Waste: Zone of Avoidance / Zone of Interest
©Nicolas Dory
“The spread of the word ‘design’ doesn’t come at a time when there is less to do; it comes at a time when there is more to do. Infinitely more, since it is the whole fabric that is now concerned thanks to the ecological crisis.”
In the 1999 film American Beauty by director Sam Mendes there is a scene several minutes long, accompanied by nostalgic piano music in which a hypnotic dance is performed by a plastic bag. The location is a deserted pedestrian walkway and the camera focuses towards a red brick building wall and pans left and right, up and down following the random drift of the plastic bag propelled by a gusting wind in this urban scenery. Dispersed on the floor, hundreds of dried leaves are seen also in motion but as a chorus rather than central characters, caressing the floor in the background. The plastic bag in its central and quasi-diva like role is the star of the performance in a delicate agitation, akin to a ballerina in a white tutu. It is portrayed as free of all restraints and let loose into its unknown destination in a close collaboration with the elements.[1] This setting is the perfect prelude to introduce us to the underworld of that which we resist accounting for, that which we no longer desire: all waste materials.
Created in England during the 1960s, the plastic bag is one of the most convenient and omnipresent designs ever conceived. It is fabricated in the trillions of units a year and is present in all corners of the world. Despite some efforts to curb its usage, its consumption is still universal. The bag costs almost nothing, is disposable and if you so choose non-reusable. Most of the time its typical life expectancy is a few hours, in other cases a limited number of days. As a counterpoint of its limited lifespan, the plastic bag will drift for years and years through the air, water, and earth. Once liberated from the constraints of the human-built channels of waste, the plastic bag initiates a journey into the abyss. Of unknown destiny, it will interplay with other existences for a century or more. Its materiality guarantees a lifespan of a hyper-temporality, that which human beings will never know. It was designed only for its initial limited temporal phase but the remainder of its existence has been left to wander in a zone of no predetermined program other than to freely compound with whatever its random trajectory will determine, but inevitably aggregating into the exponential mass of what is called waste.
The single plastic bag is an infinitesimal example in the colossal amount of matter in all its states - solid, liquid, gas - in the form of waste that our society discards. The centuries’ long churning of the crust of the Earth to turn it into countless human-made “things” designed to satisfy all kinds of human needs have never considered the aftermath of such short-lived objects, byproducts and substances. After their useful cycle is completed these “things” will enter the underworld, the space humans have resisted acknowledging its ever-growing physical existence, and will subsist for lengthy temporalities. This paper will argue that the only preeminent consideration in the designing of things is the satisfaction of human needs and desires, paying no attention to the rest of the material existence of these things, the byproducts and substances from which they derive. This fact reveals an understructure of beliefs that what is not wanted by humans somehow disappears into the unknown, a space of suspended consciousness. However, searching deeper into the human mind, concepts of matter being stable and static might be at the core of such pervasive notion, explaining in part what has summed up to be a life-threatening problem: the problem of waste. In contrast, as demonstrated by science, matter left on its own will amalgamate with everything and anything it comes into contact with, producing all kinds of surprising combinations, some of them harmless and some of them disastrous. Delving into the importance of considering matter as an actant[2] and a collaborator rather than as inert and subjugate, may initiate a process of purging from our collective way of thinking the idea that our unlimited continuous interplay with the material world has no profound consequences for life in general. It could also aid in integrating into the process of designing the afterlife of all things we create and put out in the physical world.
Since times immemorial humans have created refuse materials as a result of manufacturing and production, and burying or burning them was a common method for disposal. Nevertheless, some old-day customs already applied the concept of “out of sight out of mind” to a laughable degree. As Robert A. Scott affirms “as those who have studied urban life during the Middle Ages are fond of pointing out, the only real sanitation laws involved ordinances requiring homeowners to shout, ‘Look out below!’ three times before emptying chamber pots out of their windows and onto the streets.”[3] In a similar anecdotal mention of rubbish dumping, Andy Rihn comments that “Paris in the 15th century struggled to maintain city defense as garbage piles rose to monstrous heights directly outside of city walls. In many other European cities, it was common for residents to dispose of rotting food and other trash by tossing it out the window - it was widely believed that wild dogs would consume the refuse.”[4] These habits of a former age reveal a genealogy of ideas about rubbish and are a testament of how back in history, similar concepts about matter existed. In essence, once abandoned, matter does not regenerate itself on its own. It does not recreate itself when in contact with other substances.
