Questions for this week: What political functions do waste infrastructures serve? How does ‘distancing’ function? Do we accept this general argument? What actually happens with ‘recycling?’ Can recycling ever deliver on its promises? How have policies enacted by China in the last few years affected the global waste/recycling trade?
Readings:
- Calvino, Italo. “Continuous Cities I.” In Invisible Cities. 1st Harvest/HBJ ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, 114-6.
- Clapp, Jennifer. “The Distancing of Waste: Overconsumption in a Global Economy.” In Confronting Consumption, edited by Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002, 155–76.
- Princen, Thomas. “Distancing: Consumption and the Severing of Feedback.” In Confronting Consumption, edited by Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002, 103–32.
- National Association for PET Container Resources. “Report on Postconsumer PET Container Recycling Activity in 2017,” November 15, 2018. https://napcor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/NAPCOR_2017RateReport_FINAL_rev.pdf. (Focus primarily on the graphs on pages 4 and 13)
- MacBride, Samantha. “Does Recycling Actually Conserve or Preserve Things?” Discard Studies (blog), February 11, 2019. https://discardstudies.com/2019/02/11/12755/.
- Katz, Cheryl. “Piling Up: How China’s Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling.” Yale E360. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling.
- Schlossberg, Tala, and Nayeema Raza. “Opinion | The Great Recycling Con.” The New York Times , December 9, 2019, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/recycling-myths.html
- John Oliver on plastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E