteriorates over time, had to be renovated and repaired and was finally replaced in 2019. The biggest wasteland of the zone is ironically at the same time the most important and most cared for. It undermines the notion of waste as something people mostly get rid of, because its safe existence ensures the stability of human reality. The sudden, compulsory evacuation of the inhabitants left Pripyat in a state of constant suspension: deserted but bearing numerous traces of earlier life, eternally waiting for the return of its people. From the human point of view, radioactive contamination caused the entire space to become a wasteland—a space beyond time, an immanently broken area, in which not a clock but radiation-induced isotopes have begun to measure time. This is an example of what Foucault (1984) terms “heterochrony,” a complete break with traditional time. Time in a heterochrony does not pass in a linear logic, but rather accumulates (like radioactive isotopes in the ground), containing the past-present-future in the experience of temporality. The accident site is experienced both as the area of the past tragedy as well as the site of a period of happiness before the failure. In general, time before the catastrophe is represented as idyllic but broken at the same time because the shadow of the disaster is already present: The spring of that year was exceptionally beautiful; hot days passed quickly. Small children were playing between the concrete blockhouses in small playgrounds, and their older siblings were bored at school. The voices of birds tearing the steamy air, greeting every morning, the fishermen walking over the picturesque Pripyat River. The grass was dry in the pine forests life was awakening. It’s here: behind the town and the forest there was a miracle of Soviet technology that was about to become a place where the greatest catastrophe of the industrial age happened. (Kano 2006) The past of this almost idyllic Ukrainian city is forever destroyed by a catastrophe that was about to happen. The time division before—during—after the accident disappears, disrupting the traditional sense of temporality. An eternal catastrophe hangs over Chernobyl, introducing a cracking, looping time entangled in constant re-enactment of the already ongoing catastrophe.

Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future  201 This disruption of time is discussed by Svetlana Alexievich in Chernobyl Prayer (2016), and it underlines the inability to provide proper testimony of the catastrophe. The act of writing about the past catastrophe already gestures toward the future—it is a “recording of the future” rather than a remembrance of the past (Alexievich 2016, 41): More than twenty years have passed since the accident, yet I have been asking myself ever since: what was I bearing witness to, the past or the future? It would be so easy to slide into cliché. The banality of horror. But I see Chernobyl as the beginning of a new history: it offers not only knowledge but also prescience, because it challenges our old ideas about ourselves and the world. When we talk about the past or the future, we read our ideas about time into those words; but Chernobyl is, above all, a catastrophe of time. The radionuclides strewn across our earth will live for 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 years. And longer. From the perspective of human life, they are eternal. What are we capable of comprehending? Is it in our power to extract and decipher the meaning of this still unfamiliar horror? (39) Alexievich suggests that radioactivity disturbs prevailing conceptions and experiences of time and makes the future the only important temporality. Time is made strange—expressed in the unimaginable duration of thousands of years—and the radioactive waste and the contaminated wasteland are a new kind of clock for humanity. Once again, when it comes to radioactive waste, there is no present time—only a misunderstood past and a barely imaginable future. The sense that time is inappropriate becomes even stronger upon considering the fact that the aftermath of the catastrophe will be visible or known only after much time, that is, when some people will develop cancer, or some mutagenic plant will grow in the zone (Morton 2013, 34). Even those signs are unreliable due to the widespread dispersal of the evacuated population, lack of consistent medical examinations and propaganda activities of the Soviet Union (Brown 2019a). From this point of view, the Chernobyl site is characterised above all by a strange mixture of physical and conceptual temporalities. One uncanny place in the zone is the Red Forest, where trees have become ginger-brown because of the high level of radioactivity. It is a place where time literally stopped as a result of contamination because microorganisms, fungi and insects responsible for the decomposition of leaves and wood disappeared (Nuwer 2014). Although the trees are no longer alive, they cannot decompose, paralysing the circulation of matter, “as if life itself is stopped forever, frozen and irretrievably lost” (Marder and Tondeur 2016, 28). As Kate Brown (2019b) observes in her book A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, the Red Forest undermines the human notion of time, showing that it is something unpredictable; it can accelerate or decelerate regardless of the

202  Aleksandra Brylska division into seconds, minutes or hours (167). Or, as in the Chernobyl forest, time almost stopped. There, life and death co-exist, and because scientists cannot predict how long this state of the forest will prevail (Mousseau et al. 2014, 3), it is hard to imagine any future. This specific bio-waste exists in its own distinct temporality, in which the notion of “now” has become eternal. However, alongside the frozen time of the Red Forest, other environments within the zone seem to be spaces of reclamation: places that had been appropriated many years ago to explicitly serve humans are sites of an unlikely development of very different natural ecosystems. By banishing humanity from the Chernobyl area, the catastrophe has unwittingly created an opportunity for abundant natural environments to flourish (Pearce 2015). In Belarus, two years after the catastrophe, scientists established a reservation to protect wildlife in the toxic zone, named Polesie State Radioecological Reserve. Due to fears of radioactive animals and water flowing out of the zone, the governors wanted to completely seal and shut off the area from the outside world. Paradoxically, although it is one of the most radioactive wetlands in the world, the area features an amazing variety of animals and plants, especially wild boars, Przewalski’s horses, wolves and bears, as well as wormwood and different species of grass (Mycio 2005, 138). In 2016, the Ukrainian government established its own biosphere reservation, including most of the exclusion zone around the reactor, joining it with the Polessky Nature Reserve (founded in 1968) and creating the Polessky Radiologic-Ecology Reserve (Global Environment Fund in Ukraine and UNEP 2018). Scientists who examine the consequences of the catastrophe in Chernobyl are still divided over the impact of radiation on the environment (Baker and Wickliffe 2011). The changes are very subtle, mainly observed among birds whose populations constitute a useful indicator of radiation’s impact (Møller and Mousseau 2007). In relation to the Chernobyl zone, biologists argue that the greatest danger for living creatures is man, not radioactivity. The catastrophe at the power plant was perversely beneficial, because it forced people out (Pearce 2015, 120). Thus, the Chernobyl zone has a strange double status as a space that is both impoverished and abundant. Indeed, in the case of Chernobyl it might be said that the catastrophe has performed a productive role in the process of ecological change and evolution itself. Also, in the case of the Chernobyl accident, rapid and surprising events such as nuclear catastrophes open the possibility for creative and positive change facilitating the constitution of rich and complex ecosystems characterised by biodiversity. For example, in Chernobyl both the nuclear event itself and the subsequent evacuation of people from this space have created a novel ecosystem that is richer and more abundant that one before the catastrophe. As Jim Smith of Britain’s Portsmouth University states: Most people think of the zone as a post-apocalyptic wilderness, either occupied by two-headed monsters that glow in the dark, or completely

Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future  203 empty … But from the wildlife point of view, the disaster has been beneficial, because it forced people out. Wild animals rarely die of the diseases of old age. Wildlife in the Chernobyl zone is now more abundant and diverse than before the accident. (quoted in Pearce 2015, 120) The Chernobyl zone thus produces a new, non-human temporality in which radioactive waste enables a different sort of wildlife to live in the present. It is possible because of the different ways that radioactivity influences various organisms: what is dangerous for humans, for instance, can be safe for wildlife (Pearce 2015, 120), in part because of their different life spans. The zone became a specific wasteland of a human technological dream, but at the same time the space of escape from human-centred temporalities, a place where toxicity has become a weird form of salvation for the wildlife populations under threat elsewhere—for example, the preservation in the area of the Chernobyl zone of the species of Przewalski’s horse which was previously on the verge of extinction (Mycio 2005, 95). Areas around the Chernobyl power plant reactor undermine the notion of the “wasteland” as a space that is barren and unproductive. As Vittoria Di Palma points out, the category of a “wasteland” is generally connected to sites destroyed by industry, polluted by chemical waste or abandoned by the military. It functions as a category of land and a cultural construct (Di Palma 2014, 3, 9) that helps to divide unwanted spaces from “valuable” landscapes, and as such serves as a normative idea. The Chernobyl zone undermines this division because, on the one hand, it is polluted and destroyed by technology (and is thus a “wasteland”), and, on the other, it is an example of a valuable novel ecosystem, where flora and fauna can develop freely. It thus escapes normative understandings of value based on the modernist dichotomy of purity/dirt, pristine/degraded. Free of the economic pressures of capitalism, the novel ecosystem can evolve freely. This demonstrates that if we remove human temporality, it becomes possible to discern a different reality that exists due to radioactive contamination— even in the melted reactor, where a certain type of fungus grows because of the high levels of radiation: Recent data show that melanized fungal species like those from Chernobyl’s reactor respond to ionizing radiation with enhanced ­ growth. Fungi colonize space stations and adapt morphologically to extreme conditions. (Dadachova and Casadevall 2008, 525) Indeed, some of the genetic changes caused by radiation exposure could even be “a potential mechanism of adaptive evolution in eukaryotes” (Dadachova and Casadevall 2008, 525). The zone then is an example of a new space-time, one whose regulatory prohibitions ensure that humans

204  Aleksandra Brylska cannot dominate and appropriate it. The time of contaminated space belongs to non-humans; turning to them could help us understand the status and agency of radioactive waste. Radioactive temporality enables us to see the potential of novel ecosystems, so far rejected as wastelands, when in fact they could play an important role in sustaining biodiversity in the world.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation: the toxic cycle of life Every space contaminated with radioactive isotopes creates its own specific set of temporalities. In Chernobyl, it is a non-human temporality brought forth by the breakdown of the human-scale clock. Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, on the other hand, is an example of an attempt to restore radioactive waste into the eternal cycle of nature. Hanford is a 580-square-mile federal facility owned by United States Department of Energy (DOE). Located in the southeastern part of Washington State, along the Columbia River, it produced plutonium for nuclear bombs during the Cold War. As a by-product of this, it created two-thirds of all the high-level nuclear waste in the U.S., making it one of the most hazardous sites in the country (Mercer and Prisbrey 2004, 248). At the end of 1980s, following the end of the Cold War, the mission of the Hanford Site changed from plutonium production to waste clean-up. A new emphasis was put on the environmental restoration and ecological uniqueness of the site. In 1992, the DOE and The Nature Conservancy of Washington (TNC) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding that called for a cooperative and coordinated inventory of plants, animals and ecologically significant areas of the Hanford Site. The Hanford Biodiversity Project began in 1994 and continued until 1998. In 1999, the Hanford Reach section of the Columbia River was designated a Wild and Scenic River. An important gesture in this process was made by President Bill Clinton, who renamed the Hanford Site the Hanford Reach National Monument, which symbolically crowned its ideological transformation from a factory producing high-grade radioactive waste into a valuable ecological space. The changing status of the Hanford Site is reflected in the headlines of newspapers published at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Initially, the press focused on the risks of contamination and the inability of federal authorities to manage radioactive waste. In the 1990s, along with the change of emphasis from defence to pro-environmental activities put forward by DOE, newspapers began to focus on the future potential of the site (Mercer and Prisbrey 2004, 248). Today, idyllic descriptions of rich ecosystems in the Columbia River valleys are interspersed with horrifying stories about radioactivity leaking from the restricted zone (Mercer and Prisbrey 2004, 248).

Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future  205 Before it housed a plutonium factory, the area that became the Hanford Nuclear Reservation was characterised by a complex web of natural relationships. As Ian Stacy (2010) poetically describes: In this land, where time had once been marked by the passage of the seasons, the engineers of the Manhattan Project introduced a system regulated by the nanoseconds it took for a neutron to travel from one atom to the next, or in the epochs that are sometimes the measure of radioactive decay. (423) The disturbance of the previously stable ecosystem took place primarily at the level of time: the cyclical temporalities of nature were replaced by the time of technology and science. The timescale of radioactivity was inscribed into the time of the environment. Interestingly, in many accounts the emphasis on ecological uniqueness overshadows the problems caused by radioactive radiation: The findings of the botanical portion of the Hanford Biodiversity Project have reinforced the importance of the Hanford Site for conservation of shrub-steppe vascular plants … Much of the biodiversity of the Hanford Site might have been lost without its unique history. If the Hanford Site had not been acquired by the U.S. Government in 1943, it would most certainly resemble the rest of the lower Columbia Basin where population growth, large-scale irrigation projects, livestock grazing, and noxious weeds have significantly reduced and/or degraded available habitat for many plants. (Beck and Caplow 2006, 42) This insistence on environmental flourishing is especially visible in the narratives created by government. In the case of the Hanford Site two dominant, conflicting narratives co-exist: the idyllic story of the exceptional environment and the horrifying stories about persistent radioactivity (Cram 2016). This creates a form of ambivalence in which wildlife restoration is a desired biological reality (and important environmental processes are occurring there), but at the same time the idyllic story is an ideological fiction created to cover the history of contamination. The incomplete past created by environmental narratives indicates that Hanford exemplifies the inability to solve the problems of nuclear contamination, radioactive waste, and lack of appropriate procedures for suspending nuclear programs (Cram 2016, 92). Thus, unwanted radiation is narrativised by the government in such a way as to include it in the fixed cycle of nuclear production, reflecting the traditional cycle of nature. As Shannon Cram (2016) points out, this cyclicity is important for three reasons: (1) to describe ongoing processes at Hanford as the moment of closing a certain

206  Aleksandra Brylska cycle is to create a sense of control over the level of contamination and ensure proper management of radioactive waste; (2) to describe time as cyclic indicates that the decontamination of these areas is heading to their starting point, that is, returning to the state of untouched wilderness; (3) the production of radioactive rubbish becomes perversely necessary in closing the cycle of this reality (94). As a result, the protection of the environment becomes the obvious effect of the atomic era. The time before the atom, the time of the Cold War, and the present time are now united in a closed system of reciprocal relationships, represented by the ideological narration of the cycle of nature. Therefore, there is no need to manage radioactive waste—it will manage itself, the slow decay process becoming part of the natural cycle of life. In this narrative, boundaries are crucial. Contamination is symbolically secured not only by spatially designated boundaries, but also by an imaginary temporal boundary in which radioactive waste points less to an uncertain future than to a welcome return. As long as the waste is “contained” inside nuclear wildlife it is unharmful; when the toxic fauna and flora escape from the Hanford Site, they instantly become dangerous (Cram 2016, 97). Thus, nuclear waste helps in closing the cycle of time and the rebirthing of wilderness only in designated places, not in general. In short, thanks to radioactive waste, only the terrain of Columbia River remains untouched by human time, existing as a romantic fantasy of a beautiful wilderness. In contrast to Chernobyl, the time of Hanford does not open new temporalities, but remains a frozen fantasy of the past, in which wildlife exists in harmony with a human-created landscape. Paradoxically, there is no future insofar as only the past matters. This is perfectly visualised in the short movie The Hanford Story: Future created by management in 2012. It is a presentation of the future potential of the site, where the nuclear clean-up will no longer be a problem, and it will be a space of unique wildlife beauty existing primarily for environmental protection. In the video, the former factory and clean-up facilities end up covered by the shrub-system landscape; time will eventually return to its beginning. There are, then, significant differences in public perceptions of radioactivity in both sites. The zone around the destroyed Chernobyl power plant is a weird, ambiguous wasteland. The Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation is a site in which nuclear waste is crucial for time passing in the framework of the natural cycle of life. Paradoxically, the cyclical temporalities based on the radioactive contamination make the waste itself even more invisible than the radioactivity—it not only disappears from narratives about the site, but also from its reality. In the case of Chernobyl’s stories, there is an inability to come back to the time before the disaster. By contrast, in the narratives about the former plutonium factory there is only the past: even in stories about the future, everything is imagined as returning to the state before the production of nuclear weapons. One type of radio­ activity but different timescales.

Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future  207

The end is far away The time of radioactive waste is weird: it is all-encompassing and exists on a different, inhuman time scale, undermining a key spatial idea—the idea of “away”—and a key temporal one—that of “sometimes.” “Away” is complicated, because radionuclides move from place to place and change the level of contamination, so it is hard to create a material or imaginary spatial boundary around their existence. Similarly, there is no “sometimes,” because it is hard to imagine when the isotopes will disappear—they exist on a timescale of thousands and thousands of years. Radiation’s writing on human tissue can reveal itself in the next generation. One can never know when its symptoms might appear, what they will create or what memory will be frozen in them. Radioactive waste carries only traces of the past and a potential future (in which it might disappear completely). In the meantime, the present is upheld by non-human agents and their different temporalities. Therefore, it is possible that post-nuclear sites simultaneously symbolise ruination (contamination) and redemption (abundant ecosystems). This creates a fruitful tension between nature and technology, a tension in which non-human agents can work their way through and create new opportunities for existence. Post-nuclear sites can perhaps become our hope for the future in the shadow of the climate crisis. They are places where novel ecosystems are developing with a growing number of different animal and plant species. In the shadow of shrinking wildlife ecosystems, these spaces already have an important role in sustaining biodiversity in the world: The more damage that humans do to nature—through climate change, pollution, and grabbing land for intensive agriculture and plantation ­forestry—the more important alien species and novel ecosystems will be to ensuring nature’s survival. Aliens are rapidly changing from being part of the problem to part of the solution. And in a world where supposedly pristine habitats require constant micromanagement to keep them going, where they are increasingly like theme parks for conservation scientists, the truly wild lies elsewhere. It is in the unmanaged badlands and novel ecosystems. The bits of nature we don’t cosset and pamper. The new wild. (Pearce 2015, 122) Changing our perspective on these spaces can reveal their new potential, value and fragility. This approach involves abandoning current conservation agendas, which treat ecosystems as uniform and unchanging phenomena (Cronon 1996). Instead, we should guard nuclear wastelands, allowing radioactive waste to take its time to disappear, protecting novel ecosystems in the process. This will also enable us to renounce the romantic vision of nature and strive to create more democratic modes of coexistence

208  Aleksandra Brylska among humans and non-humans, where we open ourselves to the potential of different temporalities introduced by nuclear waste. The time of radioactive waste is a time of hope, in which we can learn how to love the contaminated environment in its weird, monstrous form. There is no today and no future—only the paradoxical potential of decay.

Note 1 This chapter was prepared as part of the research project “(Bio)discourse after Catastrophe. The Natural-Cultural Status of Nuclear Disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima,” financed by the National Science Center, Poland (no.2019/33/N/ HS2/00268).