Even if never at the heights to which garbage production has arisen in our contemporary life, these facts reveal that waste has always presented itself to humankind as a challenge which forcibly had to be confronted and that humans always dealt with a determined will to make them magically disappear. The problem we intend to delineate is the result of our throwaway culture, which by accumulation and multiplication is changing our planetary landscape. Waste is still considered as an irrelevant stakeholder in the larger scheme of things, while constituting a world of unintended consequences turned into a deviation impending on our future.
Although it is preposterous to attempt to develop a comprehensive list of all the types of the waste the human race produces, for the purpose of neatly focusing on the dramatic degree of our contemporary problem with waste, it is imperative to make a quick recounting of the extent of the calamity.
Matter exists in four states (solid, liquid, gas and plasma) and for approximately two centuries human-kind has produced huge amounts of refuse, particularly in the forms of solid, liquid and gas. By 2050, the World Bank estimates that the global generation of trash will reach a volume of 3.4 billion tons per year, seventy percent more than the current two billion tons per year we produce. Of these numbers, today only 16% gets recycled (323 million tons), and 46% (950 million tons) are disposed of unsustainably, most commonly burnt or buried.[5] To mention just a few examples of waste generation by of the most polluting industries, the fast fashion industry produces over 92 million tons of waste and consumes 1.5 trillion liters of water per year,[6]the pesticide industry produces approximately 5.6 billion pounds of pesticides a year,[7] and emissions from the fossil fuel industry reached 36.81 billion tons of CO2 in 2019.[8]
The 2019 Waste Generation and Recycling Indices of the Verisk Maplecroft, a global risk and strategic consulting firm based in the United Kingdom, reports the following:
The rate of raw material extraction per capita has also risen, as consumers have steadily grown to demand larger amounts of products. Waste streams have diversified over this period too, introducing previously unheard-of categories like plastics and e-waste. The result is a society which produces more waste overall, more waste per person, and a wider variety of waste types.[9]
The unfortunate reality described above is a direct consequence of production and consumption of human-made things of which waste is both one of the results but also an agent of disruptive action on our physical surroundings. In this research, the present-day conundrum of waste acts as a backdrop to the issues under investigation. One of these issues is the meaning of the term “waste.” What is waste? Why are we even interested in the subject? We look at waste as inanimate and in a way innocuous. However, under the current state of things it is a world of its own, a world which is letting its powers be mutedly displayed, through matter itself, and the picture we are witnessing is profoundly disturbing.
Waste is a consequence of human activity and is addressed as something negligible, unimportant, or non-desirable. However, in our industrial and technological society, the volume and pervasiveness of this billowing fact have penetrated the entire Earth's ecosystems, including the stratosphere. The amount and variety of discarded material humans have created is so gigantic that it is turning into a situation menacing both human and non-human life. For many centuries waste has been viewed as an annoyance that needs to be out of sight. The underlying concept of such a phenomenon originates in this human idea that junk somehow goes away: out of sight equals out of mind. Waste as a thing which "goes away" is a profoundly anthropocentric modern conception, linked to the hyper-production and hyper-consumption of the capitalist system. The discarded is a by-product of modern times and for "convenience," it was constituted as a circuit of evasion.
Devoid of value, usability, and need, waste is neglected. We simply dispose of waste as if by doing so it no longer exists. Waste goes to a place that does not belong in our imagination and is thrown into a space outside the dominion of care. When we dispose of it, it is as if we perform some kind of magic trick, a wishful way of thinking: it quits and disappears from this world. It is quite a supernatural or even a paranormal intimation. Waste goes into a parallel universe we have nothing to do with. Supposedly, it goes into an underworld, a negative space.
So, if waste is part of a negative space, and is today such a gigantic mass, what would be its antithetical field, and what accounts for its magnitude? The affirmative underside sphere might be, at least in part, the world of objects and things to which humankind have become so profoundly dependent in a dialectical interchange in “which human subjects and inanimate objects may be said to constitute one another,”[10] and in “how an object’s capacity to materialize identity remains contingent beyond the bounds of democracy and its consumer culture.”[11] Bill Brown also adds “we look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts.”[12] These affirmations suggest that in our contemporary society, objects and things enjoy a central role in the construction and predication of the self, and are able to perform this function because they speak to us. Additionally, “things will still lurk in the shadows of the ballroom, and continue to lurk there after the subject and object have done their thing, long after the party is over,”[13] suggesting that the dialog between humans and things is so profound that they will leave a mark, or an indexical sign even if in misuse.
