The most impressive thing about our trash is how well made it is. A plastic juice container tossed in the trash is astonishingly well made: the regularity of the surfaces; the fine hard ridges of the screw-top; the elegant fusion of bottom and walls, all rendered in a light, transparent medium. Or think of a polystyrene fast-food container, used for seconds, then discarded. Imagine the astonishment of a Leonardo da Vinci encountering such an object. How was it made? What is its material? How were the colors applied? What is the source of the exquisitely regulated workmanship? Yet to us, it is incidental utility and enduring trash.

Why is our trash so well made? Primarily, because it is mass-produced in conditions of industrial automation. Leonardo would look at a polystyrene container through the lens of a culture whose manufactures depended almost entirely on the ability of the individual workman to manage the unpredictable qualities of the material he had: a workmanship of skill and risk. Practically nothing was made with the kind of certainty that we routinely extract from automated artifice (see Pye).

Trash is what it has always been, quotidian refuse. But the nature of trash is changing fast. Over the last five thousand years it has become increasingly urban, and now, with globalization, urban trash is nearly all the trash there is. Moreover, in the last two centuries trash has become first industrial, then technoscientific, as industrial production has merged with technology and science. Trash is now technological. Drive around neighborhoods on garbage day in a large city: at the curbside, you’ll see television sets, old speakers, daisy-wheel printers, video monitors, even entire computers. Sometimes they’re broken and not worth repair. Sometimes they’re just unwanted. Even when malfunctioning, they remain exceptionally well made. The detail, precision, joinery, materials, and finishes are unique in the history of detritus.

Mass production and automated industry have significantly changed the composition of trash. They, in turn, are dependent upon urbanism and civilization, which I understand by contrast with the idea of culture. Culture is a one-word epitome for the artifactual economy (symbolic and technical) that sustains any human community. It is present wherever humans are. It is the practical, artifactual matrix that shelters every human group. Civilization is different. It is the historical event—or series of events—that introduces the civic into a human culture: the event of the city, of urbanization. World civilizations are products of the diverse transmutations that diverse cultures have undergone in cities.

The difference between technology and technical culture is akin to that between civilization and culture. A civilization is an event in the history of culture. Technology (technologizing) is an event in the history of technical culture, or technics. Humans have depended on technics since the first stone tools were fashioned by the first species of the genus Homo some two million years ago. An important difference between human tools and the so-called tools of chimpanzees is that the chimpanzees could easily survive without them, while for us some level of technical culture is a precondition of biological existence. Imagine people like us trying to live in the wilderness with not so much as a knife or the use of fire.

However, technology is not just tools or technical culture. It is a series of events in the history of technical culture. It happened first in Britain in the 1770s. The Industrial Revolution in manufacturing was accompanied by the rise of engineering knowledge and the first polytechnics (in France). The sociotechnical economy of, first, Britain, then western Europe, then America, and now the world, began to change. It began to base itself on the technological. This came as the result of crossing a threshold. More and more of what we were making with tools and machines was other tools and other machines, or their parts and accessories. Following the Industrial Revolution, machines have increasingly been made with other machines in mind as much as the humans who will operate them. Artifacts depend on ever vaster networks of other artifacts. Consequently, more of what is made is designed to take other artifacts—the machine-machine interface—into account. Machine-machine relations have become at least as important as the human interface.

An example I like to use is the Boeing 747 aircraft. It has 4.5 million parts. Its design required 75,000 engineering drawings (Petroski). The very being of a high-tech artifact like the 747 presupposes innumerable layers of artifactual interaction, linking the plane to passengers, metallurgy, petrochemicals, telecommunications, engineering schools, and so on. Without all the mediators, it cannot fly, and becomes no more than high-tech trash.

Technological trash is well made because technological artifacts consigned to the trash are mass-produced and made to interface. Imagine noticing a computer card—say, an old modem—undamaged, in the curbside trash. Someone could conceivably use it or at least recycle its electrical components. But it is generally cheaper to buy such components new, and recycling integrated circuits and micro-chips is practically impossible. So this computer card is trash.

Examine the worthless thing. Its high level of finish and diversity of materials reveal it as urban, as civilized, as mass-produced. Consider how much of it is designed to connect to another machine. As a modem, it mediates between the telephone line and the computer’s central processing unit (CPU). That is a matter, at the level of circuitry, of multiple connections and rapid switching across all contact points. This circuitry is carefully tuned to standard protocols for both the CPU and the telephone line. There is practically nothing about the card that is not technological, in the sense of having been made in anticipation of other machines with which it must be more or less directly coupled. It is that coupling that probably got the modem trashed. Technically, it works fine. The circuitry is intact; it still does exactly what it was designed to do. It is trash because changes in everything to which it must connect have made it unusable.

