The Domestic Reuse and Repurposing of Packaging

The Materiality of Sustainable Practices

The climate crisis, along with waste as a global ecological problem, have encouraged policymakers at various levels to establish regulations, initiatives, and agreements. For example, the European Parliament aims to adapt and promote a circular economy, which, in contrast to the linear economy model, aims to minimize the use of new raw materials and the production of waste in industrial production through reuse, repurposing and recycling of existing materials, including commodities and packaging…

Landscape Entrusted

Depositing Nuclear Waste in Geologic Time

Constructed about 53 kilometers southeast and 655 meters below Carlsbad in New Mexico in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is a permanent deep geological repository for a special kind of radioactive waste. There are several categories of radioactive waste, depending on many factors including types of radionuclides, levels of toxicity, and purposes of a project (whether the activities from which the waste derives are civil or defense-related). These classifications are specific to each regulatory body and thus often differ from nation to nation. The WIPP houses nuclear waste categorized as defense-generated transuranic (TRU) waste…

All That’s Left Behind

Black Ecological Interventions on Waste and Plastic

In Notes on Digging, Kiyan Williams’ poetic meditations on earth, Blackness, transformation, and memory overlay a visual montage of their movements in the creation of Reaching Towards Warmer Suns. Originally constructed on the banks of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, Williams’ captivating three-dimensional installation consists of arcing,…

The Value of Literature

The Discard of Society in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft

Wilhelm Raabe’s 1884 novel Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft (Pfister’s Mill: A Summer Vacation’s Notebook) is a work that depicts a society in a state of exceptional and rapid change. The sentiment that Ebert Pfister, the story’s narrator, expresses above captures what…

Dirty Signs in Clean Cities

On Trash as Socio-aesthetic Category in India

In India, various processes have congealed in the last three decades to rid cities of perceived ‘dirt.’ This is seen in state-commissioned urban improvement schemes that claim to instill regional and civic pride, as part of which street artists are instrumentalized within urban beautification and cleanliness drives. Notably,…