Bruno Latour says “to define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems, the Umwelt that make it possible for them to breathe.”[14] In that sense contemporary human beings need such a huge number of things and objects to assist them in their lives, “things” which are a large part of their support system. This dependence on all things fabricated attests to how complex and intricate solving this problem would be. Humans are matter, but also devise countless forms of it as artifacts which operate as extensions of the infinite appetite to express the self through material things, be them objects, cars, travel, food, and so on, all producing a chain of alterations in the physical world.
After their life cycle is completed, objects, things, and substances we use for our advantage inevitably are collected in the underworld or negative space, as we were referring to in previous paragraphs. Arjun Appadurai advises “even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.”[15] In that light, the channels of circulation of waste society has devised to get rid of its rubbish are diverse but the normal trajectory is a typical one. Materials in disuse, devoid of function and purpose will find themselves in garbage cans, dumpsters, junkyards, dumping grounds, landfills, disposable areas. Or they may be stationed for years in misuse, exposed to the works of the elements, transforming their condition of newness progressively into the decrepit, dilapidated, run-down or broken-down. Waste is always in a process of degradation and many times, of dismemberment. It exists as a phantom and as a matter of matter in a state of decomposition, radically present only in the physical realm.
The production of things useful to us almost always results in a byproduct which we perceive as non-functional: for example, all the packaging which envelops the products we buy. On the other hand, if we find a purpose for waste, it can be reclaimed into our world as existing again in it. For example, think of sawdust. As a thing, it can go both ways, as waste and as a useful product in particle board, wood pulp, mulch, or as fuel. Therefore, waste use or re-purposing is assigned by humans, to organize our outer world always according to our anthropocentric vision.
Finally, it is important to mention that there are many types of waste: biodegradable, non-degradable, toxic, or radioactive with different levels of possibilities of harm to humans and non-humans. From this perspective, we can elucidate broad categorizations of waste from several axial perspectives: duration (or biodegradable to non-biodegradable,) volume (small-scale to large-scale,) and toxicity (non-toxic to toxic.) From those categories, we can infer the spectrum from the most damaging to the least one. Under this light, the most caustic types would be non-degradable, very hazardous and produced in large volume. This latter type is many times produced by alterations of natural materials done by humans by means of an artificial method such as the use of caustic synthetic solvents and processed under unnaturally high temperatures. These types of byproducts manufactured by humans cannot be reinserted into nature without doing something, and will roam around for millions of years, a time-space beyond what we can comprehend.
One of the pivotal marks that waste leaves on Earth today is its massive volume in the form of dead objects and dispersed materials. It is a scattered mass we cannot see directly, and that is present in the outermost layer of our planet in addition to its water bodies and atmosphere. For its size and significance, waste could be better defined as a “hyperobject,” a term coined by Timothy Morton in his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
As defined by Morton, hyperobjects are “objects in their own right,”[16] constituents of the physical world, and thus real entities. First of all, they are of colossal dimensions and can be “collections, systems or assemblages of other objects.”[17] They are natural or human-made. Additionally, they are astronomically spread out throughout space and time relative to our human scale. For example, the human-made plastic material present around us (in our sneaker’s sole; our cellphone; our electrical devices; our equipment; our chairs; and so on, in addition to the mass of it floating in the oceans) may constitute the plastic hyperobject which could linger on Earth for thousands of years.
Hyperobjects exist in the physical domain but outside of human thinking. Contrary to objects that belong to dimensions we can perceive as a whole (for example, a table or a tree) at any given moment, we can only see pieces of a hyperobject, but we can never see it as a whole. For instance, of the climate change hyperobject, we can only see the hailstorm we experienced last summer, but we will never see the whole of it.
The segmented nature of hyperobjects makes thinking of them singularly tricky. For example, think of all the plutonium scattered in Earth’s oceans due to nuclear testing. We can never come up with a clear vision of it in our mind because it is a hyperobject formed by tiny particles that are not perceivable to the human eye, disbanded in massive water bodies. According to Morton, hyperobjects have a spectral nature that makes us believe they are away from us, but contrary to this perception, they arehere around us. However, because of their colossal scale, they are also there. For example, we may see a piece of garbage on our city street, but we do not see the billions of tons of rubbish of which that garbage is a part of globally. In that sense, the total amount of garbage has a ghostly presence. Since we cannot directly perceive hyperobjects, the only way to know of them is through elaborate mental abilities (association, correlation, probability) in exercises that demand abstract knowledge to access sources of data and information. For instance, to account for all the chemicals disposed of by all nations in the year 2019, information needs to be gathered region by region, nation by nation, categorizing it and translating information into graphs. There will never be a picture of it but rather an assembly of information and data that will have to be interpreted by experts.
