Journey to the Safest Place on Earth
This film examines the limitations and contradictions of finding safe places for nuclear waste storage.
This film examines the limitations and contradictions of finding safe places for nuclear waste storage.
This film follows an entrepreneurial father of 27 children as he runs a recycling business in Sao Paulo to sustain his huge family.
In Trash Dance, choreographer Allison Orr tries to persuade employees of the Austin Department of Solid Waste to participate in a public dance performance.
Agbogbloshie (Ghana) is an unnerving and fascinating example of human ingenuity, but at the same time an environmental and social tragedy.
Waste is never completely or permanently “out of sight.” Once discarded, it undergoes transformations, often reappearing elsewhere in new forms. In this volume of RCC Perspectives, scholars from different disciplines—from history and art history, urban geography, environmental studies, and anthropology—investigate the traces waste leaves behind in the course of its travels.
As a space where terrestrial jurisdiction did not apply, the ocean has often served as a repository for unwanted things, whether people or objects. This article traces the journeys of several ships and their cargos of toxic waste in the 1970s and 1980s.
Urban mining—reclaiming valuable metals from discarded electronic devices—has become an important economic activity in the informal sector in places such as Agbogbloshie, a slum in Accra, Ghana. This article examines the material flows linking Ghana with the rest of the world, the politics of waste recycling, and the hazards faced by those processing e-waste.
Energy-from-waste plants in places like Britain were designed help reduce waste and carbon emissions, but they have had unintended side-effects.
Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York, was the subject of a struggle over where to dispose of the waste of a city strapped for space. While the landfill was closed in 2001, the events of 9/11 and the need to clear the large amounts of rubble and human remains from the site of the Twin Towers attack turned Fresh Kills into hallowed ground, which posed new questions about the future of the site.
In case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of bicycling and waste recycling—tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.