Trash

Introduction

Edvard Radzinsky’s recent biography of Josef Stalin recounts how, in November 1917, the dictator strode into his richly furnished Kremlin offices for the first time and, spying an antique mirror leaning against the wall, cried, “Why all this upper-class luxury?” With one well-aimed kick of his black boot Stalin, who would later discard so many people in the Gulags, smashed his own reflection to pieces.

With every action, people make trash. Casually, as a matter of course, we throw things away. The concept of trash is the Midas touch inverted, and its malleability allows it to convert any thing or any one into garbage. People themselves—as testimony from the mothers of abducted and murdered girls in Juarez, Mexico, shows—can be made into trash. Lisa Rochon witnesses the human-to-trash shift at work on the streets of Toronto and asks: “When did our senses grow numb, overwhelmed by the parade of pain that moves constantly through the public realm?”

The ethical plea of trash is no less painful when it comes from objects–when we tune in to what Gay Hawkins calls “the strange experience of feeling sympathy for rubbish.” Looking at Bill Keaggy’s sad, charismatic chairs or Susan Coolen’s found paper airplanes calls up our nostalgic connection to trashed things on their way to oblivion. “Everything falls back to coldness,” says Wallace Stevens in “The Reader.” Everything loses its lifeline to active economies and function. One response to this entropic pull of desuetude and deterioration, argues Barry Allen, is to design things that resist it: “The best trash is trash we are prepared to care for.” His program for “morally sensitive” product design would minimize obsolescence and defer the trip to the dump.

One look at the dump—Pierre Bélanger’s clinical dissection of a modern landfill site or Jennifer Gabrys’s portrait of the toxic trail left by our digital technologies—demonstrates how effectively trash endures. It gets caught deep in geological structures, and there is more plastic than plankton swirling in the north Pacific Ocean. Everywhere trash is reproduced by the millions of tons and added to the mix. It extends into the future, beyond us. Or as Priscila Uppal writes, quoting her uncle, a sanitation engineer in Brasilia, “We’ll be lucky / if anyone remembers us / as well as the earth / remembers our garbage.”

We are embedded in our trash—there is no easy way to leap beyond it and build a utopia without garbage, to address the con-tradiction between the world’s limited resources and our seemingly unlimited ability to manufacture trash. Its production is rooted in survival, represented in every culture, and magnified by economic success. To purge the earth of garbage would be to destroy our own reflection.