guy_comparisons

HISTORICAL

I might be able to draw an interesting comparison between contemporary waste reform movements that aim to divert materials from landfills and those waste reform movements of the early 20th century U.S. that aimed to clean up the streets of the cities under the banner of “municipal housekeeping”? How did that movement work to define a waste problem, how did it frame the problem as the responsibility of certain parties (municipal government), and how did the realm of conceivable waste solutions get winnowed down? Priscialla Wald notes how the values of waste reform activists meshed with anti-immigrant values (particularly around the concept of //contamination//). What sorts of frames besides “too much trash” get drawn in to conversations about waste?

GEOGRAPHICAL

My waste activist friends like to compare the waste system in Troy to waste systems in other North American cities. Hardly a meeting goes by without somebody mentioning San Francisco or Toronto or some other town with municipal curbside food scrap collection, saying, “can you imagine if //we// had //that//?” and the group issuing a collective sigh. I exaggerate, but there’s a collective comparison process that goes on with relative regularity.

Following this lead, I think that at some point, I will need to compare the Troy case to cases where curbside composting emerged in a relatively institutionalized/commercialized form, to examine the different waste affects and ethics that emerge in places where composting is mainstream, and to try to piece out how other cities develop composting systems.

Also, I know very little about waste systems outside the U.S.! The case of the Zabaleen in Cairo, though—the waste picker caste who cleared waste from the street to feed to their pigs, until the practice was banned due to (dubious) health concerns in 2009—is a totally different system from any U.S. waste system, and the shifting imaginaries of disposal and waste problems over the course of that waste crisis might be useful comparison with waste crises and shifts in the U.S.—how does a waste crisis emerge, how does it affect the actors involved, and who decides on new imaginaries of “away” and “disposal” in the process?