References Alexievich, Svetlana. 2016. Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future. London: Penguin Books. Baker, Robert J. and Jeffrey K. Wickliffe. 2011. “Wildlife and Chernobyl: The Scientific Evidence for Minimal Impacts.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 14 April 2011. https://thebulletin.org/2011/04/wildlife-and-chernobyl-the-scientific-evidencefor-minimal-impacts/. Beck, Kathryn A. and Florence E. Caplow. 2006. “Additions to the Vascular Flora of Washington from a Biodiversity Study on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.” Madroño 53 (1): 36–45. Beck, Ulrich. 2004. Społeczeństwo ryzyka. W drodze do innej nowoczesności [A Risk Society: On the Road to Another Modernity]. Translated by Stanisław Cieśla. ­Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Brown, Kate. 2019a. “The Great Chernobyl Acceleration.” Keynote lecture at 10th Biennial conference of the European Society for Environmental History, Tallinn University, 21 August. https://vimeo.com/354501590?fbclid=IwAR2z5703axePpu BnsrEd7wIQtzQEhYDuosIpEslTfhmTpoBRLogUpcPsvGQ. Brown, Kate. 2019b. Czarnobyl: Instrukcja przetrwania [A Chernobyl Guide to the Future]. Translated by Tomasz S. Gałązka. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Czarne. Brylska, Aleksandra. 2018. “ ‘Największa taka katastrofa …’ O niewidocznych obrazach katastrofy Elektrowni Jądrowej w Czarnobylu” [“‘The Bigest Catastrophe of this Kind …’ About the Invisible Representations of the Nuclear Power Plant Catastrophe in Chernobyl”]. Studia Europaea Gnesnensia (17): 375–9. https://doi.org/10.14746/seg.2018.17.20. Chapin, F. Stuart III and Anthony M. Starfield. 1997. “Time Lags and Novel Ecosystems in Response to Transient Climatic Change in Arctic Alaska.” Climatic Change 35 (4): 449–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1005337705025. Children of Chernobyl [Dzieci Czarnobyla]. 1991. Polish Film Chronicle [Polska Kronika Filmowa], no. 31. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zKavpqces0. Cieśliński, Marek. 2006. Piękniej niż w życiu. Polska Kronika Filmowa 1944–1994 [More Beautiful Than in Life. Polish Film Chronicle 1944–1994]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Trio. Cram, Shannon. 2016. “Wild and Scenic Wasteland: Conservation Politics in the Nuclear Wilderness.” Environmental Humanities 7 (1): 89–105.

Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future  209 Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 69–90. Dadachova, Ekaterina and Arturo Casadevall. 2008. “Ionizing Radiation: How Fungi Cope, Adapt, and Exploit with the Help of Melanin.” Current Opinion in Microbiology 11 (6): 525–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mib.2008.09.013. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Translated by Catherine Porter, and Philip Lewis. Diactrics 14 (2): 20–31. https://doi.org/doi:10.2307/464756. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25 (2): 9–63. Di Palma, Vittoria. 2014. Wasteland: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel. [1984]. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. foucault.info. https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault. ­ heteroTopia.en/. Freeman, Lindsey A. 2014. “The Manhattan Project Time Machine: Atomic Tourism in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” In Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, edited by Brigitte Sion. London: Seagull Books, 54–74. Global Environment Fund in Ukraine and UNEP. 2018. “Conservation, Optimization and Management of Carbon and Biodiversity in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.” http://chornobyl-gef.com/en/kyiv-office.html. Harrison, Rodney. 2016. “Archaeologies of Emergent Presents and Futures.” Historical Archaeology 50 (3): 165–80. Hobbs, Richard J., Salvatore Arico, James Aronson, Jill S. Baron, Peter Bridgewater, Viki A. Cramer, Paul R. Epstein, John J. Ewel, Carlos A. Klink, Ariel E. Lugo, David Norton et al. 2006. “Novel Ecosystems: Theoretical and Management Aspects of the New Ecological World Order.” Global Ecology and Biogeography 15 (1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-822X.2006.00212.x. Hobbs, Richard J., Salvatore Arico, James Aronson, Jill S. Baron, Peter Bridgewater, Viki A. Cramer, Paul R. Epstein, John J. Ewel, Carlos A. Klink, Ariel E. Lugo, David Norton, Eric Higgs and Carol M. Hall. 2013. Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. International Atomic Energy Agency. 2010. Radiation Biology: A Handbook for Teachers and Students. Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency. www-pub. iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TCS-42_web.pdf. Kano, Piotr. 2006. Czarnobyl 1986 [Chernobyl 1986]. http://czarnobyl.c10.pl/wiosna. php. Madsen, Michael. 2010. Into Eternity: A Film for the Future. DVD. Films Transit International. Madsen, Michael. 2011. Interview with Helen Caldicott. Ifyoulovethisplanet.org, 15 July 2011. https://ratical.org/radiation/IntoEternity/MichaelMadsen.html. Marder, Michael and Anaïs Tondeur. 2016. The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness. London: Open Humanities Press. Mercer, Douglas and Donna Prisbrey. 2004. “Vigilant Geography: Newspaper Coverage of a Wildfire at the Hanford Nuclear Site.” Environmental Practice 6 (3): 247–57. Møller, A.P. and T.A. Mousseau. 2007. “Species Richness and Abundance of Forest Birds in Relation to Radiation at Chernobyl.” Biology Letters 3 (5): 483–6. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2007.0226.

210  Aleksandra Brylska Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mousseau, Timothy A., Gennadi Milinevsky, Jane Kenney-Hunt and Anders Pape Møller. 2014. “Highly Reduced Mass Loss Rates and Increased Litter Layer in Radioactively Contaminated Areas.” Oecologia 175 (1): 429–37. doi: 10.1007/ s00442-014-2908-8. Mycio, Mary. 2005. Wormwood Forest. A Natural History of Chernobyl. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. Nuwer, Rachel. 2014. “Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly.” Smithsonian.com, 14 March 2014. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forestsaround-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/. Pearce, Fred. 2015. The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Nature’s Salvation. Boston: Beacon Press. Stacy, Ian. 2010. “Roads to Ruin on the Atomic Frontier: Environmental Decision Making at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, 1942–1952.” Environmental History 15 (3): 415–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emq058. United States Department of Energy. Hanford Site. 2012. The Hanford Story: Future. Video. 8 March. www.youtube.com/watch?gl=SN&threaded=1&hl=fr&v=pV t4g_dvJ90. United States Department of Energy. n.d. Hanford Site. www.hanford.gov/. Van Wyck, Peter C. 2005. Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat. ­Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury.

14 Toxic transmogrification Rare Earthenware as junk art Sabine LeBel

The Unknown Field Division’s Rare Earthenware multi-media project was displayed as part of the First Central China International Ceramics Biennale at the Henan Museum in 2016–17.1 The Unknown Fields Division, a selfdescribed “nomadic design research studio” made up of Liam Young and Kate Davies from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, explores remote parts of the earth that are crucial to contemporary technologies. Rare Earthenware is part of the group’s World Adrift expedition to China and included time spent aboard a container ship, in container ports, in the Shenzhen manufacturing district, in the e-waste village of Guiyu, and in rare earth mines in Mongolia. For the Rare Earthenware vases, the group collaborated with sculptor Kevin Callaghan, who created three vases in the Ming Dynasty style made from the amount of toxic waste produced by a smartphone, a laptop and a car battery. Clay for the vases was collected from the waste run-off of a factory that refines rare earth minerals in Mongolia. The larger project also includes films, books and other collaborations. The focus of this chapter is the Rare ­Earthenware vases. Waste scholar Zsuzsa Gille (2007) notes that waste “bite[s] back,” and it is precisely this tendency that the Rare Earthenware project engages with. Drawing from contemporary waste scholarship, this chapter examines how the vases transmogrify toxic waste into art pieces that are meant (in theory, at least) to last and be cherished for generations (Gille 2007, 27). The chapter engages with William Viney’s observation in Waste: A Philosophy of Things (2015) that: “waste is not always a leftover of time, a preterite thing of subtle retrospection, but a thing with which to think through the future” (39). The Rare Earthenware vases demonstrate this claim as they draw on the pedigree of Ming Dynasty vases going back centuries while their radioactive nature will endure into the future. In addition, the vases bring together a number of seemingly contradictory temporalities: the short-term lifespans of modern consumer durables (smartphones, computers and automobiles), which includes the rapid turnover produced by planned and built-in obsolescence, the lingering and unstable toxicities of the materials such stuff is made from, and the supposed eternal “timelessness” of fine art. In other

212  Sabine LeBel words, the Rare Earthenware vases leverage the historical significance of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain traditions to make a statement about the impacts of contemporary technology on the environment. Drawing from Jane Bennett’s notion of vital matter, I also argue that when toxic mud (something that typically “bites back” low-paid workers in poor countries) is used to create high art objects, it brings that toxicity into the spaces of the world’s elites, a group which is typically protected from such exposures (Gille 2007, 27).

Trash and e-waste art Waste scholar Gay Hawkins (2006, viii–ix) suggests that “waste [is] a flexible category grounded in social relations.” Similarly, art cannot be separated from its cultural context. Art that engages with the detritus of society often functions as a critique of industrialism or consumer culture. Using junk in art is nothing new, with modern traditions going back to avant-garde artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Waste art scholar Gillian Whiteley (2011, 151) notes: “the use of trash as a raw material for art-making is … not just preponderant, it is endemic.” Traditions of collage, assemblage and the use of objets trouvés exist in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. These traditions continued in the 1960s and 1970s, with Fluxus and Pop Art artists using consumer objects and other garbage in their work. In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni created Artist’s Shit, in which he filled 90 cans with his own faeces and sold them. These examples point to the multifarious meanings of garbage. As Lea Vergine (2007) writes in the introduction to her encyclopaedic book on trash and art: “We also know that trash is a welter of symbols: it is risk and fascination, foretold catastrophe and seduction, the beauty of the ugly and the memory of the human” (12). These sculptural traditions typically deal with readily available post-consumer waste and provide a medium rich with metaphor and meaning, ranging from nostalgia to disgust, and are perhaps best understood as critiques of trash resulting from consumer culture. Industrial waste is generally outside their scope. Since they are made from the amount of toxic waste created by the manufacture of a number of electronic goods, the Rare Earthenware vases can be most usefully connected to the concerns taken up in e-waste art, even though pre-consumer mining waste is not generally included in traditional definitions of e-waste. Standard definitions of e-waste refer only to post-consumer discards—essentially anything with an electrical plug—and increasingly to information and communications technologies. Thus, most e-waste artists use this readily accessible material in their work. This very pragmatic decision made by artists has consequences for our misunderstandings of waste in general, and e-waste in particular. Similarly, most ­discourses about electronics and waste focus on discarded post-consumer electronics, often with a focus on narratives of dumping in poor countries

Toxic transmogrification  213 and devastation of the land (Minter 2019). While toxic exposure is a major concern, the reality is that the global trade in e-waste is better understood as a global recycling and refurbishment industry entered into willingly by entrepreneurs in poor communities, rather than one of dumping by rich to poor countries (Lepawsky 2018, 4). Another crucial part of the global waste trade is that the most egregious examples of waste, including volume and toxicity, are a result of industry not consumers (MacBride 2012, 4–5). The contexts of both e-waste art and the global e-waste trade are important in order to fully comprehend the intervention being made by the Rare Earthenware vases. The project deals with pre-consumer mine tailings—a form of industrial waste that rarely makes it into waste art or other discourses of waste. What the Rare Earthenware vases do is use the cultural capital of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, a symbol of taste and wealth, and bring it into conversation with the global waste trade. In her book Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash, Whiteley identifies e-waste as a burgeoning area of junk art, as e-waste streams have grown rapidly with the widespread penetration of electronics, especially mobile phones and computers, into consumer markets (154). Notable e-waste artists include Paul Bonomini and Melbourne’s Slow Art Collective, both of whom use post-consumer waste. In 2005, Bonomini created the seven-metre-tall WEEE Man sculpture, originally on display outside of the London City Hall, to bring attention to Europe’s massive e-waste problem (LeBel 2015). (WEEE stands for “Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment”). The Slow Art Collective brought e-waste into the gallery as part of their 2010 Transfer Station 2 exhibit at the Incinerator Arts Complex (Broinowski 2010, 39–40). E-waste has also been taken up in traditions of environmental documentary photography, most notably by Pieter Hugo, Chris Jordan and Edward Burtynsky. Perhaps most closely aligned with the concerns of the Rare Earthenware project are photographs by Chris Jordan and Edward Burtynsky that detail e-waste and, importantly, other industrial landscapes related to the creation and disposal of consumer technologies. Chris Jordan’s work pays particular attention to questions of scale. He is well known for his Midway photographs of albatross carcasses that showcase the amount of plastic waste that remains in the birds’ stomachs after their death. His series Intolerable Beauty and Running the Numbers both deal with American consumer culture, largely by making post-consumer trash legible. Running the Numbers is a project that uses statistics to render aspects of consumer culture visible. The digitally manipulated photographs in the Intolerable Beauty series from 2004–05 explore shipping ports and industrial yards. The images in the series are composites, made of up hundreds of tiny cell phones or circuit boards. Diodes, New Orleans 2005, E-waste, New Orleans 2005, and Circuit Boards #3, New Orleans, are all far-reaching, and it takes a moment to decipher the many tiny objects that make them up. Consumption is denoted spatially with countless copies of the object making up the image. The major effect of these works is their scale. They demonstrate

214  Sabine LeBel the sheer volume of waste produced by consumer society but hidden from most consumers. Photographer Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photographs of industrial landscapes have been widely taken up by environmental humanities scholars (Bordo 2006; Cammaer 2009). Part of what makes his photographs so revelatory is that they document the normally hidden landscapes of the global supply chain, including pre- and post-consumer and industrial waste. The Manufactured Landscapes series includes railway tracks, mines and tailings, quarries, urban mines, oil fields and refineries and shipbreaking. His photographs of tailings, urban mines, manufacturing and other industrial processes in China were captured in Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes. His photographs Densified Tin Cans #2, Densified Oil Drums #4, and Densified Scrap Metals #3a, taken in Hamilton, Ontario, all display giant compressed metal bales to be recycled. Quarry photographs from Vermont and Italy show ashy-looking, cubic landscapes in which human-scale objects, including ropes, porta-potties and ladders, are tiny. Burtynsky also photographed the demolition of neighbourhoods in preparation for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China. In Feng Jie #4 and #6, huge fields of dusty bricks and the rubble of wrecked buildings, all overwhelmingly grey, fill the frame. In many of these photographs, the result is a flat, almost depthless image, where the eye is drawn to pick out details—a telephone dial, a truck, a twisted rebar. As with Jordan’s work, the scale is devastating and awesome. A peculiar feature of these photographs is the absence of human bodies, especially as so many of these places are also sites of labour. As Gillian Rose (1993) argues in Feminism and Geography, the tradition of landscape painting affirms notions of European, bourgeois, male mastery through a gaze of ownership that encompasses vast swathes of land (96–7). As part of this tradition, landscape paintings typically erase the labouring body. These documentary photographs continue this tradition of landscape from landscape paintings and emphasise ownership and mastery over the land. The erasure of labouring bodies works to further conceal the low-paid, often racialised, workers who bear the brunt of toxicity in the global waste trade.

Waste, temporality and the power of objects When considering toxic waste, however, the spatial, while a crucial dimension through which to understand waste, does not tell the whole story (LeBel 2015, 2016, 6). From e-waste to mine tailings, waste tells a story about the past: where the waste comes from, what society discards and in what state, and what materials the waste is composed from. Toxic waste, by its nature, endures. E-waste is the most complex item in the waste stream, made up of hundreds of components including plastic, glass, metal, rare earth minerals and chemicals like brominated fire retardants. Many items are not biodegradable and require lengthy time scales to be remediated.

Toxic transmogrification  215 Moreover, when mines are shut down, communities are typically left with environmental problems including devastated land, contaminated food sources, polluted ground water and legacies of cancer and other illnesses. In many cases, the life span of an object when in use—be it a smartphone or car battery—is far shorter than the amount of time the waste from that object will take to be remediated. When thinking about the environmental aspects of waste, time is a crucial consideration. Toxic waste, and e-waste in particular, directly entangles the present and the future: the utilitarian object whose legacy extends far beyond its immediate use or the finite experience of its consumption. Unfortunately, waste continues to be understood as an essentially spatial category of organisation, by academics and waste management experts alike. For people who live in wealthy communities, our trash might be separated before being put on the kerb to be taken away by the municipality. Landfills are located away from city centres, although often located close to poor and racialised communities, as environmental justice activists tell us (see work by Robert Bullard, e.g., Bullard 2018). Industrial waste is typically unseen by people who do not directly work with it. E-waste art, similarly, mostly speaks to the spatial dimensions of trash. For example, the projects discussed above render visible the inordinate amounts of trash created by waste electronics. WEEE Man is seven metres tall and made up of 553 pieces of waste electrical items, the number a typical British household goes through in a year (WEEE Man, n.d.). The Slow Art Collective’s work TS2 created an “industrial garden” in a gallery out of 15 tonnes of e-waste (Broinowski 2010, 39–40). The photographs by Jordan and Burtynsky highlight the overwhelmingly massive and disturbing scale of waste. In general, then, e-waste art predominantly continues to connote in terms of space: huge piles of junked consumer products, vast images of toxic geographies and the devastating scale of extractive industries. However, as I argue below, Rare Earthenware goes far beyond this spatial dimension.