A shift in technical economy to favor replacement over repair explains some part of technological trash. Not many of us in North America would bother to repair a seriously malfunctioning television. If it was under warranty, we would return it; if not, it’s probably trash. Yet I remember a time when every television was repaired. Television repairmen came to your home to do it. I remember their fascinating tool boxes, the lids folding out to reveal a selection of vacuum tubes.

Repair is not necessarily a bad thing to have to do (Spelman). It is good to live in a world that can be repaired, in which artifacts are worth repairing. A world where things are well made is likely to be in constant need of upkeep. A world where things are badly made, where nothing is worth repairing, is a throw-away world of indifferent replacements. The gesture of repair is a refusal to admit that art and knowledge have reached their limit, that no more can be made, no more done, with a thing. It’s like refusing to let a person die. Nevertheless, more and more often, what makes our works work is a technological black box that one must simply replace. The failed unit may be recyclable in part, though there is always a surd for the trash. Technological artifacts are thus constructed in anticipation of other artifacts, themselves anticipating others, so that they are highly vulnerable to obsolescence well before they fail. They become the best-made trash in history.

Semantically, trash belongs with garbage, junk, rubbish, refuse, debris, and waste. Trash is more like junk than garbage. Garbage is organic. It’s formless and it stinks. Rubbish is particulate: dust, shards, cigarette butts, bottle caps. Trash, like junk, is often clean, a matter of well-made paper, plastic, and metal. Like junk, trash includes the malfunctioning, failed, burnt-out, and obsolete. If there’s a difference, junk tends to be unwanted yet usable, while trash is used up, spent, exhausted, or obsolete. That’s why there can be junk shops and junk sales but not trash shops and trash sales. Something can be unused, or even unusable, without being trash, for example, a cloud. But the cloud never was usable. Trash once was. Trash always has a past, a use that is spent. Like an old person.

That exhausted utility distinguishes trash from other artifacts in a state of desuetude, such as rubble or sacrifice. The rubble of war is not trash. It wasn’t used up but destroyed. And only unbelievers believe sacrifice is wasted. Trash is also different from objects that have been contaminated. An implement may become useless not from damage but from actual or ritual pollution, from radioactivity, for example, or in some cultures from the sullying touch of a low-caste person. The result is not trash but a polluted, dangerous thing, an artificial corpse that requires ritual care. Finally, the trashy is not literally trash (not in the trash), but ought to be. The reason is usually that it is poorly made, inferior, derelict, squalid, cheap.

Is there natural trash? The idea of “nature” is problematic. Understanding the word as commonsensically as I can, it seems clear that there can be no natural trash. To be trash, something has to be used up. Trash therefore posits a telos, a use, a design, and there’s none of that in nature. Nothing in nature is ever used up because nothing is, strictly speaking, used—that is, existing by design, for a purpose or telos. Pardon my atheism, but nature is not an artifact. Nothing in nature has an end, purpose, or design. And what wasn’t made to do anything at all cannot break, malfunction, or become obsolete, spent, or exhausted. So there is no trash in nature.

Of course, one reply to this argument is that since trash exists, it is natural. Indubitably. So too are artifacts, and everything we call artificial. They’re all nature too, all outcomes of the evolution of life. But that doesn’t mean there is no significant difference between what is an artifact and what merely happens to exist, because artifacts happen to have rather singular conditions of existence—nothing less than human socio-technical economy. I won’t say trash is unnatural, since nothing is. But I do say it requires this economy, which implies human beings, practices, cultures, ars and techne. Where there is no artifice—no art and knowledge—there is no trash.

The processes of life are unintentional, ateleological, without purpose. Trash is not like that. Trash is the spent remnants of works of design and artifice. Isn’t our power of design itself an outcome of evolution? Yes, ultimately. But art and knowledge are products of life that overstep life’s productivity. The principal force of evolution is natural selection by the conditions of existence, otherwise known as survival of the fittest; but with the evolution of artifice, an agency has appeared that is capable of arresting, redirecting, or setting aside that principal force. There is nothing impossible or even uncommon about evolution producing a power capable of interfering with the forces by which life evolves. T. H. Huxley made this point in his famous lecture “Evolution and Ethics.” His example was gardening. Gardening is antagonistic to the cosmic process of evolution, despite being an outcome of that process. So is getting your tonsils out, or wearing eyeglasses. As a Darwinian, Huxley believed that the cosmic process was one of intense and unceasing competition. But gardening eliminates struggle by removing conditions that give rise to it. Eyeglasses do the same thing. It is the ubiquitous effect of art and knowledge. From their union all good things are born, and also trash.