Morton identifies five properties that hyperobjects have in common, which allude to the shape and forms which waste has developed to be. These are viscosity, which means that its constituents are entangled with one another. Non-locality, which means their elements are spread out in a hyperdimensional space (CO2 in the atmosphere, for example). Temporal undulation, which means that as large-scale objects, they have a special relationship to time and are contained in a temporality our human brain cannot apprehend (for example, some particles we have discarded may linger for 250 million years.) Phasing, which means that hyperobjects live in a higher dimensional structure, and when the zone of one hyperobject is traversed by that of another one, there is a phasing interference (we only experience the indexical sign of the phasing: i.e. an intense fire in the summer as the proof of existence of climate change.) Finally, inter-objectivity, which means that hyperobjects belong to the non-human sphere and do not reside in the intersubjective and anthropocentric world. Due to its enormous scale, waste fits into the characterization of a hyperobject: it is a new type of challenge that humanity has never had to confront before. In this sense, we are in uncharted territory, and the assistance of language to define it is of capital importance.
Morton adds that hyperobjects are ever-present and they have a menacing and otherworldly nature, collecting power over time, growing incrementally. The bigger they become the more they imply some form of death and “the more you get rid of them, the more you realize you can’t get rid of them. They seriously undermine the notion of ‘away.’ Out of sight is no longer out of mind.”[18]
Waste can be characterized as a hyperobject and as a result of our massive generation of it we are seeing the consequences of this colossal mass in our surroundings. The sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems, including agriculture, human settlements, urbanization, forestry, and other uses of land, have altered global patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem processes, creating what scientists call Anthropogenic Biomes. Human activity and the global economic system are now the primary drivers of change in the Earth Systems, causing considerable damages and with no signs of real alleviation.
Scientists have begun seeing signs of alarm: the mega system might be showing early signs of breaking down. In the summer of 2012, the scientific community began witnessing the initial significant tolls of our influences on the global Earth systems, when for the first time an unexpected twenty-degree Celsius deviation in the temperature of the Arctic Circle was registered, causing the vast extent of the ice melting in that region. For 150 years, due to gas emissions, ninety-five percent of the extra heat we have created in the atmosphere was being hidden in the ocean floors through absorption. Nowadays, that heat has gotten to a saturation point: it has begun being released through the poles. Additionally, the Polar Vortex[19] that keeps the high-pressure cold air and the jets streams stable is opening up, releasing heat into the southern latitude and the Arctic, and the atmosphere keeps on warming up.[i] This is the type of anomaly that Morton describes as the “the horrifying, the terrifying and the petrifying,”[20] and in the case of waste, it is the result of circumventing the dilemma it poses. The phenomena described above are a testimony of the complexity of the physical reality: every human-made mixture or compound will act and produce in the environment a variety of unintended real physical consequences.
In the design field, these unintended consequences are not taken into account precisely because of the modern conception that matter has a stable and static condition. As such it may accumulate but it always will remain steady, stagnant and subdued. It has no action power.
However, as exposed by physicists at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, quantum theory disclosed a radical change in the comprehension of the nature of reality, permanently subverting the basic understanding of the physical world. The theory revealed in matter an enigmatic and baffling picture of the tiniest dimensions, a universe of hyperactivity, boundless interchange, commuting and rearrangement. It is a microcosmos where the boundaries between objects are illusory. As Bill Brown posited “somewhere beyond or beneath the phenomena we see and touch there lurks some other life and law of things, the swarm of electrons.”[21] There are countless masked activities taking place at an infinitesimal level that humans cannot perceive: however, sooner or later these occurrences will assemble and enlarge to the point of manifesting in the physical reality of our human dimensions. Additionally, matter is not static; it is in constant flux, and from that flux emerges new physical and surprising combinations, some of them life threatening.