The ethical dimensions of waste Waste has more than spatial dimensions; it is a particular and peculiar category of stuff. Waste scholar Gay Hawkins (2006, 4) notes that: “To reduce waste to an effect of human action and classification is to ignore the materiality of waste, its role in making us act; the ways in which waste is both a provocation to action and itself a result of that action.” In other words, waste has ethical dimensions: it demands a response. Even household items ask us to react. An empty glass juice bottle might be relatively safe and inert, but until it is rinsed out and placed in the recycling bin (assuming your municipality has a recycling program), it is “dirty.” It might start to smell bad. It might attract ants. It provokes. Jane Bennett (2010) goes further than Gay Hawkins’s idea that waste demands human response, and suggests that all bodies, including the

216  Sabine LeBel ­ on-human or objects not normally considered to have life, have a vitality n or force of some kind (3–4). She suggests that the modern Western tendency to categorise the world into living and inert means that we fail to notice the possibilities inherent in things. She describes how she is moved by a collection of stuff in a storm drain. These discarded objects—a glove, a dead rat, a stick, a bottle cap, and some pollen—cannot simply be reduced to the human social context. They continue to act and have meaning outside of it. Indeed, each has its own temporal trajectory: the rat carcass will decompose and perhaps enter the waterway, where it might become food for bacteria or other creatures. The pollen might be blown away (Bennett 2010, 4–8). The plastics may not biodegrade but they will change form, perhaps ending up in the stomach of a Midway albatross. In theorising “thing-power,” Bennett pays special attention to the ways in which the rapid and massive accumulation of commodities in late consumer capitalism hides the vitality of matter (2010, vii). She explains that the “vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formation [mean that] our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane as we speak” (2010, vii, emphasis in original). Temporality is an inherent characteristic of this vitality and the movement of matter from one state to another. Yet, we are so inundated with stuff that we fail to notice its vitality and only notice its volume and scale. It is this volume and scale that we see reflected in e-waste art. We are literally overwhelmed by the vastness of waste and the result is that we are unable to grapple with its other, equally important characteristics. Bennett’s intervention seems particularly apt when considering tailings lakes and e-waste. She notes that the vitality of things means they act as “quasi-agents” with their own affinities and proclivities (Bennett 2010, viii). Toxic and radioactive materials are undeniably quasi-agents. They interact with other things to produce chemical reactions. They act on the immune systems of living creatures, causing illnesses, birth defects, cancers, or changes in DNA that can persist in future generations. The interactions of these chemicals cannot be understood in isolation but must be studied as they exist in their interactions with other human-made and naturally existing chemicals in shifting bodies and landscapes in flux. The materials will endure in ecosystems and might be moved at any time by winds or waterways. Thus, toxic waste includes undeniable temporal and contingent dimensions; it is a provocation that speaks to the future. Rare Earthenware Unlike much art that deals with waste, the Rare Earthenware vases are significant because they directly deal with questions of time more than space. The Rare Earthenware project exploits circuits of value at work in the global art scene, as well as its connections to materials, waste and global power structures, past and present. William Viney (2014) notes the importance of

Toxic transmogrification  217 temporality to understanding waste: “The sculptural employment of waste, mediated by eventful, eventual things, provides occasions to collect and interpret the past and the future” (74). The Rare Earthenware vases exemplify this idea by bringing the cultural capital of Chinese porcelain to bear on the current realities of global capitalism that include the circulations of high art and information technologies. Made from toxic mud and shaped in the form of Tongping vases, the vases connote temporally, are both forwards and backwards looking, and do so on economic, social and environmental levels—including technological knowledge and available resources, provenances of art collecting, materials and environment. Porcelain vessels have always been enmeshed in these overlapping regimes of value. Chinese porcelain reveals changes in trade and art going back to the fourteenth century, when it was first made for export to the Middle East and other parts of Asia and continued the long tradition of trade in Chinese ceramics in the region. Historian Robert Finlay (1998) remarks that they are “particularly revealing” about world history, “for they were often simultaneously functional wares, treasured possessions, and bearers of cultural significance; hence, the history of porcelain must be linked to changes in commerce, art, and social values” (143). The Chinese were able to develop porcelain during the Yuan dynasty because of locally available materials, namely china-stone and kaolin (Finlay 1998, 145). This material base developed alongside existing technological knowledge and cultural practices, namely kiln technologies and a use for ceramics. In turn, porcelain played an important role in trade with the Middle East and parts of Africa, being traded for spices, metals and manufactured goods via both the Silk Road and maritime trade. Through this trade network, potters in Jingdezhen began importing cobalt oxide from Persia, which became the key ingredient in creating the blue in blue-and-white porcelain. As a result, Chinese potters were influenced by their trading partners and used Middle Eastern motifs and forms in their work (Finlay 1998, 156). Europeans became obsessed with Chinese porcelain and tried for years to reproduce a material as beautiful and robust enough to withstand heat. “Porcelain fever” swept Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and over 73 million pieces were imported. The porcelain fad swept European royalty, including members of the Prussian and Danish royalty, who reputedly had collections so big they needed to build palaces to house them (Finlay 1998, 173). This widespread influence has led some scholars to claim, perhaps overstating their case, that blue-and-white porcelain “changed the world” (Pierson 2012, 9). Indeed, Chinese porcelain continues to be highly valued (Pierson 2012, 9), and Ming vases in particular are distinctive symbols of wealth and culture as well as commodities that circulate and are traded in global markets. As Kate Davies notes: “Ming vases are particularly iconic objects of high value as well as being artefacts of international trade” (quoted in Howarth 2015). In the last few decades, Chinese porcelain has sold for ­millions of dollars at

218  Sabine LeBel auction, partly driven by newly wealthy Chinese looking to invest in their collections. It also continues to have aesthetic value in art practice. Artist Ai Wei Wei, known for his political and humanitarian work, has taken up traditional Chinese ceramics in his pieces, including Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Ghost Gu Descending the Mountain (2006), Bubbles (2008) and Field (2010). Blue-and-white porcelain continues to be a symbol of taste and wealth as it moves in the global flows of trade, politics, taste and art. In terms of high art, the Rare Earthenware vases clearly reference the recent spike in value of Chinese antiques, a trend associated with China’s new role as a global economic player. But the project has more in common with, though does not neatly fit into, lineages of junk art (typically found in Dadaism or Pop Art) made from readily available post-consumer trash. Nor does it fit easily into lineages of documentary photography, as seen in works by the photographers Pieter Hugo or Edward Burtynsky, that expose waste processes or landfill not easily accessible to the average person. Unknown Fields, the makers of these works, certainly share e-waste photography’s focus on the spatial, as they engage with the “global network of landscapes and infrastructures … too often forgotten, unseen or ignored” (Young and Davies 2013, 40). Yet, the project also explicitly engages with the toxic materials that are part of these processes and their multiple timescapes. The Rare Earthenware vases are part of the Unknown Field Division’s 2014 A World Adrift Part 02 expedition to China, which aimed “to follow the unmaking of an object … from the point of consumption to the holes in the ground where our devices and tech gadgets begin their lives” (Unknown Fields, n.d.(b)). The project begins with container ships, following them to the busiest global container ports in China, and explores Yiwu, a massive wholesale market near Zhejiang Province, the size of a city. It explicitly connects the global commodity chain to the infamous e-waste village of Guiya, China. Alongside the vases, this project is collected in a book and film of the same name. Rare Earthenware, the seven-minute film, documents the vases’ journey, beginning on container ships and ending with the completed vases being carefully packed into crates (Smith 2015). The film reinforces the geographic and spatial aspects of toxic waste, more than other aspects of the project, particularly the vases. Importantly, it goes beyond representations in much documentary photography, and offers context and critique about the labour conditions that underpin global electronics manufacturing. Images of coal mining and the rare earth tailings pond are reminiscent of Burtynsky’s photographs. They are vast, ruined landscapes. Throughout the film, schematics, vector lines, and text on screen interpret what the viewer sees. For example, statistics on screen inform us that 3.6 million container ships are in motion globally, that 60 per cent of factory workers in the Guangdong dormitory experience depression, and give the coordinates of Nansha Port. Chemical symbols appear over workers soldering electronics. The three key statistics that inform the creation of the three

Toxic transmogrification  219 vases appear as text: a laptop produces 122 kilograms of toxic waste, an electric car battery produces 2.66 kilograms of toxic waste and a smartphone uses eight rare earth minerals and produces 380 grams of toxic waste. The project considers the largely invisible but absolutely crucial aspects of the global commodity chain that produces and disposes of technology. Like Burtynsky and Jordan’s photographs, the overall effect of this part of the project is spatial. It connects disparate parts of the globe and takes a life cycle approach to waste, which accounts for the complexities of global trade and goes far beyond the aspect of post-consumer waste so typically used in much junk art. However, unlike these photographs, it also offers a sharp critique of labour practices informed by race-to-the-bottom policies. It highlights the everyday lives of workers, including their meals in cafeterias, and, importantly, noting their poor mental health and low wages. These elements turn the focus to labour and thus work against some of the masculinist tendencies of landscapes found in Burtynsky’s photographs that work to erase labouring bodies. During the World Adrift project, the Unknown Fields team visited Baotou Refinery Tailings Lake, where two-thirds of the rare earth metals that China produces are refined. As described in their book Unknown Fields: World Adrift: From where I’m standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely liquid, toxic sludge. Welcome to Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia … It’s the kind of industrial landscape that America and Europe have largely forgotten—at one time parts of Detroit or Sheffield must have looked and smelled like this. (Unknown Fields, Davies and Young 2016, n.p.) The project intentionally references the industrial past, including its labour and environmental costs, of much of Europe and North America, one that China is rapidly repeating. It also is a reminder of the materiality of the global infrastructure required to produce the technologies of the information age. This is particularly crucial when considering information and communications technologies that are so often named as though they are ephemeral and immaterial: the cloud, featherweight, air. Baotou Refinery Tailings Lake is a ten-square-kilometre lake polluted with acids, heavy metals, carcinogens and radioactive materials. This is where the team collected mud for the vases. Young notes that: “At every stage of the process everyone would wear dust masks, gloves, goggles and protective suits when handling the material, and any waste has been disposed of via hazardous material routes” (Howarth 2015). He continues: “An entire city is built beside this toxic lake in Inner Mongolia yet for us to be safe when handling this material and get past the museum’s health and

220  Sabine LeBel safety team we all needed full body protection” (Howarth 2015). Scientists with Greenpeace China tested samples of the mud and found metals toxic to humans, including cadmium, mercury, lead, arsenic and chromium, and that the tailings were three times higher than background radiation. Images of sculptor Kevin Callaghan show him working at a potter’s wheel wearing protective gloves and mask. Although the toxic mud is created by human activity, it continues to act on the land and its creatures, whether or not humans take further action. The precautionary steps taken by the team are a clear indication of human action provoked by the vitality of this material. Similarly, the Rare Earthenware vases require humans to wear protective clothing and special protective cases to be moved and displayed. The vases themselves can be understood as quasi-agents in a number of ways. At the level of materials, they behave in similar ways to toxic waste, and thus act on their surroundings, living and otherwise. Young notes: Once they have left the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition we like the idea that the vase might sit in the home next to someone’s smartphone, the latest gadget sitting next to its shadow … It is interesting to have this danger ever-present in our lives. If we choose to live with the technology then we must be ready to live with its consequences. (quoted in Howarth 2015) The project draws attention to the fact that our technologies are always already acting as quasi-agents at the level of their materials. Even as they are functional and important tools, they are toxic waste. They emit radiation. They contain dangerous chemicals. They exist in and give rise to unpredictable temporalities. Rare Earthenware plays an unusual role in global commodity chains, as it reverses many temporal and economic circulations, including that of waste, of technology and of “high art” objects. The rare earth mines of Inner Mongolia where the mud was gathered to create the vases represent the location where cell phones, laptops and car batteries begin. They remind us of the centrality of mining, especially rare earth minerals, in the creation of electronics. The project also works to reframe understandings of waste related to electronics that typically focus on post-consumer e-waste and ignore industrial waste, especially the vast amounts of waste created through mining processes that actively harm workers and ecosystems. It connects the viewer to the larger infrastructures and institutions of consumerism, industrialism and waste. It renders visible the contradictory, irreconcilable temporal relations of waste, especially those connected to modern lifestyles, consumer fads, planned obsolescence and the persistence of components and chemicals that will take generations to break down and, indeed, may never fully disappear. In addition, as art objects, the Rare Earthenware vases disrupt many typical circulations of global capitalism. They bring toxic chemicals that typically come into direct contact only with

Toxic transmogrification  221 factory, mining, recycling and waste workers into the spaces of the world’s elite, including art galleries and private homes. The global division of labour means that it is typically racialised people in poor countries who are on the front lines of toxic exposure in their workplaces. The vases bring into stark relief the environmental consequences of our technologies. In sum, the vases bring toxicity back into the global economy, but not as part of the troubling global trade in toxic waste or by remediating materials and re-inserting them as commodities into global supply chains. As Bennett (2010, ix) notes: [M]y hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption … The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption. The vases circulate as art, which has particular modes of production and consumption that are quite different from those of consumer electronics. Thinking through the ways toxicity in art might animate differently than toxicity in electronics is crucial for understanding the intervention the Rare Earthenware vases make. One of the important aspects in establishing value for an artwork is proving its provenance, by verifying past owners via galleries, museums and auction houses. The vases ask what the provenance of toxic waste could possibly be. In trying to answer this question, the spectre of low-paid workers, their environment and damage to their health and ecosystems is brought into the space of the gallery, a space typically populated with the wealthy or those less likely to work directly in the extraction of those rare earth minerals that can be found in the devices that gallery visitors carry in their pockets. Any attempt to seriously answer the question of what the provenance of toxic waste could be must consider the complete disregard for the health and well-being of future generations of humans and nonhumans alike that this material embodies. Simply put, the vases reconfigure the provenance of art. The vases bring toxicity into the specific temporal economies of both consumer culture and high art, which in the case of Ming vases stretch back centuries. They disrupt the rarefied spaces of Chinese porcelain collecting. The vases continue the tradition of junk art in provoking a reconsideration of what counts as art and what belongs in an art gallery. The vases do more than simply represent devastating images of post-consumer e-waste. They literally bring pre-consumer, industrial waste into the gallery. The Rare Earthenware vases embody toxicity. In so doing, they force a different type of action or reckoning in all the spaces they come to occupy. They embody

222  Sabine LeBel the long-term toxicity of waste, which is in direct contrast with the increasingly short lifespans of high-tech gadgets. Art aims to provoke. In some ways, the function of art can be said to produce an emotional or intellectual response in the viewer: disgust, awe, sadness or nostalgia. The Rare Earthenware vases have this function. They bring to junk art new renderings of what art is or can be, namely that it can include material produced in all aspects of a product’s life cycle, from resource extraction to disposal. However, they also embody toxicity and have the potential to act on the unprotected viewer physically. Their toxicity provokes at the cellular level. This toxicity will endure and provoke action in every space they are exhibited. Crucially, they bring this provocation out of the inaccessible places toxic waste is usually found and into the spaces of the gallery.

Note 1 Thank you to Emily Veysey, student and potter at the University of New Brunswick Fredericton, for bringing this project to my attention.

References Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bordo, Jonathan. 2006. “The Wasteland: An Essay on Manufactured Landscapes.” Material Culture Review 63: 89–95. Broinowski, Adam. 2010. “TS2: Art Intercepting Waste.” Art Monthly Australia 227 (March): 39–40. Bullard, Robert D. 2018. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. London: Taylor and Francis. Cammaer, Gerda. 2009. “Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Creating Moving Still Images and Stilling Moving Images of Ecological Disasters.” Environmental Communications 3 (1): 121–30. Finlay, Robert. 1998. “The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History.” Journal of World History 9 (2): 141–87. Gille, Zsuzsa. 2007. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Hawkins, Gay. 2006. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Howarth, Dan. 2015. “Radioactive Vases are made from Toxic Smartphone Waste.” De zeen, 28 April 2015. www.dezeen.com/2015/04/28/radioactive-mingvases-toxic-smartphone-waste-mud-unknown-fields-division-kevin-callaghan/. LeBel, Sabine. 2015. “Notes on Cool: The Temporal Politics of Friendly Monsters and the E-Waste Aesthetic.” NANO: North American Notes Online. https://nanocrit. com/issues/issue7/notes-cool-temporal-politics-friendly-monsters-and-e-wasteaesthetic. LeBel, Sabine. 2016. “Fast Machines, Slow Violence: ICTs, Planned Obsolescence, and E-Waste.” Globalizations 13 (3): 300–9. https://doi.org10.1080/14747731.2015.1056492.

Toxic transmogrification  223 Lepawsky, Josh. 2018. Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. MacBride, Samantha. 2012. Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Minter, Adam. 2019. “Adam Minter: In the Flow of Things.” Discard Studies: Social Studies of Waste, Pollution & Externalities. 5 June. https://discardstudies.com/ 2019/05/06/adam-minter-how-things-flow/. Pierson, Stacey. 2012. “The Movement of Chinese Ceramics: Appropriation in Global History.” Journal of World History 23 (1): 9–39. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Smith, Toby. 2015. “Rare Earthenware-Full Film.” Video file. https://vimeo. com/124621603. Unknown Fields. n.d.(a). www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/. Unknown Fields. n.d.(b). SUMMER 2014_A WORLD ADRIFT Part 02 _China. www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/summer2014china-aworldadriftpart02.html. Unknown Fields, Kate Davies and Liam Young. 2016. Tales from the Dark Side of the City: A World Adrift. London: Architectural Association Publications. Vergine, Lea. 2007. When Trash Becomes Art: TRASH Rubbish Mongo. Milano: Skira. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury. WEEE Man. n.d. “About the WEEE Man.” www.weeeman.org/html/impact/about. html. Whiteley, Gillian. 2011. Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash. New York: I.B. Tauris. Young, Liam and Kate Davies. 2013. “A Distributed Ground: The Unknown Fields Division.” In System City: Infrastructure and the Space of Flows, edited by Michael Weinstock. Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, 38–45.

15 Crunch time Temporalities of scrap metal collection Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby

Introduction The presence of metals in backyards, alleys and industrial sites is ubiquitous across North American cities, especially in post-industrial urban centres. To some, this metal is waste to be forgotten and placed out of sight. To others, it is the basis of scrounging to survive and a lucrative quasi-trade. Scrap metal refers to discarded pieces of metal, and its collection is connected to an overlooked form of economic and social activity in post-industrial cities. Metal collection involves locating quantities of copper, brass, steel and more to sell to scrap yards that pay varying amounts per pound. One way to think about scrap metal collecting is to use a spatial lens: scrap metal is associated with dirty, downtrodden spaces such as alleys, vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites. Scraps yards too are associated with the dirty and the polluted, since they are literally mass collections of scrap metal that when processed emit tiny polluting particles into the soil and lungs of urban dwellers. Scrap yards are relegated to marginal urban spaces through municipal zoning and licencing regimes aimed at containing their socially and environmentally noxious activities. As part of our qualitative research into scrap metal collection and processing in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, we have moved through these spaces and examined the boundaries of polluted space associated with scrap. However, if one simply focused on the objects (the metal) or the spaces (the alleys, the yards) one would miss a significant dimension of scrap metal work: the temporalities of metal scrapping. In this chapter, we contend that the temporalities of scrap metal collection extend beyond the routines and rhythms of the work itself. These routines and rhythms intersect with cycles, schedules, seasons and nostalgic urban traces in multiple ways. Based on interviews with scrap metal collectors and buyers in a major Canadian city, and observations of scrap metal work, we reflect on the temporalities of scrap metal collection. Significant stretches of time are required to drive, cycle or walk around to accumulate metal. The sheer amount of time a scrapper devotes to collecting metal determines the level of income that can be generated by the activity. We

Crunch time  225 argue that the temporalities of metal collection vary by urban location and the socio-economic status of collector. For those who are precariously housed or homeless (who themselves may feel treated like human waste), the temporality of their work is influenced by police regulation and a sense of liminality. For middle-class collectors, their work temporality is conditioned by other urban schedules and flows of discarded materials. We also show that these micro times and spaces of metal collection are connected to macro industrial schedules and circuits of global capital, metal recycling, processing and production in sometimes hidden ways. We draw from literature on the temporalities of work (e.g., Fine 1990) but we connect these ideas to broader flows and disjunctures of time that shape how scrap metal collecting is organised and how that collecting work is experienced. This chapter has four parts. First, we review the literature on temporalities and work to provide analytical context. Second, we offer a note on method. Third, we analyse our findings from qualitative research on metal collecting in Winnipeg. Fourth, we explain what our arguments add to the literature on temporalities, cities and work.