Where knowledge is potent, artifacts are recycled, used instead of trashed. Only when knowledge is weakened by reaching its current limit does trash appear. Trash is generated where knowledge ends. And knowledge, what’s that? Orthodox ideas of knowledge have never been more untenable (Allen 2004b; 2005; forthcoming). Such views confine knowledge to propositions, judgments, veridical belief, or mental representation. Orthodox views emasculate knowledge by demanding that it be true, a logical condition only a proposition can meet. The best knowledge, on these accounts, is linguistic, logical, theoretical, and (it is seldom noticed) written, graphic. Orthodox views present knowledge as orthodoxy, insisting that any knowledge be “justified,” which means reducing it to something familiar, established, orthodox. Why untenable? This logocentric point of view mystifies the connection between our “knowledge” and the historical accomplishments of technological society. The ingenuity of our technical culture, the depth of technical mediation, the multiplicity of the interfaces in a global technoscientific network: all of that bespeaks profound knowledge. But it isn’t the application of a theory, it cannot be formalized in a canonical notation and seldom takes the form of an indubitable truth. The “knowledge” of epistemological philosophy is scarce on the ground in technological society. And what looks like knowledge in technoscience is far different from epistemology’s logocentric linguistification.

That knowledge must be “true” is a longstanding presupposition of Western thought. Yet there are many instances of knowledge that cannot be called true. A surgical operation or a bridge can be as good examples of knowledge as any truth of science. Nor are such cases exceptional. Knowledge does not merely include artifacts, it is artifacts more than anything else, and such knowledge, not being propositional, cannot be subject to the discursive conditions that only a proposition can meet.

Knowledge is a quality of artifacts, not of all but of some, the most accomplished. I call this quality superlative artifactual performance. Not every use of an artifact exemplifies knowledge. It doesn’t take knowledge to use a payphone—only habit. But the creation of artifacts, artifactual innovation, and everything that is well done, well made, and technically excellent about artifacts, is evidence of knowledge, the work of knowledge, the art of knowledge. Knowledge exists in technically accomplished artifacts before it is represented in the mind. The accomplishment that distinguishes knowledge is not a representational or cognitive one; it is technical, the performative quality of an artifact.

To explain knowledge as superlative artifactual performance is not a statement about an essence or pure concept. Rather, it explains knowledge in terms of its good, its value, the human point of caring to know. Nietzsche put the question with his usual bluntness: why know—why not rather be deceived (455)? My answer is that to see the good of knowledge, we must look at superlative artifactual performance. To understand why knowledge makes a valuable difference to our experience, think about the relationship between human existence and our capacity for superlative artifactual performance. The global human environment is more densely mediated than ever before by complicated, interdependent artifacts. The more we cultivate knowledge, the more our environment assumes this character; the more it does, the more effective knowledge becomes.

Trash is the artifactual surd confronting knowledge at its limits. Something is trash when it is spent, exhausted, used up. It becomes that the moment a person can no longer use it. What are you supposed to do with the paper cup your french fries come in after you have eaten? Fold it up and take it home? Keeping it would be more trouble than it’s worth. You would soon have a houseful of empty containers. No, you’re supposed to throw it away. The only way it would not become trash is if somebody knew how to convert it to a resource. Therefore what stands between us and our trash is the limitation of current knowledge. In what we consign to the trash, we confront the current limits of ingenuity, the current limits of art and technical economy. The once useful artifact stares back at us with dull inutility, and we look for a place to toss it. It’s harmless now and then, but when billions are served it becomes a problem: everybody’s problem.

Ultimately, trash is what’s really costly about exchange. If I exchange A for B, someone else exchanges B for A. We pay each other’s costs. B costs A, which I give the other; A costs B, which the other gives me. Accounts balance. But not everything made can be exchanged. There is always debris, an inutile surd. Trash is a product of exchange that is not exchangeable, since to exchange trash is to eliminate it, to convert it to a resource. Kitchen scraps and excrement are waste only when they are expensive to produce. If they are instantly recycled in a garden compost they are resources, not trash. The proof of trash is the cost of doing anything with it, even leaving it alone. Anything you do with it has an unrecoverable cost, and you have to do something, because doing nothing is making a choice too.