Jane Bennet asserts that “the sheer volume of commodities, and the hyper-consumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter,”[22] acknowledging in our minds a hidden mechanism which facilitates human activities like littering. She is referring to the inter-subjective common and inaccurate notion of matter which has persisted for centuries:
the idea that matter as passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert. This habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings) is “partition of the sensible,” to use Jacques Rancière’s phrase. The quarantines of matter and life encourages us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations.[23]
In her book “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,” Bennett rejects the classical Western divide between subjects and objects, the in-side (subject) and the out-side (things), and acknowledges in matter a force or energy capable of acting in the world. She confers those capabilities to all kinds of matter, including rigid matter such as metals. She goes as far as to dissolve such binaries, as the “I” and the “it,” and states that the self is itself a combine, a human-nonhuman conglomeration due to the material nature of the body and its functioning being regimented by natural laws. She argues that the advances in science have transformed the partitions between life and matter, organic and inorganic, into something more and more questionable.
There are things happening in the physical world that are not perceivable to human beings (in the microcosm and the macrocosm, for example) and as such we have believed they are devoid of power, and have remained invisible and pertaining to an obscure dimension we just don’t recognize. These phantasmatic developments are out of the human consciousness for two reasons: for physical impediments such as the capacities of our senses to perceive only in a limited spectrum of possibilities, and also for cultural impediments such as deep-seated ideas about the world (such as matter being passive, inert, irresponsive.) In opposition to the canonical views about matter, Bennett elaborates what she calls a vital materialism, a field in which vitality means “the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”[24] In this light she asks a question which is central to the present study: “How for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or the ‘recycling,’ but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter?”[25]
The vital matter, says Bennett, has thing-power, an impersonal power referring to the capacity of any body (organic, inorganic, nonhuman, natural, or cultural) of “activity and responsiveness.”[26] Vital matter is any actant as a source of action which can do things, make a difference or produce an effect. By infusing materiality with agency, Bennett exonerates matter of automatism and mechanism: materials are lively and self-organizing. It constitutes a world of autonomous activity and she adds: “the so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thing-power.”[27]
This is a central notion to our argument since waste belongs to the physical world and as Morton mentioned is a real entity, and as such, as illuminated by Bennet, it is entrusted with agency: with a life force. Waste is not passive nor subdued. Robert Sullivan describes the liveliness that exists even in trash when he describes a dumping site, a description that goes to the core of the point we want to highlight in this investigation:
The… garbage hills are alive… there are billions of microscopic organisms thriving underground in the dark, oxygen-free communities…these cells then exhale huge underground plumes of carbon dioxide and of warm moist methane, giant stillborn tropical winds that seep through the ground to feed the Meadowland’s fires, or creep up into the atmosphere, where they eat away at the ….ozone…I found a little leachate seep…[and] here at its birth… this little seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc.[28]
Waste and the way we dispose of it, by hiding it or dumping it, introduces in the physical world an element of promiscuity where matter and substances are randomly put in contact with one another and then left to the laws of chance. This way we unleash unexpected or even unknown processes where most of the time the outcome may be destructive.
Whatever we discard will ultimately assemble with other elements. Of this characteristic of matter Bennett says:
Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them within. Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage.[29]
Matter and its infinitesimal constituents have thing-power, and have the capacity to assemble morphing into other state of being, in a rich succession of alchemies, and as Bennet says the physical world is not completely determined. She posits that an aspect of chance inhabits within it. She notices that the transient aspect of matter entails invention in a continual flow of alterations and affections: “it is to mod(e)ify and be modified by others.” In this same way, waste has thing power and is made up of random assemblages somewhat distinct from the assemblages that occur on the soil of a forest for instance. There the leaves, branches, mushrooms, worms, insects, lichen, and so on, will amalgamate into a local composite that could be regenerated into a constant backdrop for years and years, in a cycling succession which will constitute an endemic recurrence. In contrast, waste assemblages represent a more hostile combination: a plastic bottle with remnants of polish remover, with orange peels, an empty tube of tooth paste, a used cotton ball, and so on. The list could be endless. What is the result of such combinations? We don’t really know until they manifest as larger phenomena as for example climate alterations, ocean acidification, terrestrial biosphere degradation or high greenhouse gas levels and global temperature.