Literature review Metal collecting One way to conceive of metal collecting is as a form of theft. Much of the criminal justice and criminological literature suggests that global commodity prices, deindustrialisation and urban decline have fostered the conditions for increasing rates of metal theft (Sidebottom et al. 2011). Ashby et al. (2017) focus on metal theft and the railway network of Great Britain, arguing that theft is highly organised rather than opportunity-based. Robb and colleagues (2015) focus on metal theft in rail yards. Posick et al. (2012) use opportunity theory to explore metal theft as a kind of criminal activity similar to other crime. Whiteacre, Terheide and Biggs (2015) examine repeat victimisation, place and metal theft. Bennett (2008) calls metal theft the dark side of the global recycling market. Stickle (2017) provides a typology of scrappers based on an ethnography of scrap work, focusing on metal thieves conceived as a distinct subtype within the subculture. There are limits to conceiving metal collection as theft. There are multidisciplinary approaches to examining scrap metal collection and scrounging. Zimring (2005) explores aspects of metal collecting in his examination of municipal recycling. One dimension of scrap metal collection is how scrap metal collectors feel about themselves. Savio (2017) has examined stigma management in dumpster diving in New York City. Ferrell (2006) identified the social, legal and spatially marginal aspects of dumpster diving and scrap metal scrounging in a critique of global hyper-consumption. Müller (2012) found high levels of cooperation and community among urban scroungers. Metal collecting is a topic of interest to urban studies

226  Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby scholars, given that scrapping is a unique form of work generated by the post-industrial city and its ruins. Waste and the urban condition are tethered in ways that cannot be untangled (Millar 2014). Time and temporality Chronological time is something we deeply depend on or rail against depending on context (Neustadter 1992). In metal collecting, as in other work types and social activities, time is counted. Yet there are moments when people lose themselves in the process or stop counting. The way that people understand time is shaped by space and context (Demetry 2013). For example, there can be temporal demands thrust upon workers depending on management or administration. Time and space are interrelated and socially organised. Temporality takes many forms: from timing, frequency, duration, tempo, pacing, rhythm, sequencing, to synchronicity and chronicity. Metal collecting is a sphere of work in which time is socially organised across space and by context. Any analysis of work and workplaces that does not pay attention to time and temporality will be lacking (Maines 1987). Organisational time (Fine 1990) refers to sequences set in motion by workplaces, companies and agencies. Work is temporally structured but not simply in a chronological manner. For instance, workers can develop temporal niches in their ­routines—slices of time carved out of work time allowing some autonomy (Fine 1990, 112). There can also be a temporal overload at points. Moreover, there is a temporal patterning to some work that involves lulls and rushes, while there are occupational temporalities specific to types of work (Larson and Zemke 2003). There are different rhythms that structure the way people move through the city (Cresswell 2010). Local and global economic and social forces shape the rhythm that metal collectors follow. Yet the present and the future are not the only timescapes in the city. Duryea (2014) analyses the temporality of nostalgia, remnants and industrial relics in Pittsburgh. Parts of Pittsburgh hark back to the industrial age and contain abandoned and underused industrial materials and structures. These large-scale industrial developments left behind an abundance of steel and other metals that now form the raw material for new forms of work in the post-industrial city. Winnipeg is marked by industrial remnants and the social dislocation caused by the rise of post-industrial cities. Like Pittsburgh, Winnipeg has pockets that refer back to a time when the city was ethnically and economically divided between the north end, populated primarily by Jewish and Eastern European communities, and the south end, home to predominantly middle- and upperclass Anglo and Northwestern Europeans. These historical traces and temporal echoes are woven into the fabric of the neighbourhoods, streets and alleys that now provide a bounty of raw materials for scrap metal collectors who move with the rhythms and routines of the city across time and space.

Crunch time  227

Note on method We are criminal justice scholars with backgrounds in urban studies, cultural geography and the sociology of interaction. Our research focused on urban scrap metal collecting as an overlooked and undervalued form of work. We interviewed 13 scrap metal collectors and three scrap metal yard managers in Winnipeg, Canada. Recruitment occurred face-to-face as well as through posters and advertisements on Kijiji—a website where users can post free classified advertisements and where there is some communication about scrap availability. We also biked around central Winnipeg where most scrap yards are situated and where scrap metal collection is visible. Interviews were openended to allow respondents to raise issues of interest or concern. Using thematic analysis, temporality emerged as a prominent theme in the data set. We document the rhythms, schedules, seasonal and other temporal dimensions of metal collecting, though these are always in flux. There is a (poly)rhythm to the city (Lefebvre 2004; Smith and ­Hetherington 2013) and to metal collecting too. It is necessary to think about the ethics of research with persons who may feel marginalised. We did not want to impede or interrupt collectors going about their routines during their work. We also did not want to make people feel like they were being followed, although some subsistence scrappers (Stickle 2017) might have mistaken us for police. We handed working scrappers a flyer allowing them to decide when and how to communicate with us. The issue of temporality became acute during recruitment as we could observe the sense of “crunch time” that scrappers must obviously feel. Time is money (quite literally) for scrap metal collectors and it was costly to take time out of their busy days to speak with us. Even half an hour spent talking to researchers meant that much less scrap metal could be hauled to the scrap yard. Below we explore five aspects of temporality that emerged in our work: seasonality, weekly rhythms, daily rhythms, urban nostalgia and the immediacy of consumer culture. Note that these temporal dimensions often intersected and overlapped in scrappers’ stories. In distinguishing five aspects of temporality, we impose a conceptual order on the data that was often more complex in reality. For example, in a single anecdote, a participant might invoke multiple temporal dimensions or scales. While we have selected examples from our data to illustrate these five temporal dimensions, we acknowledge the overall complexity of time in these narratives. Multiple temporalities structure the work lives of our participants and this could often be seen as they described their activities to us in detail. We discuss some of these temporal convergences and intersections in our analysis below.

Analysis The first temporal dimension of scrap metal collection is seasonality. The broad seasonal variability of metal collecting in Winnipeg, with its long,

228  Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby harsh winters, is a defining feature of scrap metal collecting. Yard owners/ managers told us that spring was by far the busiest time because after a long winter, many casual scrappers emerge from hibernation to clear out garages, yards and basements in a spring-cleaning ritual. Business at the scrap yards slows down in late summer and fall and becomes very slow in the depths of winter. Only the most dedicated, professional or perhaps desperate scrappers work consistently through the winter where temperatures can plunge as low as -40 degrees Celsius. While January is typically the coldest month of the year and the slowest at the scrap yards, the period between November and March can also experience lengthy stretches of double-digit below-zero temperatures. From November to March a thick blanket of snow buries Winnipeg and its junk, secreting away these treasures until the spring thaw. One subsistence scrap collector explained another reason for avoiding winter collecting: it is difficult to push a shopping cart in the snow. For those who collect scrap metal as a sole means of income, the seasons certainly condition their ability to collect scrap but do not prevent them from doing so altogether. We have observed winter scrappers pulling sleds through the snow. While some scrappers we spoke with rode bikes all winter, others expressed trepidation at the prospect of scrounging for metal in the colder months: “I dare say it be pretty frigid in this province (laughs). Fifteen years here and I am still getting used to it.” One part-time scrapper said he collected more in summer and would pick up extra hours at his other job in the fall/winter. During the short summer season, he described how his time could be fully committed to collecting metal. Our conversation with him revealed much about the convergence of temporal dimensions in scrap collecting. While talking about ­seasonality, he seamlessly shifted to the other temporalities that undergird his scrapping activities. He described the need to constantly monitor Kijiji ads otherwise he might miss out on items listed in the “Free Stuff” category. Time committed to scrapping can also refer to the minutes spent searching for information online, not just the hours spent scrounging in alleys. He also talked about stockpiling items on the weekend because only two yards are open limited hours on Saturdays, while none operated on Sunday. Consequently, metal would pile up in his yard over the weekend, necessitating several trips on Monday to catch up. Not only is collecting temporally organised but buying and selling at the scrap yard is as well. This scrapper’s narrative simultaneously collapsed seasonal, weekly and moment-to-moment temporal scales, illustrating the complexity of temporalities that converge and structure scrap metal collecting. These rhythms are not all standardised. Rhythms depend on space, resources, seasons and the other forms of work people are engaged in (Lin 2012). One scrapper who collects aluminium cans for extra money described how collecting was limited temporally to his regular daily work commute, but was a source of motivation to keep to his cycling routine,

Crunch time  229 particularly during inclement weather: “It motivates me … if it’s a rainy day … there’s money I could’ve picked up or something! So, I cycle.” A scrap yard manager described multiple intersecting flows of time noting that these are conditioned by socio-economic conditions and resource availability: there’s absolutely a seasonal flow, there’s a daily flow, a time of day flow. So, you need time to collect the scrap, then you bring it in, and then you want to get out as quick as possible so you can go back and get another run in … we have people who are here multiple times a day … we have people who are retired or who aren’t working for whatever reason … or who are doing this on the side to supplement their income—so it’s like a second job … they’ll come at specific times of the day. And you know before work starts, on their lunch break, after work is done. Seasonal collecting habits and timelines culminate in a bottleneck at the scrap yard at certain times, especially during the hot summer months of July and August when the frenzy of spring scrapping gives way to a large glut of materials for scrap dealers to process over the colder winter months: “And we expect it often in the winter, right? Things slow down because it’s hidden! So you forget that you’ve got stuff and you don’t want to go outside and dig through the snow.” The seasonal crunch of spring/summer is also felt by yard workers when there are long lines of sellers bringing in metal in trucks, carts, and by hand. These are just a few of the ways that metal collecting in Winnipeg is organised around seasonal rhythms. Scrapping is shaped by the city’s harsh winter climate yet does not stop when the mercury plunges below zero and the snow piles up. Instead, collectors and dealers described various ways that the flow of work and commodities shifts, slows down or changes but, ultimately, the resilience of scrap metal workers to adapt to these broad seasonal shifts displays equal parts ingenuity and tenacity in the face of adverse conditions. These seasonal shifts intersect with other temporal layers that in combination shape the lives of scrap metal collectors and buyers in important ways. A second temporal layer of scrapping plays out at weekly, bi-weekly and monthly intervals. First, the weekly cycle of garbage and recycling pickup in Winnipeg sets the pace for many subsistence scrappers. In Steven’s area of the city, Friday is garbage day, and most people put out their recycling carts on Thursday night. Overnight, or very early in the morning on Friday scroungers can be observed, often pushing shopping carts, rooting through the recycling bins before the trucks arrive. Knowing the timing of waste collection sets the rhythm for many smaller scale scroungers and scrappers. Second, yard managers and owners told us that Mondays and sometimes even Tuesdays are huge days, particularly in spring/summer because of a

230  Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby backlog from the weekend. As noted, no yards are open on Sunday and only a few on Saturday (for limited hours, often just in the warm months). So, there is a cyclical uptick in business on Mondays. Third, one scrapper described a cyclical weekly rhythm whereby Sunday mornings following a busy Saturday night could yield more liquor bottles and cans, particularly in areas near drinking establishments or sites of sporting events. Consequently, metal collectors have to know the weekly schedules and routines of others to decipher when scrap will appear on the urban landscape. One participant pointed out that the discarded metal items that can be found following a busy Friday or Saturday night need not be limited to liquor containers: All that stuff ends up in the back lane there and I go pick it up. Patio furniture or anything metal essentially. So that kind of stuff I find happens a lot more on the weekends, so Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the best days for collection. Much of the scrappers’ social action is also future-oriented (Flaherty and Fine 2001). Some scrappers anticipate upcoming monthly events or days and plan their scrapping activities around those. For example, one scrapper noted: “The best time is at the end of the month because people get evicted and people move, and they throw away what they don’t need.” Additionally, there is a monthly rhythm generated by the timing of government transfer payments. Government pensions, social assistance and employment insurance are paid monthly or bi-weekly, creating a predictable cycle of feast and famine. As funds run low, more time might be spent supplementing income in the informal economy. A study by Kohm (2007) revealed that the timing of government transfer payments was correlated with an uptick in police calls for service. Additionally, recipients of government transfers described a number of ways their lives were structured by the cyclical nature of these payments. This may form yet another monthly rhythm for subsistence scrappers. While some scrappers plan their work flow based on the cyclical nature of activity, others described how much of their work unfolded in temporally unpredictable ways. In essence, they describe an element of chance or luck to finding scrap metal. Scrappers describe being at the right place at the right time or seeing an ad at the right time and making a call before anyone else does. However, even chance can be socially structured, and timing often intersects with resources and opportunities. Some scrappers have an inside track to avoid “the crunch” due to availability of surplus metal at work sites associated with their other jobs. For example, one male scrapper also worked as an electrician and used the job to collect valuable metal: “if I am working or wiring things up I will keep a box beside me. Two boxes: a garbage box and a scrap box. I can sort it as I work and bring it home at the end of the day.”

Crunch time  231 If one does not know the urban rhythms, one could lose time. Knowing these schedules ensures that scrappers do not waste time or resources searching for scrap when it is not likely to be out there. Metal collectors have to judge what is “wasted time” (Lin 2012, 2479) in a routine versus what is time well spent to obtain metal. One part-time scrapper described planning his route using a sort of time-space mental map of hotspots for collecting cans after regular events, like football games, concerts and social events where alcohol is served. As well, he tracked other spots that are “just notorious for being littered ’cos people sit there.” In these ways, the regular weekly and monthly cycles that undergird urban life work to direct the rhythms of scrap metal collectors. Routines are shaped by an urban or neighbourhood rhythm (Mulíček, Osman and Seidenglanz 2015; Valverde 2015). Metal collectors navigate these urban timescapes: knowing when the monthly recycling and garbage day is scheduled in a particular area is important, as is knowing that certain times of the week or the month are likely to yield more valuable discarded items. However, there are limits to knowing the weekly or monthly routine in a given area because chance plays an important role for many scrappers. A third temporal layer unfolds in a daily, almost hourly fashion. Scrappers are working against the clock to get as many loads to the scrap yard as possible during business hours. Time is quite literally money. Consequently, it was hard to get people to stop and talk to us because it was more lucrative to spend that time hauling loads. In Kevin’s area of the city, closer to many homeless shelters, some scroungers have a daily routine of checking bins in the neighbourhood that is practically followed down to the minute day after day. These scroungers are always in motion and always on the clock. A yard manager declared that it does not take any particular skill to collect scrap, but it does take considerable time. Scrap metal collectors must be attuned to the timescapes of multiple neighbourhoods and urban areas and be ready when metal is available at various times of the day: G: 

It’s usually the afternoon. Because that’s when … G:  Collect during the morning, get enough and before closing time we go cash in. L:  And in the mornings we go to the apartment block when somebody gets evicted, they give them time to bring all their stuff down. L: And then you just stick around there (inaudible), there’s a couple [at] Manitoba Housing that we know, the maintenance guys. L:  They see us, you know. What’s in my treasure chest today? Just wait, he says, I got more to bring up. L:  You see (laughs) they give us the info … L: 

232  Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby Some temporalities are more collectively experienced (Borer 2010). In the above quote a married couple is finishing one another’s sentences as they recount how they receive information from building managers. This allows them to schedule a visit to the site to retrieve the scrap metal that is available. These scrappers are integrated into a network or community of people who are aware of the necessity of scrap metal for economic survival and will share tips about where and, more importantly, when, to collect. A fourth temporal layer pertains to the historical development of the city itself. Most scrap yards are found in the oldest, central districts. Zoning and separation of land uses were ideas that took root after many older city districts were established. Older neighbourhoods of Winnipeg mixed heavy industry with (low-income) residential development prior to exclusionary zoning in the post-war period. The timing of urban development itself structures scrapping and scrap yards in two ways. First, most yards are found in the oldest districts mixed with residential and commercial land uses, and second, the raw materials for these yards comes to a great degree from older, blighted areas of the city that have experienced decline and decay. Deindustrialisation, abandonment of buildings and demolition provide sources of scrap metal in older districts of the city, while newer suburban areas generate less material and have fewer places to sell scrap. All of this links back to the history of urban development over time and space in Winnipeg. Related to the history of the city’s development are personal family histories connected through generations by the shared activity of buying and selling scrap metal. This yearning for prior temporalities was expressed by one of the yard managers at a “mom-and-pop” scrap business. The female owner described the long history of their family business which is located in a central district alongside a mix of residential and lower income housing: my great grandfather started with a truck during World War I—my grandfather wanted to go to med school and was told he wouldn’t be able to support his family and was forced into the [scrap] business. They made decent money in World War I and the twenties were roaring until the collapse—at which point my grandparents and their two, almost three, children had to move in with friends of theirs and share an apartment because they were wiped out … and then the war came! And my great grandfather and grandfather regained their footing—my great grandfather retired, my parents got married, he gave my dad three years to figure out how he was going to support my mom, and he’d said, “You’re useless, come in the business with me.” Retired about thirteen years later so Dad was on his own—and Dad was on his own for about eleven years, and then [Anon] and I got engaged … and he brought [Anon] into the business! And that’s where we are thirtyfive years later.

Crunch time  233 The intergenerational character of the business also extended to the employees and some customers who described memories of family members who worked or sold metal at this particular scrap yard over the years. There are multiple pasts, presents and futures of urban neighbourhoods and communities (Bastian 2014). The operation of the metal yard intersects with nostalgia for earlier memories and materialities of family and community. But there is a broader sense in which families are linked as the scrap yard manager keeps track of who is connected and their roots in the neighbourhood. As Duryea (2014) notes, post-industrial cities are marked not only by the wreckage of mechanical ruins, but also by memories of a time gone by, of familial and community connection that people may cling to as a way of making meaning in their lives. Last, there is the temporality of consumption, fashion and the useful life of consumer goods. This layer can be found scattered throughout other temporal layers described by respondents. Many items are discarded not because they are useless, but because they become obsolete and unfashionable, or a newer gadget is marketed as the latest “must have.” Who has not discarded an appliance for one that is shinier or more effective in some way? This temporality of consumption determines which objects end up in alleys awaiting collection by those we interviewed. The sheer amount of scrap generated is dependent upon an ever-increasing rate of consumption, and a steadily decreasing life expectancy for most consumer products. One scrapper summed up this process: “Oh I need a new barbeque or I need a new fire pit. Let’s get rid of this old piece of junk!” It is often said that poorly designed and short-lived products today create a “throwaway” culture. The temporality of consumer goods and consumption is an overarching theme that influences the volume and flow of waste in the urban environment. Metal scrappers scouring the city for these remnants of planned obsolescence collect discarded consumer goods that have become wasted objects. The functional life of most consumer products is becoming shorter and this will consequently feed into a faster cycle of consumption, use and obsolescence. This in turn feeds into the unending cycle of scrap metal collection, buying and selling and shipment to industrialscale recyclers who furnish raw materials for the next generation of ­consumer goods. The temporality of the product lifecycle thus operates invisibly in the background of urban scrap metal scrounging, yet its influence on the lives of scrappers is profound.