Could there be a trashless economy? Thermodynamics may suggest otherwise. It is also unclear that a trashless technology would necessarily constitute progress. A technology could only become trashless by becoming so radically simple that its debris disintegrated into the soil. That is the “technology” of chimpanzees, not advanced human beings. So, far from being progress, it would probably be a prelude to extinction. Ecologically, however, trash per se is not a problem. The problem is its cost, especially the cost of urban, technological trash. With urban density now practically worldwide, trash has entered the ranks of a global ecological agent.

Must there be trash wherever there is ars or techne? It seems inevitable. There will always be trash as there will always be tragedy, since knowledge is always limited. As Prometheus said, “Art is weaker than Necessity” (Aeschylus). Trash doesn’t have to be expensive, though. The problem with our current trash is that it is too expensive. We cannot master trash, as we cannot master death, by a decisive act of knowledge, but we can be more intelligent about trash, consider it more, care more about consigning work to the trash. We need to be more ingenious and artful about trash so that the art and ingenuity upon which so much depends don’t cost so much.

We mourn rubble. Who mourns trash? Is the loss less wasteful? The cost less a concern? Not anymore. Not when trash becomes urban, technological, global. Witnesses to the rubble of war, we mourn human short-sightedness, willfulness, evil. Even “justified” rubble is mourned: that it had to come to that. Would we act better, more justly, if we had better knowledge? That has been the conviction of Western philosophy since Socrates, who insisted, to general incredulity, that vice is no more than ignorance. Anyone who knew better would automatically act better. Maybe war is ignorance. Trash certainly is. Anyone who can convert trash into a resource is guaranteed a reward. Therefore the reason we do not do it must be that we don’t know how. Or just don’t care? Or don’t care to know?

Trash is money, of course. We pay contractors to dispose of it. Insofar as it is not recycling, however, paying for waste management is spending on the spent, the most unproductive expenditure imaginable from a long-term perspective. Not that that restrains an economy like ours, premised on indifference to the long term. The whole ethics of artifacts concentrates around the morality of trash. Trashing is something we do to artifacts, a moral act involving them even more intimately than in their original appointed use. When we use artifacts, we are caring for them. When we trash them, we withdraw care. To withdraw care from something for which we are responsible is a moral act, and it is a moral problem because artifacts don’t stop needing care just because they can’t be used. Even as trash—especially as trash—they require costly care. The largest human structure on the planet now is a landfill, the Fresh Kills site on Staten Island (Homer-Dixon 56).

Trash may be nonhuman, but it is an intensely socialized artifact. It is nonhuman, inasmuch as it cannot talk; but it is also a highly refractory participant in our economy. Any artifact is. Artifacts cooperate or throw up obstacles. They impose their programs, compel respect for their integrity. They are so much a part of our knowledge, economy, and evolution that we can hardly exclude them as indifferent to our values. Trashing something doesn’t exile it from the commonwealth. It may be spent, but it still counts, because it still importunes and still requires care. Trash is a moral problem because artifacts are moral beings. They count, too. As Bruno Latour writes, “morality is from the beginning inscribed in the things which, thanks to it, oblige us to oblige them” (2002, 258).

A moralist might say that morality is only for humans, not for artifacts, because only humans possess intrinsic moral dignity. Artifacts can’t have intrinsic moral dignity. It is perfectly appropriate to treat them as mere means. Trashing artifacts is immoral only if it harms other people. I would agree that, yes, artifacts lack inherent moral dignity, but so do humans. An inherent moral dignity reserved exclusively for us would be an unnatural discontinuity, fallaciously setting humanity apart from the rest of living nature. It is an impossible distinction in any understanding of evolution. Genealogical continuity links practically every organism on earth. You and the cows in a Big Mac are kin. You haven’t shared an ancestor in several million years, but that’s just a number, and doesn’t support a categorical distinction, as if the suffering of cattle simply couldn’t matter. In a world where everything alive is bound by countless threads of ecological interdependence and common descent, species membership carries no moral weight (Rachels; Allen 2004b). Dignity is a moral achievement of individuals, not a generic human birthright.

What we call morality is a folk name for what a natural historian might call our social instincts. Humans are intensely social primates with similar social instincts. These include a predisposition to sympathy and a strong biological need for a group to whom we can be loyal. Most of moral feeling begins there. With experience and understanding, we can expand the circle of sympathy and altruism, from clan or tribe to nation or humanity at large. We may extend morality to other animals, even trees, even artifacts. We recognize members of other species primarily because they suffer. But if, like trees or entire species, they do not meaningfully suffer, they may still count, or can be made to by their spokespersons, who tie humans and trees together in a common future.