As we mentioned above Jane Bennet observes creativity in the working of the physical world and Manuel de Landa corroborates that nature has a creative side when he comments “when put together, these forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined. And this insight into matter’s inherent creativity needs to be fully incorporated into our new materialist philosophies.”[30]
This matter power to create is not intersubjective (person to person) but impersonal, emanating from the non-human, from organic or inorganic bodies. This impersonal power is affective in Bennet’s interpretation of the notion of affect “which refers broadly to the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness[31]… [she] equate[s] affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body.”[32] This impersonal power emerging from matter belongs to the inter-objective realm,[33] the whole cosmic world of matter. The intersubjective space (human and anthropocentric), shared among humans, is a minuscule dominion of a much expansive space field: the interobjective amplitude (non-human). As Timothy Morton asserts all entities of any scale are interconnected in the interobjective system that he calls the mesh. When an object is born, is it simultaneously entangled in the mesh. Under this consideration, out of sight can never be out of mind any longer. Hence, waste should no longer be contemplated as a zone of avoidance but rather as a zone of keen interest, and with all urgency the design world should begin to deal with it as central to its practice and integrated in the design of things.
“The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption”[34] says Bennett. A change in the way we think about matter has become progressively more urgent, and we need to begin a collective change of our conception about it. As a consequence of this potential powerful shift in thinking, we could be on the cusp of, all together coming to understand that everything is part of a cosmic mesh where nothing will ever go away and from which nothing can be purged. Under this light, waste is a lively and powerful mass, with impersonal affect outside of the human sphere of interest. It is governed by the interobjective laws, a horizontal field with no hierarchies, and where humans represent a diminutive segment of concern against a compelling gargantuan mass, which is calling us for respect and representation.
Notes
[1] American Beauty is a 1999 American drama film written by Alan Ball and directed by Sam Mendes, accessed 04/10/20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHxi-HSgNPc
[2] “The term is Bruno Latour’s: an actant is a source of action that can be either human or non-human; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.” Jane Bennett in “Vibrant Matter”, p VIII.
[3] Robert A. Scott, “Life in the Middle,” in Miracle Cures: Saints, Pilgrimage, and the Healing Powers of Belief (University of California Press, 2010), 9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppj66.6
[4] Andy Rihn, “The Garbologist is in: A Brief History of Garbage.” Accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.roadrunnerwm.com/blog/history-of-garbage
[5] Kristin Linnenkoper, “Ranking the Biggest Waste Producers Worldwide,” Accessed March 20, 2020, https://recyclinginternational.com/business/ranking-the-biggest-waste-producers-worldwide/27792/ + Waste Generation and Recycling Indices 2019, Verisk Maplecroft Website, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.circularonline.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Verisk_Maplecroft_Waste_Generation_Index_Overview_2019.pdf
[6] “The Environmental Price of Fast Fashion,” Nature’s Review Website, Accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-020-0039-9
[7] “Pesticide Use and Exposure Extensive Worldwide,” NCBI Website, Accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/
[8] “Analysis: Global Fossil-Fuel Emissions up 0.6% in 2019 Due to China,” Carbon Brief Website, Accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-fossil-fuel-emissions-up-zero-point-six-per-cent-in-2019-due-to-china
[9] “Waste Generation and Recycling Indices 2019: Overview and Findings,” Verisk Maplecroft Website, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.circularonline.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Verisk_Maplecroft_Waste_Generation_Index_Overview_2019.pdf
[10] Bill Brown, “The Tyranny of Things”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2002): 446, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344278 Accessed: 12-02-2020 19:24 UTC.
[11] Brown, “The Tyranny of Things”, 446.
[12] Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.
[13] Brown, “Thing Theory,” 3.
[14] Latour, Bruno. A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk). Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008.
[15] Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.
https://www-fulcrum-org.libproxy.newschool.edu/concern/monographs/vq27zp00f
[16] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2.
[17] Morton, Hyperobjects, 2.
[18] Morton, Hyperobjects, 36.
[19] Johan Rockström,“Beyond the Anthropocene,” YouTube, February 14, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9ETiSaxyfk&app=desktop
[20] The terms which Timothy Morton utilizes to define the time scales of some hyperobjects, in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 59.
[21] Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 6.
[22] Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 6.
[23] Bennet, Vibrant Matter, VII.
[24] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, VIII.
[25] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, VIII.
[26] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, XII.
[27] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 18.
[28] Bennet, Vibrant Matter, 6.
[29] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 22.
[30] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 7.
[31] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, XII.
[32] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, XIII.
[33] Morton, Hyperobjects, 81-95.
[34] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, IX.
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