Conclusion Most people pay no mind to the pounds of metal they discard each year. Indeed, our world has been characterised as a society of waste (O’Brien 2012), a society in which the discarding of objects treated as rubbish is ­creating social and ecological crises. Metal collectors see value in these discarded items, and they organise their days and weeks around urban ­

234  Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby r­ outines designed to seek out and obtain metal. Scrap metal yards are bustling places of work and commerce that play an important role in linking the local and global economy. In this chapter, we have revealed the temporalities of the understudied urban phenomenon of scrap metal collection. These are temporalities that span the individual, organisational, social and global realms. Metal collecting work is subject to pressures emanating from conditions in back alleys and from global flows and prices of commodities. The pressure from ­multiple temporal scales creates the feeling of “crunch time” for metal collectors and yard managers alike. Conceptually, we have argued that a multidisciplinary approach is needed to make sense of the multi-dimensional phenomenon of temporality in urban metal collection. The (poly)rhythms of the city (Smith and Hetherington 2013) are navigated by metal collectors in ways that are hidden, nuanced and reflective of the complexity of the city itself and its myriad forms of waste.

References Ashby, Matthew P., Kate J. Bowers, Hervé Borrion and Taku Fujiyama. 2017. “The When and Where of an Emerging Crime Type: The Example of Metal Theft from the Railway Network of Great Britain.” Security Journal 30 (1): 1–23. https://doi. org/10.1057/sj.2014.43. Bastian, Michelle. 2014. “Time and Community: A Scoping Study.” Time & Society 23 (2): 137–66. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0961463X14527999. Bennett, Luke. 2008. “Assets Under Attack: Metal Theft, the Built Environment and the Dark Side of the Global Recycling Market.” Environmental Law and Management 20: 176–83. Borer, Michael Ian. 2010. “From Collective Memory to Collective Imagination: Time, Place, and Urban Redevelopment.” Symbolic Interaction 33 (1): 96–114. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2010.33.1.96. Cresswell, Tim. 2010. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (1): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fd11407. Demetry, Daphne. 2013. “Regimes of Meaning: The Intersection of Space and Time in Kitchen Cultures.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 42 (5): 576–607. Duryea, Scott N. 2014. “Holding on to Steel: Pittsburgh Culture in the Age of Globalization.” Globalizations 11 (6): 767–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2014.916554. Ferrell, Jeff. 2006. Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging. New York: NYU Press. Fine, Gary A. 1990. “Organizational Time: Temporal Demands and the Experience of Work in Restaurant Kitchens.” Social Forces 69 (1): 95–114. www.jstor.org/ stable/2579609. Flaherty, Michael G. and Gary A. Fine. 2001. “Present, Past, and Future: Conjugating George Herbert Mead’s Perspective on Time.” Time & Society 10 (2–3): 147–61. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0961463X01010002001. Kohm, Steven. 2007. Routine Activities, Opportunity and Crime in the Inner City: Investigating the Link Between Monthly Income Assistance Payments and Crime in Winnipeg. Winnipeg Inner City Research Alliance.

Crunch time  235 Larson, Elizabeth A. and Ruth Zemke. 2003. “Shaping the Temporal Patterns of our Lives: The Social Coordination of Occupation.” Journal of Occupational Science 10 (2): 80–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2003.9686514. Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Edinburgh: A&C Black. Lin, Weiqiang. 2012. “Wasting Time? The Differentiation of Travel Time in Urban Transport.” Environment and Planning A 44 (10): 2477–92. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4525. Maines, David R. 1987. “The Significance of Temporality for the Development of Sociological Theory.” The Sociological Quarterly 28 (3): 303–11. www.jstor.org/ stable/4120644. Millar, Kathleen M. 2014. “The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 29 (1): 32–53. https://doi. org/10.14506/ca29.1.04. Müller, Thaddeus. 2012. “The Empire of Scrounge Meets the Warm City: Danger, Civility, Cooperation and Community among Strangers in the Urban Public World.” Critical Criminology 20 (4): 447–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-012-9160-5. Mulíček, Ondřej, Robert Osman and Daniel Seidenglanz. 2015. “Urban Rhythms: A Chronotopic Approach to Urban Timespace.” Time & Society 24 (3): 304–25. Neustadter, Roger. 1992. “Beat the Clock: The Mid-20th-Century Protest against the Reification of Time.” Time & Society 1 (3): 379–98. O’Brien, Martin. 2012. A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the Rubbish Society. London: Routledge. Posick, Chad, Michael Rocque, Kevin Whiteacre and David Mazeika. 2012. “Examining Metal Theft in Context: An Opportunity Theory Approach.” Justice Research and Policy 14 (2): 79–102. https://doi.org/10.3818%2FJRP.14.2.2012.79. Robb, Paul, Timothy Coupe and Barak Ariel. 2015. “ ‘Solvability’ and Detection of Metal Theft on Railway Property.” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 21 (4): 463–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-014-9253-7. Savio, Gianmarco. 2017. “Organization and Stigma Management: A Comparative Study of Dumpster Divers in New York.” Sociological Perspectives 60 (2): 416–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121416632012. Sidebottom, Aiden, Jyoti Belur, Kate Bowers, Lisa Tompson and Shane D. Johnson. 2011. “Theft in Price-Volatile Markets: On the Relationship Between Copper Price and Copper Theft.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 48 (3): 396–418. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427810393021. Smith, Robin J. and Kevin Hetherington. 2013. “Urban Rhythms: Mobilities, Space and Interaction in the Contemporary City.” The Sociological Review 61 (1): 4–16. Stickle, Benjamin. 2017. Metal Scrappers and Thieves: Scavenging for Survival and Profit. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. Valverde, Mariana. 2015. Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Whiteacre, Kevin, Donald Terheide and Bruce Biggs. 2015. “Metal Theft and Repeat Victimization.” Crime Prevention and Community Safety 17 (3): 139–55. Zimring, Carl A. 2005. Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Part VI

Revivals and returns

16 New temporalities of everyday life in Australian suburbia Cultural and material economies of hard rubbish reuse Tania Lewis, Rowan Wilken and Frédéric Rauturier Introduction This chapter examines new temporalities associated with householders who actively share and reuse items placed by their neighbours on the kerbside, items conventionally understood as forms of hard rubbish or hard waste (appliances, furniture, crockery, books, e-waste of all kinds, sometimes clothing and soft furnishings, children’s toys, etc.). We are interested in the ways in which such practices challenge certain norms, particularly marked in late-capitalist societies, around disposability and convenience. As we show, hard rubbish gleaners attempt to set up new practices that rely on a different kind of cultural logic of waste, one in which a range of approaches to the temporal—personal, familial, ethical and ecological—is evident. Sociologist of time Barbara Adam (2000) contends that “Temporality denotes the time in things, events and processes which is unidirectional and irreversible: we grow older rather than younger; cars rust; growth is followed by decay” (136, emphasis in original). Temporality, as it is understood here, seems to mean linearity. But in the contemporary era, this linear model is being challenged by a range of other temporal logics. As Head et al. (2016) put it: the Anthropocene appears to be a place and time of spatial and temporal ‘crossfire’ where past and future, local and global are mobilised and come together to create new entanglements which are characterised by uncertainty, loss of control and risk. (4) This post-teleological era, while challenging, is also, as John Urry has argued, a space of new possibilities, especially for the construction of personalised temporalities. Two temporal forms are key here: (1) what Urry terms “glacial” time, an immensely long temporality tied to environmental issues, and (2) the “instantaneous” time of the “throwaway society” (Urry 1994). Household waste reuse can be seen, in part, as a response to

240  Tania Lewis et al. the former and a reaction against the latter. In this chapter, however, we show that “global gleaning” practices evidence a range of temporal frames (Lewis and Rauturier 2019), marking a broad investment in a new ethics of temporality. This ethics incorporates and negotiates everything from circular conceptions of commodity life cycles through to slow, labourintensive, trans-generational and anti-consumerist approaches to material objects. This chapter discusses the findings of video-based ethnographic research undertaken with households in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, with a focus on the role of different temporal frames in shaping people’s relationships and practices with things. Drawing on a variety of conceptual approaches for understanding household gleaning, we detail how these new temporalities pose alternatives to normative frameworks of convenience and disposability while navigating significant challenges in the context of advanced consumer capitalism.

Temporal norms of convenience and disposability A key way in which household gleaners in our study talked about their practices was as a challenge to consumption and disposability practices as usual. As social practice theorist Elizabeth Shove argues in her book Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience (2003), today in much of the Global North our everyday lives are organised to support ways of living and consuming in which a high level of bodily comfort (air-conditioned and heated cars, homes and offices), cleanliness (daily showering) and absolute convenience (privatised transport; access to trans-seasonal foods) has become ­normalised. Convenience culture also involves quick and easy access to commodities—from the latest whitegoods to the new season’s furnishings— and the ability to relatively easily dispose of such items due to advanced systems and technologies of waste management and household kerbside waste collection. As such, convenience goes hand in hand with a logic of disposability. While historically disposability has been associated with American consumerism, countries around the globe have shifted towards normalising “throwaway” commodities such as bottled water. In our study, households often (guiltily) referenced Ikea as a site of quick and dirty purchasing of what they saw as disposable forms of cheap furniture. Critical scholars of waste such as Gregson, Metcalfe and Crewe (2007) have rightly critiqued the lack of nuance in the concept of the throwaway society, pointing to how disposal is linked in complex ways to questions of familial care and love. Another point to make is that there are also diverse infrastructures and practices around the world in relation to waste and reuse (Lewis and Rauturier 2019). For example, alongside infrastructures of consumption and disposability, much of the Global South also operates with informal circular economies of reuse and repair while in many European countries

Hard rubbish reuse in Australian suburbia  241 neighbourhood shops offer clothing and shoe repairs. The latter services arguably support the survival of a post-war mend-and-make-do ethos, one that for some portions of the population has taken on new life under conditions of European austerity. While recognising these points of cultural difference, however, our argument is that, under forms of globalising late liberalism and associated pressures and norms of labour and lifestyle, “fast” temporalities associated with high product purchasing and turnover have nevertheless increasingly become hegemonic. Here a key aspect of throwaway culture is the design of short-term use and disposal into the techno-materiality of commodities themselves. Builtin obsolescence drives consumers to keep up with the latest version of “smart” fridges and phones. Furniture likewise is no longer built for a lifetime (or more) of use but is constructed at lower cost and according to prevailing design fashions. Children’s toys are a somewhat special category here; often made of plastic, they are easily broken but can be worryingly long-lasting for households trying to consume sustainably. Durable or not, toys associated with media franchises often become quickly dated, replaced again by the latest version. Here, we are reminded of another key dimension of the temporality of throwaway culture: its connection to cycles of fashion, with furniture and increasingly white goods designed and marketed according to seasonally changing styles.

The emergence of new temporalities In our study we found that householders were often conducting reuse practices that involved developing and enacting new and diverse temporalities, speeds of living that ran counter to the convenience culture that tends to be culturally normative across much of Australian urban and suburban society (exceptions here might include isolated rural communities such as remote Indigenous communities). As we discuss below, these varied temporal ways of living range across slow and labour-intensive approaches to domestic lifestyles as well as trans-generationalism—that is, inherited temporalities that privilege thrifty approaches to material objects and to living more broadly. We theorise and conceptualise these domestic temporal tactics in a range of ways but here we want to briefly discuss Anthony Giddens’s influential argument about temporality in late modern society. As noted above, we live in a time of speed, risk and insecurity; there is a sense that the global is a space of rapid change while our future imaginary is one of accelerated transformation (Head et al. 2016). Social commentators such as Ulrich Beck (2009) paint a picture of widespread uncertainty in which no one can project themselves confidently into the future. This post-teleological era could be read in apocalyptic terms but this open-ended multiplicity also suggests new possibilities (Urry 1994). As part of his broader influential (though much debated) arguments about post-traditional identity, Giddens (1991) argues

242  Tania Lewis et al. that the official time of modernity and its systems and structures is gradually giving way to intimate temporalities. Generated by individuals themselves, these temporalities involve “life-calendars” focused around non-work or “leisure” identities. Everyday forms of trust and commitment become increasingly less articulated to conventional institutions and discourses organised around clocks and calendars, and more to how individuals (and we would suggest also households and late-modern communities) create their own subjective time (Giddens 1991). Aside from paid labour, a key aspect of the temporal commitment of (particularly middle-class) individuals, households and communities is to the “work” of living. As we will see, with environmentally conscious and thrift-oriented households, this commitment can be a very significant one, one bound to specific kinds of what Giddens (1991, chap. 7) has described as “life politics” or a politics of lifestyle choice. Another key body of work we draw on concerns the temporalities and “lives” of the hard rubbish objects themselves. Here we are influenced by anthropological work focused on material studies (Appadurai 1986, in particular) but also by new materialism where “things” are seen not just as carriers of symbolic value and/or mediators of social relations but, drawing upon Actor Network Theory and work on social practices (Shove, Trentmann and Wilk 2009), as agents in and of themselves, participants in the ­“collective organization of practices” (Hargreaves 2011, 79).

Changing times: hard rubbish households After approaching Moreland City Council, a local government area representing a large swathe of Melbourne’s northern suburbs, we were granted permission to undertake a year-long qualitative study of the recycling and reuse of kerbside hard rubbish within households in Moreland. Council had identified problems of increased operating costs associated with organised scavenging for economic gain and were interested in gaining a better understanding of the practices and motivations of gleaners. In her surveys of Melbourne households, geographer Ruth Lane had found that 35–40 per cent of respondents had gleaned items from hard rubbish for household reuse (Lane 2011; Lane, Horne and Bicknell 2009). Drawing on Lane’s work, we saw a need to further build upon a culturally inflected, ethnographically based understanding of this practice in relation to wider consumption practices, cultural perspectives on commodities and changing meanings and practices around circular and cultural economies and value, notions of household responsibility, “ownership” of waste and environmentalism and concerns around ethical consumption (Lewis and Potter 2011). This level of understanding would help locate the potential “place” and role of gleaning activities, particularly for domestic reuse, within communities and link strategies and policies to manage and enable gleaning to everyday practices and infrastructures.

Hard rubbish reuse in Australian suburbia  243 The core of the study consisted of interviews and video ethnographies with 15 households across Moreland, from inner urban to outer suburban homes. Each interview began with a video-recorded tour of the home, where participants showed us the reused items in their house and garden. The merit of this approach, as noted by Wilken, Arnold and Nansen (2011), is that it provides crucial baseline data on these domestic objects, explaining “something of their origins, purposes, usefulness (or lack thereof), their ‘character,’ their principal users, and their rationale for their location in the home” (5.3). In most households, this tour ended up involving a broader discussion of all of their goods, which were often a blend of hard rubbish “finds,” second-hand purchases and new purchases. Our video-based method was also tied to a politics of visibility—we were interested in documenting and foregrounding the reuse practices of households. This is important insofar as “the bulk of consumption is embedded in relatively inconspicuous routines occasioned by the characteristically mundane socio-technical systems of everyday life” (Shove et al. 2007, 10). Inviting householders to guide us through their domestic space and talk about their domestic practices placed their routines and the assemblage of objects that are part and parcel of these practices at the centre of the research focus. The video process enabled householders to rediscover their own modes of dwelling in place—to “make strange” (Highmore 2002, 12) their everyday domestic habits and their relationship with their objects. Investing time in hard rubbish practices In our project we sought households actively involved in hard rubbish reuse as we were interested in what kinds of households engaged in gleaning, how they went about this practice and what drivers and barriers shaped their reuse practices. While the households we recruited were dominated by middle-class households—dual income/tertiary educated—the participant group also included single and low-income households. In the majority of our household interviews people talked extensively about time: their time-pressured lives, the problems they saw with the fast-paced lives associated with consumer culture and also the amount of time they spent on the hunt for, fixing up and/or learning new skills in order to “repurpose” hard rubbish items. As with many modern-day dual-income families, most of our gleaning households perceive heightened levels of busyness, increasingly hectic daily schedules and an overall time deficit (Brannen 2005; Hochschild 1997; ­Kremer-Sadlik and Paugh 2007; Robinson and Godbey 1999; Southerton 2003). While a significant amount of research suggests that members of dual-income families in affluent countries actually spend more time in leisure activities at home than in any other activity (Broege et al. 2007), people’s perceptions are often that they are time poor. As Darrah’s (2006, 383) ethnographic research with middle-class dual-income families in the U.S.