The case is just the same for artifacts. For instance, the artifactual sources and byproducts of electrical power: the fuel burned, the radioactive waste produced, the effects on the atmosphere, the potential biohazard or terrorist threat. All of that matters, and has to be taken into account. The artifacts of electrical power can no more be morally discounted than a murder. We have to count artifacts because they impose themselves; they don’t just disappear merely because we no longer know how to use them. Instead, they become trash, which is always a net loss—and increasingly a dangerous one.

Isn’t such care ultimately for our good, not theirs? Artifacts have no good, no connatus, no will to live. Well, not without us. But neither have we without them. Human beings can no more exist without artifacts than without fresh water. Any good we pursue is so densely crisscrossed by applications of artifice that we have little or no idea what a “good” is that is not artifactually mediated. The artifacts are there, then, with us, with the good, from the beginning and until the end. Just like other people. Artifacts like the ozone hole or the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl are players. They reveal the autonomy of artifacts in relation to will and knowledge. They do not have a will of their own. But their effects cannot be mastered by will, or art, or knowledge; Art is weaker than Necessity, and artifacts have a necessity of their own, a necessity they throw up at the limit of knowledge.

Our good has to include peaceful coexistence with sometimes unruly artifacts. Trash gathers along the fault lines of this coexistence, where artifacts become uncooperative, fail to work, and yet still require care. What does morality require in our relation to artifacts? I think Latour defines this well: “To maintain the reversibility of foldings is the current form that moral concern takes in its encounter with technology” (2002, 258). The reversibility of foldings is, in a word, recycling. We make things, and make things of things we’ve made. Every artifact, especially the technological artifact, folds countless others into the black box of its effectiveness. Ideally, we can reverse these folds, recover materials to then fold into other assemblages. Trash begins where this reversibility is stymied. To withdraw care at that point and discard a thing is like letting a person die. Sometimes there’s no choice. In a different world, the person might not die; there might be the knowledge to save him. When we trash a thing we withdraw care, not usually for callous reasons but because we have no practical choice, and that is a failing of knowledge. You have to throw the french fries container away. No one knows what else to do with it since, sadly, it was made that way, made to defeat the very knowledge that designed and manufactured it.

Works can be made to recycle, designed to cooperate with this alternative, instead of being made (as they increasingly are) with indifference to reuse. Design has little alternative (nor has humanity) to becoming much more serious about reuse and recycling at every possible level. Knowledge has to catch up with its own works, and design for the day when things can’t work as designed and have to be, not trashed, but retired from service and gracefully recycled. There’s nothing immorally obsolete about an item that can no longer fulfill its original function when it can be recycled into works elsewhere. Whatever the work, whatever it is made of, the more of it that can be folded back into renewed techne the better.

Of course, such an art of design will not appear merely because the survival of the global system of civilizations depends on it. Neither can market forces be guaranteed to discover it before older ways take us over the ecological brink. What will it take to make us feel the failure of art and knowledge that trash implies, to feel it as a problem, a problem of art, of knowledge, of artifactual morality?

It is, as I said, probably impossible to become trashless. The challenge, however, is not to become trashless but to make trash for which we can care. What matters is not trash per se but its cost. The best trash is trash we are prepared to care for. We care for trash not just by waste management but by taking care not to trash for trifling reasons, or to make things that can only be trashed after one cycle of use. Trashing artifacts is like the end of life. It is inevitable. It is also a morally sensitive transition, and should be negotiated civilly with the nonhuman beings whose fate has intertwined with our own.

Sources Cited:


Aeschylus (1995) Prometheus Bound

George Thomson, trans. New York: Dover Books


Barry Allen (2004a)Evil and Enmity

Common Knowledge 10


—(2004b) Knowledge and Civilization

Boulder: Westview Press


—(2005) Knowledge, New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 3 Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ed.

Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons


—(forthcoming) Turning Back the Linguistic Turn in the Theory of Knowledge

Thesis Eleven


Thomas Homer-Dixon (2001) The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental,
and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future

Toronto: Vintage Canada


T. H. Huxley (2004) Evolution and Ethics, Evolution and Ethics and Science and Morals

Amherst: Prometheus Books


Bruno Latour (2002) Morality and Technology: The End of the Means

Theory, Culture & Society 19


—(2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

Cambridge: Harvard University Press


Friedrich Nietzsche (1967) The Will to Power

Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans.

New York: Vintage Books


Henry Petroski (1990) Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing

Cambridge: Harvard University Press


David Pye (1978) The Nature and Aesthetics of Design

Bethel: Cambium Press


—(1995) The Nature and Art of Workmanship

Bethel: Cambium Press


James Rachels (1990) Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism

Oxford: Oxford University Press


Elizabeth V. Spelman (2002) Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World

Boston: Beacon Press

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