schaffer_data

HAD I DATA

Often, people who study things that most people do but few people talk about have a perverse fascination with data (Kinsey, 1948); several of my informants have already expressed to me their excitement about “waste audits” and other projects to quantify the U.S. waste stream. While I recognize that this excitement might be situated within what Marilyn Strathern (2000) terms an “audit culture,” in which the act assessment works to evade responsibility, the excitement about trash is catching. I want to take volumetric measurements of the waste stream; I want to peek inside landfills. I want to know what [the U.S.] throws away.

While this kind of data hunting works against the produced //invisibility// of waste in the contemporary US (Nagle 2013; Strasser 1999), it flattens a variety of facets of American trash. A big list of the trash that a city produces ignores the work of collection and the throughput of production (and I’m not referring to that “production” that makes waste out of gum wrappers and used Kleenex). Instead, waste audits seem to paradoxically frame their results as the waste produced by American households, and toss their blame that way, toward wasteful subjects and a throwaway culture.

The image generated in a waste audit is a clear plastic box that a city collectively fills with trash and looks at in order to feel wasteful. The image of the American waste stream that I want is one in which that trash moves around, from extraction to manufacture to use to disposal, reuse, or destruction.

If I am to give in to that primordial urge for data and dream of excel spreadsheets, I’d like to focus on collection and production (production qua production, not qua //waste generation//). On the collection end, I’d love to have some sort of sense of how much waste in the U.S. is picked up by private haulers and how much by municipal collection. It’d be nice, furthermore, to know how these haulers dispose of waste once they have it. How much moves across state lines? How much of those recyclables and compostables turn back into bottles and food? Are there real resource cycles in the U.S., or just resource eddies that divert waste from the trash for one or two uses?

I’m imagining that this kind of waste flow mapping could be accomplished through very detailed records of the materials picked up by a variety of haulers in a variety of places, the throughput of recycling plants and organics recycling operations, the input to landfills and the output of overseas waste shipping operations.