244  Tania Lewis et al. suggests, families may not necessarily be working longer hours, but they are having to manage complex, busy lives characterised by increasing bids for their attention and by segmented and hectic schedules. In our study, Liz, a 42-year-old “casual” gleaner and member of a twoincome household with children, talked about the fact that she has to put a boundary on her time commitment to reuse practices and be realistic about how much work she can put into cleaning and repurposing found items: I think that’s just having two small kids, and trying to find time in the weekends to do everything. But I like the idea of actually doing more, I like the idea of getting things that need fixing up. But I have my monitor who goes, “No you won’t do it.” While most of our households spoke of considerable time pressures, we found that gleaning households often invest significant amounts of time into hard rubbish, in some cases learning new craft skills in order to repair and repurpose found objects. In Fiona’s case, for instance, a friend told her and her partner that there was a big skip full of material from “some company like Australian Wool Company … and we think they must have mainly made office furnishings … because it was a thicker sort of cloth.” They filled up the car twice, brought home rolls of material, and then Fiona (35) learnt how to sew and made items for her friends and family: I wasn’t a big sewer, but when I saw all this material, I thought, “I’m going to learn to sew,” because I knew I had friends with sewing machines, and I had a mum with a sewing machine. Here we see a shift towards temporal biographies in which people are making an ethical choice to invest in particular modes of temporality. That is, in contrast to the sped-up world of consumerism with its associated culture of easy disposability, householders like Fiona and her Swedish vegetarian partner Frank have adopted a consciously slower type of living. While Fiona’s sewing could be seen as a kind of “serious leisure,” in the context of their broader household practices we would suggest this investment of time also indicates a form of ethical or lifestyle politics. Fiona and Frank have chosen to store this found fabric so that they can give it to any neighbourhoods or friends who may need it in future; their temporal investment represents a sense of waste stewardship and civic responsibility. While Fiona and Frank are motivated in part by ecological concerns and a sense of community, for gleaners the large amounts of time looking for hard rubbish is often also framed as a pleasurable activity. The buzz, the thrill, the excitement—these are terms that householders used in relation to the time spent hunting for “finds” and fixing things up. For instance,

Hard rubbish reuse in Australian suburbia  245 Yolande, a 38-year-old, married, homeowner was something of a gleaning addict, particularly when she was single: I’d check out what was—what council [clean-ups] were coming up and all that kind of stuff, and then I’d head out. It would just sort of be a bit of a day out you know, depending on where it was. Yolande’s comment foregrounds the ways in which pleasure, ethics and politics are often intertwined for gleaners, something Kate Soper (2004) describes as a kind of “alternative hedonism” (115). Material temporalities Another key way in which the temporal emerges in our study is in relation to the gleaned objects themselves. For instance, what gleaners often prize about the objects they find is their imagined biographies. Gleaning households are often strongly attuned to the rich and varied ways that the meanings of second-hand items are “inscribed in their forms, their uses, their ­trajectories”—in short, in their “stories” (Appadurai 1986, 5), in contrast with the disposability of many contemporary commodities. As we walked through homes and video-recorded hard rubbish items, householders would often recount the biographies of their things and how they had come to be in the house. For example, Fiona, discussed above, pointed out to us that “all [her] chairs have a story.” We found that objects are often valued for the way that they speak to what Gregson and Crewe (2003) describe as “imagined histories,” which are “largely based around romantic and fantasised visions of the lives and times of imagined others” (147). For instance, Kevin, a 55-year-old part-time social worker and musician with a wife, grown-up son and teenage daughter, makes the following comments on a shoe cleaning box he had gleaned and lovingly repaired: What I like about it is its history … and I can just see some old dude using it [puts on a strong Aussie accent], although he’d probably be an Italian … There’s a lot of history in that, which I think is important. Gleaners also attempt to subvert or bypass a culture of disposability and newness, and here objects again play a key role. Jane, a 48-year-old part-time public servant, discussed the impact that an electric meat grinder had on the life of herself and her partner—both, ironically, vegetarians. Finding the grinder on the kerb, they decided to repurpose it to grind tomatoes. What ensued was a long process in which Jane tried in vain to get the grinder adapted and lost her car keys in the process. In the end she concluded that: [These found objects], they can take up a lot of time. You get all excited with the find and you think it’s wonderful and then two weeks

246  Tania Lewis et al. later you’re running around all over Melbourne looking for the adapter for the tomato thing. For gleaners, the temporalities of things are also related to their materiality and longevity, with certain kinds of items—especially wooden ones—being seen as being repairable and as well as aesthetically desirable. Kevin, who describes himself half-jokingly as a “functional hoarder,” invests considerable amounts of time looking for specific objects. Pointing to a not-yetcompleted bathroom cabinet stored in his garage that was built out of an industrial toaster, he remarks: I was looking for the toaster. I wanted stainless steel, and I wanted to combine stainless steel and wood. So, I looked for ages to find that … It’s easy to go and buy something. The flipside to this was that the temporal (environmental) longevity of other, undesired items—notably, plastics—was a recurring anxiety for gleaners, particular those with children. Though plastic children’s toys constitute a significant part of the circular economy of gleaning households, their easy breakability and imagined long life cycle as a toxic and degrading material reflects a heightened environmental consciousness and awareness of Urry’s “glacial” long temporality. Past/future and intergenerational temporalities There is yet another, trans-generational sense of time that often frames awareness of hard rubbish and gleaning among those in our study. According to this temporal sense, current practices and attitudes towards gleaning are filtered by past experiences, especially of growing up, and oriented towards the future—of living differently in the present in order to open the possibility of a different future, of current practices shaping time to come, and of passing on a new ethos around consumption to the next generation. Many of those interviewed typically did not identify a specific time when they started actively gleaning, but rather located it somewhere in an historical continuum that included remembered childhood practices, such as visiting tips, op [thrift] shops and having repurposed clothes or toys. Katarina, 59 years old and single, reminisces that her dad “was a bit famous for going to the tip and coming home with more than he went with,” while Alice, 41 years old, living in her own home with her partner and two children, recalls “getting toys from op-shops if we were on holiday or something; mum would take us to the op shop and buy us toys.” This sort of upbringing also has broader impacts. For example, Sarah, a thrifty 38-year-old, suggests that there is a concern for the environment behind her gleaning that is due largely to her upbringing in St Andrews, an outer north-eastern suburb of

Hard rubbish reuse in Australian suburbia  247 Melbourne historically known for its residents being attuned to environmental issues: “I grew up green without even knowing it.” References were commonly made to the more difficult economic times that participants’ parents grew up in as a likely reason for their parents’ thrifty mend-and-make-do approach to resources, including clothing, furniture and food—an ethos that was often seen as a major influence for participants in shaping their own present-day gleaning habits. For instance, 40-year-old New Zealander, Karen, acknowledges her mother’s upbringing as an influence on her own interest in thriftiness: “Well, my mother grew up in that sort of depression attitude and was very good at scrimping and saving.” Similarly, her Australian-born partner Robert, who is a self-employed 45-year-old, spoke of his mum growing up in the depression era, where there was a strong emphasis on thrift. While Robert is not sure how much this influenced him growing up, he remembers that op-shopping was big (he used to go with his sister) and recalls a “bohemian badge of honour in spending as little as possible.” Often these skills are still drawn on as parents continue to be valued sources (and resources), both of gleaned and second-hand items and of certain DIY and craft skills needed to repair or repurpose these and other items for their now-adult children. Interviewees exhibited a degree of pride in their parents’ skills, and items that were made from scratch, repaired or repurposed by their parents feature prominently in the house tours, usually with an accompanying story of how or why they came about. For instance, during the tour of her house, 42-year-old Ally, who lives with her partner and their young son, pointed out: “So my dad made this; there’s one here and there’s one at the back door because we just needed something to get a bit organised by the front door.” Meanwhile, during her house tour, DIY sewer Fiona paused to point towards a small cupboard: So that little cupboard there, that was an old record playing cabinet or something, and that had all been falling apart, but the nice curved wood on the sides, that was there, so mum found other bits of wood to fix it up and polish it back. These gleaners’ parents seem to have played especially significant roles in shaping their children’s current attitudes and expertise around hard rubbish and second-hand items. Most of those interviewed exhibited a range of DIY, craft and creative skills, and the willingness to tackle all kinds of projects, with the only significant deterrent being time. Items that interviewees had already repaired, repurposed or created from salvaged materials featured prominently in all the house tours: Everything is second hand. That bookshelf, I made it from scratch; so this here, you know, was being chucked out and I just redid it. (Kevin)

248  Tania Lewis et al. That seat over there, the legs of it were the feet of a laundry trough that used to be in our previous laundry which was demolished a long time ago and the top is actually fence posts from the old fence that was demolished about fifteen years ago. (Alice and Bart, 41 and 42 years old respectively) I found this [bicycle] frame and bits on the side of the road and spent about 100 bucks on it using recycled bits that I had and now I’m giving that to a friend. (Arlo, a gleaner and dumpster diver who lives in rental accommodation with his partner and child) There are also indications that these inherited attitudes and skills are in turn being passed on to the next generation. For example, 40-year-old New Zealander Karen who lives with her partner Robert and two small children in a medium-sized suburban house, now walks the nearby streets with her kids and talks with them about gleaning when hard rubbish is out for collection. Meanwhile, Jane remarks in relation to her son: I’m really trying to bring him up to understand. I say to him, “That was good. We went to that garage sale and we got that for $2. That’s normally $20. That’s $18, we can spend that on something else now.” I think he’s starting to get that. He gets his pocket money, so he’s starting to value—just understand. Again, this trans-generational consciousness can be seen as a temporal counterpoint to the “presentism” and perceived selfish individualism of today’s throwaway society. While not necessarily referencing “glacial” time, there is a deliberate distancing here from many of the (perceived to be) sped-up temporal norms and practices of contemporary living, with gleaners investing in what might be seen as cross-generational forms of circularity and reuse.

Conclusion: a temporal politics Our small-scale ethnographic study suggests that for certain households gleaning is a deeply embedded, cross-generational practice in Australian culture in which people invest significant amounts of time and effort. Despite prevailing norms and associated linear infrastructures of cheap production, rapid use and quick disposability, gleaning households attempt to set up different temporal relationships to material goods. This often involves considerable time and effort. For instance, many of our gleaners held on to gleaned items for long periods, handing items on to friends or relatives as and when they were needed, reusing materials (such as bicycle parts) to fix up or add to new “finds,” or waiting until they had time to

Hard rubbish reuse in Australian suburbia  249 repair or make use of the item in question. Such practices reflect new temporal regimes in which people are prepared to invest time into (communities of) hard rubbish reuse, in which objects themselves have agency, value and longevity (beyond the usual notion of a commodity life cycle), and in which past, future and cross-generational practices are brought to the fore. While these practices might be dismissed as merely lifestyle choices, as the privatised temporalities of Giddens’s late-modern individual, in our study the majority of gleaners engaged in a range of broader temporal and ethical practices that might be understood as a “life politics,” or a form of domestic, lifestyle activism (Giddens 1991; Lewis 2015). People’s political and ethical investments in hard rubbish reuse as part of broader alternative life narratives were expressed clearly and strongly across the interviews we conducted, as illustrated in the following quotations: I just think it’s trying to live a life that’s more ethical and environmentally sustainable, and why buy, when you can reuse things? (Liz, 42) Well, you know, we don’t like paying for things and contributing to a consumer culture. (Arlo, 24) Well, it’s just the obvious really, that it’s just reusing resources that would otherwise go to the tip … I’m from that round of environmentalism and I’ve always had an environmental conscience from probably when I was about 15 or something. (Jane, 48) I’ve always had an interest in social justice, not just environmental issues, and I think I just hate the idea of spending large amounts of money on things, when other people have so little. So, it’s a combo [combination] of environmental and social, because I think things shouldn’t go to landfill, partly because that’s bad for the environment. But I also think things shouldn’t go to landfill because I think our society is just, I don’t know, I guess it’s unethical for people to be just upgrading for the sake of the latest fashion, when there are so many people that are doing without. I would rather be able to donate to those charities that help, rather than just earning money in order to buy new things. (Fiona, 35) Such an alternative temporal politics is enacted not just through gleaning and broader environmental attitudes, but also through a range of other activities. These include, most commonly, saving energy and/or water (eight households), growing their own food (seven households), embracing sustainable transport options (seven households) and through participation in

250  Tania Lewis et al. volunteer or community work (five households). What these activities witness, in effect, are multiple regimes of value adopted by the households in our study, and a desire and a need for tying green, thrifty, communitarian and anti-consumerist initiatives to a range of cultural values not just economic or utilitarian. What becomes evident from this study is that, for participating households, a politics of temporality and a commitment to an ethical life politics are intimately entwined; they are part of one framework or life creed. This is not an orientation that is anchored in neoliberal individualism which is sometimes the lens through which domestic acts of ethical living are read and thereby dismissed. Rather, it involves a communitarian spirit of responsible living, both in the present and for the future. Thus, if time is a commodity that is usually exchanged for money, these gleaners strive to resist this. A key way they do this is by building different systems of temporal exchange, ones that are concerned for and motivated by investments in labours of living for others—for community, for those perceived to have less or to be in need, and for future generations.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the households involved in the Moreland Hard Rubbish study. Special thanks to Dr Malita Allan at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, who worked as a research associate on the project.

References Adam, Barbara. 2000. “The Temporal Gaze: The Challenge for Social Theory in the Context of GM Food.” The British Journal of Sociology 51: 125–42. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2000.00125.x. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–63. Beck, Ulrich. 2009. “World Risk Society and Manufactured Uncertainties.” IRIS: European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate 1 (2): 291–9. www.fupress.net/ index.php/iris/article/view/3304. Brannen, Julia. 2005. “Time and the Negotiation of Work-Family Boundaries: Autonomy or Illusion?” Time & Society 14 (1): 113–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/096 1463X05050299. Broege, Nora, Ann Owens, Anthony P. Graesch, Jeanne E. Arnold and Barbara Schneider. 2007. “Calibrating Measures of Family Activities between Large- and Small-Scale Data Sets.” Sociological Methodology 37 (1): 119–49. https://doi. org/10.1007/j1467-9531.2007.00194.x. Darrah, Charles N. 2006. “Ethnography and Working Families.” In The Work and Family Handbook: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives and Approaches, edited by Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, Ellen Ernst Kossek and Stephen Sweet. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 367–85.

Hard rubbish reuse in Australian suburbia  251 Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gregson, Nicky and Louise Crewe. 2003. Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Gregson, Nicky, Alan Metcalfe and Louise Crewe. 2007. “Identity, Mobility, and the Throwaway Society.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (4): 682–700. https://doi.org/10.1068/d418t. Hargreaves, Tom. 2011. “Practice-ing Behaviour Change: Applying Social Practice Theory to Pro-Environmental Behaviour Change.” Journal of Consumer Culture 11 (1): 79–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540510390500. Head, Lesley, Katarina Saltzman, Gunhild Setten, and Marie Stenseke. 2016. “Holding on and Letting Go.” In Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management: Scandinavian and Australian Perspectives on Peoples and Landscapes, edited by Lesley Head, Katarina Saltzman, Gunhild Setten and Marie Stenseke. London: Routledge, 3–12. Highmore, Ben. 2002. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1997. The Time Bind: When Work becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Henry Holt. Kremer-Sadlik, Tamar and Amy L. Paugh. 2007. “Everyday Moments: Finding ‘Quality Time’ in American Working Families.” Time & Society 16 (2–3): 287–308. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X07080276. Lane, Ruth. 2011. “The Waste Commons in an Emerging Resource Recovery Waste Regime: Contesting Property and Value in Melbourne’s Hard Rubbish Collections.” Geographical Research 49 (4): 395–407. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1745-5871.2011.00704.x. Lane, Ruth, Ralph Horne and Jenny Bicknell. 2009. “Routes of Reuse of Secondhand Goods in Melbourne Households.” Australian Geographer 40 (2): 151–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049180902964918. Lewis, Tania. 2015. “ ‘One City Block at a Time’: Researching and Cultivating Green Transformations.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (3): 347–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877913513694. Lewis, Tania and Emily Potter. 2011. “Introducing Ethical Consumption.” In Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction, edited by Tania Lewis and Emily Potter. London: Routledge, 3–23. Lewis, Tania and Frédéric Rauturier. 2019. “Gleaning Around the Globe: Reframing Urban Thrift via Practices and Economies of Hard Rubbish Reuse.” Journal of Consumer Culture 19 (4): 493–512. https://doi.org/10.1177/146954051 9872072. Robinson, John P. and Geoffrey Godbey. 1999. Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use their Time. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Shove, Elizabeth. 2003. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg. Shove, Elizabeth, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk. 2009. Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture. Oxford: Berg. Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand and Jack Ingram. 2007. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Soper, Kate. 2004. “Rethinking the ‘Good Life’: The Consumer as Citizen.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 15 (3): 111–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/1045575042000247293.

252  Tania Lewis et al. Southerton, Dale. 2003. “ ‘Squeezing Time’: Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society.” Time & Society 12 (1): 5–25. https://doi.org/10.117 7/0961463X03012001001. Urry, John. 1994. “Time, Leisure and Social Identity.” Time & Society 3 (2): 131–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X94003002001. Wilken, Rowan, Michael Arnold and Björn Nansen. 2011. “Broadband in the Home Pilot Study: Suburban Hobart.” Telecommunications Journal of Australia 61 (1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.7790/tja.v61i1.180.

17 Temporal cycles of waste management in Southern African Indigenous societies Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue

Introduction Globally, we are engulfed in a self-generated ocean of waste. The accumulation of solid waste and its management are emerging as a major environmental crisis in both developed and developing countries, particularly in urban contexts (Guerrero, Maas and Hogland 2013; Hoornweg and BhadaTata 2012). Solid waste accumulation is an indicator of unsustainable linear economic growth and consumption patterns. A significant contributor to urban waste is domestic waste, a large proportion of which is organic biodegradable waste (Korfmacher 1997; Nahman et al. 2012; Schanes, Dobernig and Gözet 2018; Simelane and Mohee 2012). The focus of this chapter is on solid organic waste management. In South Africa, the developmental trend towards urbanisation comes with an associated increase in solid waste generation. Most cities and towns rely on modern formalised municipal collection, transportation and disposal of solid waste. Besides the high costs of urban solid waste management, most of the organic solid waste ends up in open landfill sites (waste dumps) where it generates significant leachate and landfill (methane) gas as by-products, thereby creating further problems of ground water pollution, air pollution and greenhouse gas emission (Couth and Trois 2011; Friedrich and Trois 2016; Mbiba 2014; Nahman et al. 2012; O’Neill, 2018). Modern conventional approaches to organic solid waste management amount to “solving a crisis with a new crisis.” In the South African context, minimal effort has been expended to reduce and utilise organic domestic waste from homes, with most of the waste reduction efforts under Integrated Waste Management Practices focusing on the separation and recycling of specific types of waste, namely paper, cardboard, plastic, glass and metal. This recycling is mainly done informally and is largely driven by the private sector recycling market (Karani and Jewasikiewitz 2007; Matete and Trois 2008). Most waste minimisation, reduction and recycling efforts tend to focus on commercialised Western/modern technocentric approaches such as municipal integrated Solid Waste Management Practices. There is very

254  Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue little representation and application of Indigenous waste management practices to address exponential solid waste management challenges. In this chapter we explore alternative approaches to organic solid waste management by drawing attention to Indigenous communities’ temporal cycles of waste management around the traditional homestead as a sustainable waste management practice. We further narrate how the recycled waste is utilised in traditional home food gardens to grow food plants as well as to feed livestock, thereby ensuring food security for rural households. Unlike modern cumulative waste management systems, the Indigenous practice of solid waste management and traditional food production is a self-sustaining socio-ecological system that follows a similar pattern to natural ecological cycles of production and decomposition. We propose the adoption of these innovative Indigenous Knowledge Practices and wisdom as an alternative approach to waste reduction at source for urban homes and as a potential business initiative in urban environments where organic waste accumulation in dump sites is extremely high. The urban organic food gardens that result from the recycling of organic waste as manure will contribute significantly towards enhancing global food security and environmental sustainability (Biel 2016; FAO 2011).

