schaffer_poster_draft_draft

Draft draft in that it is the draft of a draft. To be expanded on greatly over the weekend.

Guy Schaffer
 * It’s our trash, too!: Waste stewardship as an emergent ethic of**

Guy Schaffer is a second-year student in the MS/PhD program in Science and Technology Studies, where he studies waste and waste systems using participatory methods and a pitchfork.

This project builds on work in social movement studies, particularly that on science, technology and social movements, which seeks to characterize the role of social movements in challenging/creating scientific knowledge and new technologies. While the work around social movements and waste has been extensive, it has mostly focused on movements against the siting of landfills, incinerators, and transfer stations, or on efforts to characterize the effects of waste on health. This project promises to characterize the efforts of a social movement to develop a new waste system built around a critique of the waste system and an alternative set of values.
 * Fields of Study**

This is also situated within discard studies, a nascent interdisciplinary subfield that examines waste, its separation from/incorporation into societies, and the social, cultural, and technical structures that undergird and emerge from these complex relationships. Much of discard studies is built around the premise that “trash” is a fluid and socially situated category, and that modes of managing it and relating to it are historically and culturally contingent. This project aims to examine cultural innovations with regards to trash, specifically an ethics of //waste stewardship//, in which caring for waste replaces disposal as a means of understanding trash.

The contemporary U.S. waste stream poses threats to environment, human health, and economy, but is managed to a point of near-invisibility by private haulers and municipal collection. However, a variety of actors and groups are working to make these problems visible, to pose alternatives to a throwaway culture and to “fix” the waste system. In this project, I work with one such group—an assortment of activists, researchers, organizers and farmers called //Troy Compost//—that opposes itself to a variety of structural problems in the U.S. waste system, as well as large-scale shifts toward forms of resource recovery that privilege industry, greenwash waste problems, and move resources out of communities. Instead, Troy Compost is working to develop a waste system that privileges the local and radically questions the division between waste and resource. In order to examine the //cultural innovations// developed in this context, I use participant observation at meetings and interviews with activists, I examine reports and public presentations, and work with the group to design and implement an alternative, decentralized resource recovery system for food and yard waste. How do these actors imagine the relationships between waste and ownership, innovation, justice, environment and health? And how do these imaginaries of waste and society draw from and challenge status-quo formulations of waste problems, recovery solutions, and the responsibilities of individuals?
 * Abstract**

There is too much trash.
 * Problem**

Landfills are filling up [data]

The anaerobic digestion of organic materials in landfills gives off methane, a greenhouse gas that is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide. [data]

Excessive wasting means excessive demand on natural resources. [info]

Initiatives that aim to reclaim materials from the waste stream often do by centralizing materials reclamation geographically or institutionally. They transport resources long distances in order to reclaim them for industrial and commercial purposes, rather than to meet the needs of __.

Troy Compost is working to implement waste systems that can care for resources locally in order to divert materials from landfills, keep methane out of the atmosphere, and close resource loops. We are designing means of composting through networked neighborhood sites and large-scale institutional facilities, and partnerships with landowners, gardeners, farmers, haulers, businesses, ….
 * Addressing Waste Problems**

In working with Troy Compost, I am not only helping to coordinate and facilitate these projects, to answer questions and turn compost piles, but also working to elicit the imaginaries of waste problems and waste ethics that are developing in this movement, and to operationalize “waste stewardship”—a care for waste—as a cultural innovation that might be exported to other sites of contestation around trash.

What is being developed by Troy Compost? How have they conceptualized contemporary waste problems and how are they solving them?
 * Research Questions**

Things to include: maps of compost sites in Troy, photos of planning meetings,
 * Preliminary Plans**

Also, explanation of how I have been/will continue to work on this.

Maybe a big box on waste stewardship? What is waste stewardship? Why do I focus on it so much? Waste stewardship is not throwing away; it is a radical questioning of the category of "away." Wastes do not go away; they become more distant, they are pyrolyzed or decomposed or melted down and turned into toothbrushes. ...
 * Waste Stewardship**

Why is this important!?
 * Meaningful Trash**

In terms of waste, "cultural innovation" of waste stewardship model. How can new values for waste change waste management?