schaffer_core_categ


 * Core Categories**

This might simply be analogous to //product stewardship//, but with a set of responsibilities that attach to consumers, waste management companies, and the state. The members of Troy Compost have seemed intrigued by the concept of stewardship (perhaps owing to a Christian environmental ethic of stewardship of the Earth?) and have already begun to take up this frame (neighborhood piles have stewards). What does it mean to take care of one’s waste, to love one’s waste stream? What does it mean to extend this kind of care to the level of the community or municipality? The nation? Dare I say—the world?
 * waste stewardship**

Pulling from Zsuzsa Gille’s work…a means of talking about the systems in which waste gets created and moved around, the discourses that classify waste and frame waste as a problem, and the ethical, legal, social, etc systems for deciding who gets to deal with waste and how. This category is useful in examining the possibility that large-scale changes in the American waste regime are taking place—or need to take place. Furthermore, there’s a chance its dramatic tone could be useful in eliciting articulations of critiques of waste regimes.
 * waste regimes**

A means of pointing to imaginaries about the middle ground between ethical waste stewardship (what //should// be done with waste?) and state-based waste regimes (who has the right to control wasting?). How does good waste policy and waste practice get defined? How do you know if these policies/practices are good? Who has what rights in relation to waste, and how do you match up those rights in relation to social/environmental concerns?
 * waste governance**

Away has been an interest of Abby Lublin’s; our first presentation to City Council was entitled //Where is “away?”// as a joking nod to the ambiguity of the phrase “throwaway.” It’s a good question, and opening up the category of //away// to further scrutiny might be a useful tool for eliciting both articulations of waste regimes and alternate frameworks for resource management (i.e., what do we call it when “away” is here?).
 * “away”**

It seems like this term might have been drawn from human resource management, but some of my informants in public works have pointed to //resource// management as an important discursive shift away from //waste// management. Is this shift important? Are food scraps a //resource// now, or is it simply a euphemism in a system in which people still view food scraps as trash but compost them anyway? What kind of work does “resource management” do?
 * resource management**

Waste is not a simple problem, nor is it a single problem (nor, rightly speaking, is "waste" itself a problem, except in some definitions). Conceptions of the "waste problem" will become increasingly salient...
 * waste problems**