Indigenous waste management practices Indigenous rural communities in southern Africa have derived both their livelihood and sustenance within an alternative non-monetary economy that emphasised community self-reliance through self-sustaining socio-­ ecological systems based on reciprocal relationships between people and with their lived environment (see Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata 2012; Shava and Masuku 2019). The main type of solid waste within Indigenous community contexts is organic waste materials. Indigenous African communities have always practised an effective and sustainable system of solid waste management prior to the emergence of modern waste management practices (see Ajibade 2007). This localised system, where organic waste is a resource, is based on a regenerative circular economy of food production, waste generation, decomposition and natural nutrient recycling. In this chapter we focus on organic waste management practices among two Nguni communal areas in South Africa, namely KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape provinces. In rural homesteads in South Africa it is common cultural practice to have a waste mound or pit (izala—Zulu, ithuthu—Xhosa), where organic waste comprising food waste and ash is disposed of (Ngcoza 2019; O’Donoghue, Shava and Zazu 2013). These pits harness natural biogeochemical processes of organic matter decomposition, thereby preventing the accumulation of domestic organic waste by transforming it into a valuable and renewable resource (Franco-García, Carpio-Aguilar and Bressers 2019). The waste wood ash (umlotha) remains from the kitchen cooking fires provide a covering layer to the decomposing organic food waste,

Temporal cycles of waste management  255 thereby preventing these sites from being fly-infested and a potential source of disease epidemics. The ash layers also minimise waste odours from the izala/ithuthu sites. The process of decomposition transforms organic waste, rendering it into a non-hazardous nutrient-rich resource for plant growth. The siting of these pits is usually shifted around the homestead so that new ones are created as the old ones fill up, creating multiple nutrient-rich sites around the homestead. While the advent of rural electrification is contributing to the reduced reliance on wood fuels, wood fires still remain a dominant source of energy for cooking and heating in rural community contexts (Department of Energy 2012; Dovie, Witkowski and Shackleton 2004). It is also common practice in Indigenous homesteads to use some of the food scraps to feed domestic livestock such as poultry, goats and cattle. An example is the scattering of residue (amavovo) from traditional beer-making (ukwenza umqombothi) around the homestead, which attracts ants and termites that feed on the dried-up residue. Termites and ants are an immediate threat to the traditional homestead structure, which is made up of thatch, pole and dagga (earth), with floors and walls covered with smeared dung (ubulongwe) for insulation. These construction materials are not only biodegradable (thereby being recycled soil nutrients and further evidence of a circular economy), but are a potential source of food to ants and termites. However, the ants and termites are picked by chickens, naturally controlling them, and smoke from the wood fires penetrates the thatch and walls, protecting them from ant and termite damage. Winged termites (inhlwa) which come out from their anthills during summer are collected by people and roasted as a snack. Amavovo are also fed to pigs and this leads them to quickly increase in weight, supplying people with meat and grease for softening leather. Indigenous waste management practices are therefore a complex adaptive system of continuous natural material flows that integrates various interrelated elements and evolves to address emerging challenges in a local socioecological context. It is this adaptive capacity of Indigenous food production systems that makes them resilient and self-sustaining.

From waste to food: traditional food production systems Natural ecological cycles are such that decomposing organic matter is a source of renewed life through providing nutrients for plant growth. These regenerative material flows in natural cycles of production and decomposition are mimicked in the circular flow of materials at the izala/ithuthu sites which transform organic waste into useful, natural nutrients for the growing food plants. Seeds from food crop remains are usually thrown into the izala/ithuthu, where they germinate and grow into new crops. Kitchen waste water is also disposed of in these sites. It is also common practice to sow food crops on the izala or ithuthu site. These composting pit sites are

256  Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue nutrient-rich micro-environments for growing crops that are within close reach for use in the homestead kitchen. They therefore provide a continuous supply of food plants, thereby creating local sustainable food systems that enhance food security and sovereignty (self-sufficiency). Commonly grown on izala/ithuthu sites are traditional vegetables, with some self-sowing, semi-domesticated, wild, leafy vegetables (imifino) such as imbuya/ityuthu (Amaranthus spp.), imbilikicane (Chenopodium album), Irhabe (Sonchus oleraceous) and umsobo (Solanum nigrum) being permitted to thrive as an integral part of the izala/ithuthu garden (Asafo-Adjei 2004; Shava 2000). The result is a compact (small-scale), randomly ordered garden rather than a westernised linear patterned “formal” garden structure. Most of the self-sowing plants are considered “agricultural weeds” of cosmopolitan distribution that have naturalised in South Africa. However, to the Indigenous communities they are a valuable food resource and they also serve an ecological function (see Orion 2015). Indigenous home food gardens are rich in species diversity, again mimicking natural ecosystems in contrast to crop monocultures of modern agriculture (Shava, O’Donoghue, Krasny and Zazu 2009). The diversity of food plants provides a fresh supply of dietary variety and health-giving nutrients for human well-being. The organic waste remains generated from the consumption of these food plants and other organic waste matter (e.g., bones) is again thrown into the izala/ ithuthu, where it undergoes biological reduction into natural nutrients for supporting plant growth, forming a “cradle-to cradle” closed-loop system. The regenerative process of biodegradable waste decomposition produces natural nutrients that enrich the soil, while also improving the soil structure and its moisture-retention capabilities for agricultural use (in contrast to chemical fertilisers, which disrupt the soil’s natural properties). The humus-rich soil also sustains beneficial micro- and macro-organisms that support plant growth (Ranjan, Divya and Bavitha 2015), unlike chemical fertilisers that destroy soil organisms. In addition, the plant species diversity also attracts wildlife, including pollinators. This self-contained circular system of traditional waste composting to humus for organic food production is not only sustainable but also has social, economic and environmental benefits. Indigenous food waste recycling and gardening practices have been adopted into emerging systems of sustainable agriculture such as organic farming, natural farming and permaculture, where use of natural manure as fertiliser and species diversity (multi-cropping) are founding principles (Mollison and Holmgren 1990). For example, the zoning of food or herb gardens close to the house in permaculture is similar to the izala/ithuthu gardens. The species diversity in izala/ithuthu traditional food gardens relates to the ecosystem approach in permaculture that mimics the natural environment. In Indigenous community contexts, organic waste is therefore understood and practised as part of a cyclical temporal schema. It is integral to a natural and holistic regenerative system where the disposed waste has a

Temporal cycles of waste management  257 ­ roductive afterlife. It is allowed to naturally decompose over time and is p later used as a nutrient-rich organic compost resource to sustain the growth of food plants in home gardens. This Indigenous recycling of organic waste provides a localised, sustainable, self-contained and cost-effective approach to organic waste management that can be used as an intervention in unsustainable household organic waste disposal practices in urban areas.

Going back to go forward towards sustainability: relearning the traditional practices of urban organic waste recycling and food gardening The problem of organic waste management in urban areas is directly related to unsustainable consumption and waste generation patterns. In an effort to promote sustainability practices and reduce organic waste from urban households in landfill sites, there is an advantage in recovering and relearning the traditional practices of organic waste composting and use in home gardens for food production. These practices not only reduce the amount of organic waste that ends up in landfill sites but also promote local food production in urban homes that have garden space. Home food gardens have an economic value in that they enable the home to grow its own vegetables and not rely on store-bought vegetables that have usually traversed long distances (food miles), thereby leaving a considerable ecological footprint. The home food gardens are also of health benefit as the food is grown organically and without the accompanying negative effects on the environment and on human health that comes from the use of chemical fertilisers and health damaging pesticides and herbicides in commercial agriculture. It is possible to promote a regenerative culture that replaces a culture of organic waste accumulation and disposal in urban contexts through transformative innovations in organic waste management. The transition from waste to resource through the Indigenous practice of converting of organic waste into manure or compost in urban areas can be applied at a microlevel in urban homes, where food waste can be used as organic manure for growing local food gardens. This minimises waste, while developing food self-sufficiency at a household level. At a macro-level, Indigenous organic waste composting can be applied in schools, community gardens and in sites generating commercial food waste such as hotels and restaurants, where it can be used for organic fertilisation of larger-scale organic food gardens. This practice will significantly reduce the amount of organic waste that makes its ways into landfill sites, while creating economic opportunities for organic waste recycling and organic food garden production, turning waste into wealth (Lacy and Rutqvist 2015). The problem of organic waste accumulation in urban environments can therefore be used as the opportunistic basis for sustainable waste management and for the creation of sustainable food systems premised on a circular economy.

258  Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue

Application of Indigenous temporal cycles of waste in the formal school curriculum It is clear that there are opportunities to study and apply Indigenous waste practices in the formal school curriculum. Indigenous waste management and its related food production practices provide enabling contexts for collaborative learning and meaning-making processes in environmental education (Ngcoza 2019; O’Donoghue 2015). For example, Indigenous composting can be used to teach natural cycles of production and decomposition and their role in ecosystem sustenance in Natural and Life Sciences. It can also be used in teaching the waste management concepts of waste reduction and recycling and reuse under Integrated Waste Resource Management Practices. In Agricultural Sciences, Indigenous food composting and food production can be used to promote organic/natural food gardening as a form of sustainable agriculture with an integrated “resource recycling” approach and an awareness of its benefits. It can also be used to teach knowledge of traditional food plants that are commonly grown on the izala/ithuthu sites. In Life Skills, the concept of life-long learning can be exemplified through the cyclical practice of izala/ithuthu and its related food-growing skills for self-reliance in the ezaleni/ethuthwini food gardens. These Indigenous capabilities are essential for livelihood sustenance in Indigenous community contexts. We close this chapter with two short examples that demonstrate this potential in action. Each of them points to a particular set of relationships over historical time. The examples have been drawn from the involvement of both authors in collaborative, action research projects where Indigenous scholars worked to “uncover and recover” Indigenous knowledge processes for inclusion in the education system. In these projects, Indigenous Knowledge (IK) practices were recovered and documented through collaborative action research processes of deliberative action learning over many years. Indigenous researchers worked in village communities with elderly custodians of IK who recounted intergenerational knowledge practices, many of which have been displaced by modern ways, so that most young learners in schools today had no life experience of common-sense, Indigenous modes of environmental management. Over the years, leading researchers such as Mba Manquele, Sibongile Masuku, Caleb Mandikonza, Cryton Zazu and Soul Shava (lead researcher of an emerging IK interest group) wrote up notable Indigenous Knowledge Practices with relatives and community members. Through a Share-Net creative commons process many of the emerging materials were written up in an easy reading form for use in multilingual classroom environments. Here the students read and discussed the waste and other practices or watched IK-Today video enactments co-developed with other IK custodians such as Mabongi Mtshali, who co-wrote and narrated the IK-Today series. The children were commonly given a homework task to find out about, for example, waste management practices of old. If

Temporal cycles of waste management  259 something interesting surfaced through learner interviews with elders, then this was shared back in Mother Tongue, with another child or group providing the translation for all members of the class to understand. In this way, the narrative was checked by the narrator for misrepresentations or inaccuracies in translation. Over the years, the researchers built up, and Indigenous researchers published, insightful narratives as start-up stories for reflexive inquiry in relation to IK and sustainability practices.

Case 1: Urban organic waste recycling: uncovering the heritage foundations of organic waste management in Makhanda “Xaba ye golide” (“Let us find gold”) emerged as a youth group dedicated to finding the wisdom (gold) in their Xhosa heritage and learning from this to care for the local environment in Makhanda town in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Most people in the area no longer grew their own vegetables and their parents had told them that every Xhosa homestead had vegetable gardens in the old days. The youth group wanted to restore the “gold” and resolve the waste problem by teaching people to make compost without the health problem of rubbish and rats. To do this, they collected old corrugated iron sheets and used these to make compost ring “drums.” By not using pits, the composting happened in aerobic conditions (with oxygen) so that there was no anaerobic decomposition (rotting without oxygen) that would breed diseases. Xaba ye golide started a partnership with some of the old people who still had gardens. The elderly, with the practical temporality of old, worked with them to support people to build their own composters and vegetable gardens in the area. People were surprised that there was so much Xhosa practical wisdom in compost gardening and felt proud of their small vegetable gardens in waste-free surroundings.

Case 2: A colonial history of exclusion as a foundation for a new temporality of waste management The alienation of Indigenous people from their traditional life-sustaining practices is linked to historical time, since it occurred as part of colonial technologies of governance. As the Indigenous peoples began to live in towns, traditional waste management systems continued to function but new materials did not lend themselves to rapid decomposition and rubbish removal was initiated as a health measure to reduce the risk of bubonic plague as in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth (Ferguson and Harington 1963). Here bubonic plague was attributed to rats living on traditional waste dumps and the accumulation of tins, glass and the early debris of modern urban living.

260  Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue A similar colonial abjection emerged in education where children were forced not to use their Mother Tongue and to change from the Indigenous practices of organic waste recycling to simply discarding waste for disposal in waste dumping sites. Many years of struggles against these modes of exclusion and oppression had Indigenous peoples also resist waste management practices, particularly in public spaces where waste scattering became a mode of protest (Southhall 2018). Traditional practices of organic recycling were also disrupted with the advent of tin, glass and plastics creating the solid waste challenges found across the country today. Our interest in these complex temporal histories of waste management developed around the challenges of waste management in schools across the country where children are introduced to recycling and many schools have emerged as centres for local waste recycling, which can earn them a small income for their sports facilities. Teachers reported to us how children ­willingly bring in waste articles for recycling but keeping schools and their surrounds clean seems to be a continuous struggle of “command and control” clean-up campaigns to inculcate better waste awareness and practices in school students. Teachers in the Mooi River area of KwaZulu-Natal were introduced to long-forgotten Nguni temporal practices of organic waste management. It dawned on them that Indigenous modes of waste disposal were effective and needed to be taught within the evolving cultural history of waste. The teachers found that an induction into the wisdom of Nguni waste management practices in historical times enabled them to start a conversation about how modern waste management was an adaptive problem that could be informed by the Indigenous waste management practices of earlier times. The “Reduce—Reuse—Recycle” mantra became “Refuse—Reuse—Recycle,” with the students using the natural material flows implicit in IK practices for transformative learning in relation to local waste challenges. “Refuse” allowed the students to make choices in relation to plastics. “Reuse” enabled them to retain useful items as well as compost. “Recycle” became the process of collecting waste for the paper, glass and metal recycling industry. The rediscovery of the organic temporalities of early Nguni waste management practices appeared to provide modes of resonance and a platform for a critical review necessary for a wider temporal recycling of organic waste in the modern era where organic materials can be separated from solid waste destined for the dumpsites, composted and recycled.

Conclusion IK systems can provide innovative responses to the transforming socio-­ cultural and ecological conditions in an urban environmental context by drawing on Indigenous community capabilities. In the case of the challenge of increasing organic waste volumes in urban areas, Indigenous organic

Temporal cycles of waste management  261 waste management and related food production practices provide a sustainable alternative to centralised conventional waste management practices that are solving a problem (organic waste accumulation) by creating another problem (disposal in landfill sites resulting in land, water and air pollution and the generation of greenhouse gases). Providing enabling spaces for the interaction of plural knowledges, in this case combining modern conventional waste management practices with IKs of waste management, allows for the co-generation of innovative solutions to current problems of organic waste management and the reciprocal valorisation of the different knowledges. The Indigenous temporal cycles of waste provide a sustainable alternative to conventional linear waste management practices. They represent a localised, self-contained, circular economy that addresses organic waste disposal through natural nutrient recycling while simultaneously contributing to community livelihood and sustenance and human well-being through sustainable agriculture.

References Ajibade, L.T. 2007. “Indigenous Knowledge System of Waste Management in Nigeria.” Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge 6 (4): 642–7. Asafo-Adjei, Robert T. 2004. “From Imifino to Umfuno: A Case Study Foregrounding Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge in School-Based Curriculum Development.” Unpublished Master of Education thesis, Rhodes University, South Africa. Biel, Robert. 2016. Sustainable Food Systems: The Role of the City. London: UCL Press. Couth, R. and C. Trois. 2011. “Waste Management Activities and Carbon ­Emission in Africa.” Waste Management 31 (1): 131–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. wasman.2010.08.009. Department of Energy [South Africa]. 2012. A Survey of Energy-Related Behaviour and Perceptions in South Africa: The Residential Sector. Pretoria: Department of Energy. Dovie, Delali B.K., E.T.F. Witkowski and Charlie M. Shackleton. 2004. “The Fuelwood Crisis in Southern Africa—Relating Fuelwood Use to Livelihoods in a Rural Village.” GeoJournal 60 (2): 123–44. www.jstor.org/stable/41147872. FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations]. 2011. Save and Grow: A Policymaker’s Guide to the Sustainable Intensification of Smallholder Crop Production. Rome: FAO. Ferguson, D.L. and C. Harington. 1963. “The 1938 Outbreak of Plague in Port ­Elizabeth.” South African Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine 9 (3): 118–21. Franco-García, María-Laura, Jorge Carlos Carpio-Aguilar and Hans Bressers, eds. 2019. Towards Zero Waste: Circular Economy Boost, Waste to Resources. Greening of Industry Networks Studies Vol. 6. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. Friedrich, Elena and Cristina Trois. 2016. “Current and Future Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions from the Management of Municipal Solid Waste in the eThekwini Municipality—South Africa.” Journal of Cleaner Production 112, pt. 5: 4071–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.05.118. Guerrero, Lilliana A., Ger Maas and William Hogland. 2013. “Solid Waste Management Challenges for Cities in Developing Countries.” Waste Management 33: 220–32.

262  Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue Hoornweg, Daniel and Perinaz Bhada-Tata. 2012. What A Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management. Washington, DC: World Bank. Karani, Patrick and Stan M. Jewasikiewitz. 2007. “Waste Management and Sustainable Development in South Africa.” Environment Development and Sustainability 9 (2): 163–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-005-9010-7. Korfmacher, Katrina Smith. 1997. “Solid Waste Collection Systems in Developing Urban Areas of South Africa: An Overview and Case Study.” Waste Management and Research 15 (5): 477–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734242X9701500504. Lacy, Peter and Jakob Rutqvist. 2015. Waste to Wealth: The Circular Economy Advantage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Matete, Ntlibi and Cristina Trois. 2008. “Towards Zero Waste in Emerging Countries: A South African Experience.” Waste Management 28 (8): 1480–92. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2007.06.006. Mbiba, Beacon. 2014. “Urban Solid Waste Characteristics and Household Appetite for Separation at Source in Eastern and Southern Africa.” Habitat International 43 (July): 152–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2014.02.001. Mollison, Bill and David Holmgren. 1990. Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. Tyalgum: Tagari Publications. Nahman, Anton, Willem de Lange, Suzan Oelofse and Linda Godfrey. 2012. “The Costs of Household Food Waste in South Africa.” Waste Management 32 (11): 2147–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2012.04.012. Ngcoza, Kenneth, Mlungisi. 2019. “Education for Sustainable Development at the Problem-Posing Nexus of Re-Appropriated Heritage Practices and the Science Curriculum.” Southern African Journal of Environmental Education 35. 10pp. http:// dx.doi.org/10.4314/sajee.v35i1.9. O’Donoghue, Rob. 2015. Fundisa for Change. Available at: http://fundisaforchange. co.za/feature/resources/. O’Donoghue, Rob, Soul Shava and Cryton Zazu, eds. 2013. African Heritage Knowledge in the Context of Social Innovation. Yokohama: Institute of Advanced Studies, United Nations University. www.ias.unu.edu/resource_centre/UNU_Booklet_ MB2013_FINAL_Links_v12.pdf. O’Neill, Kate. 2018. “Linking Wastes and Climate Change: Bandwagoning, Contention, and Global Governance.” WIREs Climate Change 10 (2). https://doi.org/ 10.1002/wcc.568. Orion, Tao. 2015. Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Ranjan, Rajeev, M. Divya and M. Bavitha. 2015. “The Importance of Soil Food Web for Healthy Environment and Sustainable Development.” International Journal of Applied Research 1 (3): 15–20. www.allresearchjournal.com/vol.1issue3/ PartA/pdf/74.1.pdf. Schanes, Karin, Karin Dobernig and Burcu Gözet. 2018. “Food Waste Matters: A Systematic Review of Household Food Waste Practices and their Policy Implications.” Journal of Cleaner Production 182 (1 May): 978–91. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.02.030. Shava, Soul. 2000. “The Use of Indigenous Plants as Food by a Rural Community in Eastern Cape: An Educational Exploration.” Unpublished Master of Education thesis, Rhodes University, South Africa. Shava, Soul, Rob O’Donoghue, Marianne E. Krasny and Cryton Zazu. 2009. ­“Traditional Food Crops as a Source of Community Resilience in Zimbabwe.”

Temporal cycles of waste management  263 International Journal of African Renaissance Studies—Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity 4 (1): 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/18186870903101982. Shava, Soul and Sibongile Masuku. 2019. “Living Currencies: The Multiple Roles of Livestock in Livelihood Sustenance and Exchange in the Context of Rural Indigenous Communities in Southern Africa.” Southern African Journal of Environmental Education 35. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/sajee.v35i1.16. Simelane, Thokozani and R. Mohee. 2012. Future Directions of Municipal Solid Waste. AISA Policy Brief no. 81 (September), 6pp. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa. www.ai.org.za/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/10/No.-81.-FutureDirections-of-Municipal-Solid-waste-Management-in-Africa.pdf. Southhall, Roger. 2018. “Littering in South Africa is the Expression of Wider Selfish—and Costly—Culture.” DownToEarth, 10 May 2018. www.downtoearth. org.in/news/waste/littering-in-south-africa-is-the-expression-of-wider-selfish-andcostly-culture-60484.

Index

accumulation: bioaccumulation 129, 185–7; of capital 26, 48; of food/ organic waste 26, 254, 257, 261; of goods 23, 116, 216; hoarding 22, 91; of waste 9–10, 62, 64–5, 70, 87–104, 110, 253–4, 259 Adam, Barbara 3–7, 55–6, 239 Anthropocene 3, 5, 55, 108, 139, 143, 182–3, 239 art see trash art; waste assemblage 37–45, 123–4, 132, 243; see also Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari Bauman, Zygmunt 2, 107, 111 behaviour change xiv, 14, 43–5, 64–5, 68, 70–1, 100, 188, 244, 246–7, 250 Beirut Garbage Crisis 87–104, 108 Bennett, Jane 75, 215–16, 221 Burtynsky, Edward 213–15, 218–19 Butler, Judith 2, 112

204, 206, 228, 245, 260; and whiteness 72 climate change 5, 21, 55, 154, 167–8, 207 colonialism xiv, 2, 3, 9–10, 54, 81, 112–15, 159, 167–8, 180, 186, 259–60; see also war comfort 2, 6, 38, 44–5, 107, 122, 240 commodities 25–6, 54, 137, 211–12, 216–18, 233, 225, 240–1; see also objects consumerism 13–14, 24–5, 28, 41, 118, 136, 152, 212–13, 216, 220–1, 227, 240, 243–4, 249–50; see also consumption; disposability consumption 21, 24–6, 30, 37, 41, 43, 54, 70, 122–4, 130–1, 142, 152, 188, 213, 215, 218, 221, 225, 233, 240–3, 246, 253, 257 convenience 6, 13–14, 36, 43–5, 63, 70, 153, 239–41 COVID–19, xiii, 14

capitalism xiii, xiv, 6, 8, 37, 41, 47, 52–4, 56, 79, 108, 111–13, 122, 145, 169, 203, 216–17, 220, 239–40; see also consumerism; Marx, Karl carbon emissions 21, 128, 142, 167, 184, 253, 261; see also climate change cell phones see technology, mobile phones Charlie, Miriam 76, 78 Chernobyl 3, 13, 195–208 circular economy 11, 14, 122, 130–1, 136, 143, 160, 240–1, 246; Indigenous circular economies 254–5 cleanliness 2, 21, 23, 44, 50, 81, 129, 136, 240; clean city imaginary 9–10, 61, 63, 71–2, 87–100; cleaning 244; clean-ups 52–3, 138–9, 187–8, 196,

death 51–2, 63, 110, 113–14, 152–3, 183–5, 185, 200, 202 debility 51, 167–8, 172, 174–6; see also disability; illness decay 55, 110, 124–5, 152–3, 156, 161–2, 196, 200; biological/organic 8, 24, 26, 37, 44, 61–6, 91, 151–2, 254–7; bodily 51, 110, 152, 161; houses 10, 75–7, 79, 162, 232; radioactive xv, 136, 197–8, 200–1; see also entropy Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 37–8; see also assemblage; time, the refrain dirt 11, 22, 129, 169, 203, 215, 224; dirty spaces 9, 89, 97, 224; vs. soil 151–3; see also Douglas, Mary; waste, as dirt; waste, matter out of place disability 51, 167–79

Index  265 discard: as a category 22, 75, 110–11, 114, 116–17, 151–3, 160; discarded objects 7, 109–11, 113, 156, 212, 216, 225, 233; practices 5, 24, 47, 122–4, 240, 260 discard studies xiii, 15, 78 disease 21, 61, 63–5, 117, 128, 180, 203, 255, 259; see also debility; epigenetics; illness disposability 6, 10; in consumer culture 14, 122, 131, 136, 213–15, 233, 239–41, 245, 248; of human lives 10–11, 107–21 disposal see discard; disposability donating 26, 29, 249 Douglas, Mary 1, 22–3, 107, 138, 152; see also dirt; waste, matter out of place dumpster diving 25, 225, 248 entropy 10, 75, 77, 84, 145 environmentalism 171–5, 179, 188, 242, 246–7, 249; environmental justice movement 2, 72, 215, 249 epigenetics 12, 15, 185, 187 ethics see waste, ethical dimensions ethnography 39, 125, 240, 242–3 everyday life 6, 38–9, 61, 79, 97, 129–30, 137–8, 242–3 excess see surplus fashion see waste, clothing and textile flow 11, 53, 138, 145, 225, 233, 255; as metaphor 108–16; see also leakage; time, flow food: edibility 22–6, 29, 36–7, 39, 44; freshness of 36–46; rescue 28–31; security 21, 26–7, 154, 162, 254, 256 Foucault, Michel 62, 184, 200; biopolitics 61–74, 109; governmentality xiv, 36, 61–2, 70, 72

housing 75–86, 253–7; see also waste, domestic; waste, housing illness 128, 142, 167–78, 201, 215; see also disease; labour, impacts on body Indigenous peoples 23, 187–8; Australian Indigenous language 180; in Australia, Northern Territory 75–86; Precolumbian Indigenous people (Maya) 154, 156–62; in South Africa 253–63; see also circular economy, Indigenous; Indigenous Knowledge Practices; Indigenous research methods; waste management, Indigenous systems Indigenous Knowledge Practices 254, 257–60 Indigenous research methods 39, 258–61 industrialisation 3, 52–6, 169–71, 212, 220, 224–6; deindustrialisation xiii, 224–6, 232–3 Iversen, Kristen 168, 174–5 Jordan, Chris 213, 215–16, 219 junk art see trash art Khaal, Abu Bakr Hamid 112–15 Khoury, Elias 110–11

Giddens, Anthony 241–2, 249 gleaning 14, 239–49 globalisation 5, 7, 111, 118, 184, 213–14, 216–21, 225–6, 234, 239, 241

labour 224–6; household 41–5, 76, 240–1, 254–7; impacts on body 49–52, 127–8, 186, 221; intensive 31, 240–1; invisible 13, 50, 126, 214, 218–19, 221, 234, 243–4; of machines 48–9, 107; of nature 54, 171; precarious 27, 50, 227; and temporality 226–30; see also waste workers landfills see waste management, landfills leakage 13, 80, 125, 128–9, 204; chemical 47, 53, 188; leachate xiii, 140, 143–4, 253; radioactive 13, 204; water pipes 76, 80, 82; see also flow litter see waste, littering

Halasa, Malu 115–18 Hanford Nuclear Reservation 13, 204–6 Hawkins, Gay 1–2, 6–7, 22, 125, 130–1, 151–2, 212, 215 Hird, Myra J. 1–2 hoarding see accumulation home 36, 38, 40–5, 65, 75–86, 80, 111, 175–6, 239–43, 249–50; Indigenous

Marx, Karl 51–3 materials and materiality 6–7, 15, 42, 75, 97, 122–35, 143, 161, 214, 220–1; see also Bennett, Jane; new materialism migration 8, 11, 36–46, 108, 112–15, 179; see also refugees mining xv, 12, 54, 186, 214–15; see also rare earths; waste, mining

266  Index mobility 23; human 108, 111–12, 119; of waste 11, 124–5, 129, 132, 145; see also migration; space modernity 4, 37, 55, 241–2, 203, 249 nature 4, 61, 73–4, 154–6, 198–9; temporalities of 47, 52–5, 204–7; see also novel ecosystems; waste, impacts on wildlife neoliberalism 116–17, 172, 175, 241, 250 new materialism 125, 212, 216, 220, 242; see also Bennett, Jane; materials and materiality Nixon, Rob see slow violence novel ecosystems 13, 195–6, 204, 207 objects 123–4, 132; artefacts 151–3, 156; attachment to 76, 78, 113; biographies of 113, 123, 125, 130, 132, 136, 242, 245 oceans 1, 114, 154, 179–91, 185 packaging 23–5, 42, 141–2 Piepzna–Samarasinha, Leah Laksmi 167–71 plastic see waste policy cultures 75–86 pollution xv, 12, 22, 52–4, 129, 142–3, 155, 167–78, 203, 215, 219, 224, 253 poverty xiii, 9, 28, 61, 63, 71–2, 167, 186, 212–15, 221, 231 race see environmental justice movement; Indigenous peoples; waste management, racial politics of rare earths 54, 211–23 Rathje, William 136, 144 recycling see waste management refugees 10–11, 109–11, 115–18; see also migration; waste, humans as repair 3, 75–86, 240–1, 244, 247, 249 resource recovery 6, 254; see also circular economy; reuse reuse 3, 11, 14, 26, 100, 123, 126, 132, 239–52; see also sharing economy risk xiv, 29, 41, 44, 83, 117, 144, 187, 204, 212, 239, 241, 247–8, 259 scale 1, 4, 21, 91, 131, 139, 182, 213, 215–16; see also time, longue durée second–hand goods see reuse sharing 26–7, 30, 40–2 sharing economy see sharing

Shove, Elizabeth 6, 44, 240, 242–3 slow violence 3, 12, 108, 115–18, 139, 141, 168, 172, 175–6, 180 social practice theory 37, 242; see also Shove, Elizabeth soil 12, 47, 84, 151–66, 255–6; see also waste, mining space 108, 117, 139; immobility 108–9, 111–12, 118, 138, 145; public 64–6, 87–8, 97, 90–1, 100, 260; shadow places 11, 13, 137; spatiotemporal relations 3, 38–9, 61–74, 112, 114, 137, 182–8, 203, 226, 231; urban imaginaries 87–9; wasted spaces 13, 61, 63, 71, 176n3, 203, 224; weak places 88, 92, 96, 100; see also cleanliness; novel ecosystems; waste, spatial politics of Steingraber, Sandra 167–8, 171–3 surplus 1, 22–31, 37, 40, 122, 230; surplus populations 108, 111, 119; surplus value 52 surveillance xiv, 62–3, 67–9, 71, 77 sustainability, environmental 7, 14, 21, 39, 45, 130, 136, 160, 221, 241, 244, 249, 254, 256–61 technology 8, 24, 45, 200, 203, 205, 207; computers and ICT 8, 26–7, 29–30, 47–58, 211–12, 217, 219–21; mobile phones 29, 54, 211, 213; refrigerators 36–46; as solution to waste xiii–xv, 1, 9, 65, 136 temporality see time Thompson, Michael 78, 113, 154–6 thrift 7, 241–2, 246–7, 250 time: bodily 49–52, 55; circular/cyclical 6, 13, 14, 55, 111, 114, 136, 138–9, 200, 230, 255–7, 261; clock time 42, 48–9, 55, 107, 202, 242; Crip Time 12, 168–78; deep time 4–5, 55, 108, 138–9, 143–5, 182, 185; delay see lag; stalling; durability 6, 78, 128–9, 136–7, 241, 246, 249; flow 24, 145, 229; future and futurity xiv–xv, 3–7, 11, 14–15, 37, 62–3, 71, 79, 100, 112, 118, 139, 143–5, 168–9, 172, 180, 182–5, 188, 195–211, 215–17, 221, 230, 239, 241, 244, 246, 250; geological 55–6; Indigenous conceptions of 180, 188; intergenerational xiv, 3, 8, 11–13, 48, 180, 185, 187, 197, 211, 232–3, 240–1, 246–8, 258; just-in-time provision

Index  267 29–31; lag 47, 49, 51, 75, 79, 89, 142; linear 3–5, 14, 39, 55, 61, 72–3, 110–11, 114, 136, 168, 182, 188, 196, 200, 239, 248, 253, 256, 261; lingering see time, persistence; longue durée 11–12, 54, 119, 139–40, 160–2, 197, 201, 222, 239; multiplicity of temporalities 5, 12–14, 55, 107, 124–5, 180–4, 197, 201, 227–9; network time 48–9; non–human temporalities 47, 56, 195–7, 181, 203–4; “out of time” 3, 107–8, 111, 170, 172–3, 197; past, the 4–6, 53, 111, 115–16, 144, 152–4, 182–3, 185, 188, 197–8, 200–1, 206–7, 214, 217; pause 87–104; periodicity 64, 138; persistence 10–11, 97, 122–35, 139, 143, 211, 214, 220; present, the 4, 51, 57, 110, 130, 143–4, 153–4, 172, 174, 183, 185, 187–8, 197–8, 200–3, 206–7, 215–16, 220, 246, 247, 250; presentism 248; refrain, the 38, 42; repetition 38; return 5, 12, 111, 180–1, 184, 188; rhythms and routines 6–7, 36–8, 40–4, 56, 61, 64–5, 87–9, 96, 129, 145, 224, 226, 228–30, 234, 243; seasons and seasonality 43, 44, 61–2, 65–6, 70, 124, 172–3, 227–9, 240–1, 255; slowness 4, 47, 174, 241, 244; speed 4, 21, 48–9, 51, 58, 111, 122, 124, 136, 154, 162, 167, 174, 179, 184–5, 188, 201, 233, 241, 243–4, 248; stalling 10, 83, 89, 109, 112–15, 118; “stuckness” 108–9; suspension 10, 13, 89, 107–9, 112–14, 117, 139, 175, 197, 200–2; synchronicity 49, 62, 70–1, 74, 172–3, 226; time is money xiii, 54, 227, 231, 250; timetables and scheduling 9, 30–1, 62–74, 224–5, 227, 229–31, 243–4; waiting 81, 108, 200; wasted 10, 75–6, 82–3, 107, 114, 231; see also decay, radioactive; epigenetics; labour, intensive; waste, as matter out of time trash art 13, 211–23 toxicity xiv–v, 2–3, 8, 12–13, 15, 47–56, 117, 128, 139, 167–78, 185–7, 195–223; see also pollution; waste, radioactive Viney, William 3, 78, 154, 196, 216–17 volunteering 8, 29–31, 66, 125, 127, 249–50

vulnerability 1, 26, 115, 118 war 15–18, 112, 116; Cold War 168, 174–5, 198, 204, 206; Lebanon 10, 87, 90, 96, 116; Middle East 115–8; U.S. militarism 175; World War One 232; see also waste, military waste: agricultural 155, 167–8, 171, 173, 179, 257; in autobiography 167–78; in ceramics 211–23; chemical 47, 52–5, 128, 180; clothing and textile 6, 11, 122–35; conceptions of xiv–xv, 5, 15, 22, 117–18, 130, 151–2, 196; as dirt 1–2, 9, 22–3, 215; domestic xiv, 4, 62–71, 140, 143, 156, 239–40, 253; ethical dimensions xiv, 2, 6–7, 14, 61, 73, 215–16, 240, 249–50; e-waste 211–23; in film 108, 179, 197, 199, 214, 218; food waste 21–46, 97, 254; garbage 7, 61–74, 87–104, 109, 110, 115, 138, 140–3, 145, 152, 212, 229; hard rubbish 239–52; housing waste 75–86, 141, 214; humans as 2, 9, 50, 107–21, 225; impacts on wildlife 129, 179, 182–4, 201–3, 213; industrial 167–74, 185, 212–14, 219–20; invisibility of i, 2–3, 12–13, 87–101, 125, 128, 137–9, 141–2, 152–3, 180, 199, 214–15, 218, 222; in literature 107–21, 170–1; littering 97, 100, 137; as matter out of place 1, 3, 22–3, 107–8; as matter out of time 3, 22–3, 108, 111; methylmercury 12, 180, 184–7; microfibres 6, 123, 128–9; microplastics 128–9; mining xiv–xv, 12, 13, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220; nuclear see radioactive; organic/ biological waste 14, 62–4, 253–63; in photography see Burtynsky, Edward; Charlie, Miriam; Jordan, Chris; plastic 179, 213, 246, 260; military xv, 116–18, 197, 204; radioactive xv, 168, 195–211, 220; revival of older practices 14–15, 239–63; scrap metal 13, 224–34; in sculpture 213–15; sewage and wastewater 5, 77–8, 80, 109, 179–81, 185, 188, 255; and social inequality 2–3, 9, 12–13, 15, 50, 61–3, 71–3, 122; spatial conceptions of 1–6, 9–10, 107–9, 207, 213–15, 218, 219, 224–5; spatial politics of 2, 9, 61–3, 71–4; and value 7, 11, 22–3, 25–7, 78–9, 84, 90, 108, 113–19, 130–1, 136–7, 137, 145, 152, 196, 203, 233–4,

268  Index waste: continued 245, 249–50; wasted time 10, 75–6, 82–3, 107, 114, 231; see also pollution; toxicity; trash art; waste management; waste workers waste management 1; containment strategies xiv–xv, 1, 22, 26, 64–5, 89, 109, 138–40, 144–5, 197, 202; hard rubbish collections 14, 239–52; Indigenous systems 14, 253–63; landfills xiii–xiv, 1, 6, 10–11, 22, 28, 90–3, 100, 122–3, 126, 129, 132, 136–47, 151, 215–16, 249, 253, 257, 261; municipal collections 61–74, 137–8, 253; racial politics of 61–2, 72, 75–86, 215, 221; recycling xiv, 7, 11, 26, 93, 97, 100, 111, 122–3, 126, 130,

136–7, 213, 215, 225, 229, 242, 253–4, 256–60; scrap metal collection 13, 224–34; see also Beirut Garbage Crisis; space; waste workers waste studies see discard studies waste workers 2, 13–14, 62–71, 137–8, 144, 212, 221; scrap metal collectors 224–34; and gender xiv, 2, 171; see also labour water 12, 53, 129, 154, 156, 161, 179–80, 216; clean 63; contaminated xiii–xiv, 3, 11–12, 15, 22, 47, 53, 128–9, 180, 183–4, 186, 202, 215, 253, 261; contamination and disability 167–78; as resource 21, 47, 52, 130, 183, 186, 249; water security 154, 162; see also oceans; waste, sewage and wastewater