Dream Big, Speak Up: Reimagining Waste Infrastructures in Maine
By Erin Victor
I am a waste nerd. If you open the Photos app on my phone, you will find hundreds of pictures of waste-related infrastructures (Figure 1). Nestled between pictures of my children, I have photos of trash, recycling, and compost bins from around the world. After scrolling through a photo shoot of our new puppy, you will find photographs of recycling trucks and close-ups of recycling labels on packaging. I even have photos from touring recycling facilities, one of my favorite pastimes.
Over lunch at a recent recycling conference, I learned that I am not alone. Other self-identified “waste nerds” also take these pictures, especially when traveling. Their vacation photo albums, like mine, feature pictures of rubbish containers awkwardly mixed in with awe-inspiring architecture, breathtaking landscapes, and pictures of family and friends.
Waste infrastructure is one of those things that, unless you work in the “materials management” field, is rarely given a second thought. Finding the nearest public trash or recycling bin, rolling your recycling cart to the curb each week, or dropping off your trash at the local transfer station quickly become routine parts of life. We rarely question these systems in place for getting rid of the items we no longer want.
Yet anthropologists and other critical social science scholars have started to examine these infrastructures that hide in plain sight. For example, in Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (2017), Nikhil Anand draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai to show that the city’s water system is more than just a network of pipes and valves but a dynamic and contested set of material, political, and social relationships. Anand argues that “hydraulic citizenship” — or the recognition as a legitimate resident through access to municipal water — is continuously negotiated and, in turn, shapes social belonging and civic claim-making.
Discard studies scholars Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky make a similar point about waste. In their book, Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power (2022), they show how infrastructure and wasting practices are culturally and historically specific, challenging the idea that humans are naturally wasteful. People, they argue, had to be taught to accept single-use disposable items. This teaching came from both the explicit marketing of cheap “throw-away” goods to post-WWII consumers and the infrastructures in place that normalize this behavior, such as the regular collection of trash and recycling. Discard studies, as a field,also draws attention to what infrastructures are missing, either because they were removed (e.g., the delivery of milk in refillable milk jugs), marginalized (e.g., the use of durable cutlery in many restaurants), or never built in the first place (e.g., wash hubs for robust reuse-and-refill systems).
Liboiron and Lepawsky challenge us to go beyond feel-good solutions, like simply recycling more. They argue that discarding is inevitable, but we can still learn to “discard well” by designing waste systems and practices that are attentive to power dynamics, specific to particular times and places, and remain accountable to what (or whom) is discarded. For Liboiron and Lepawsky, discarding well requires an “ethic of incommensurability” that accepts that there is no single right answer, that every act of discarding will benefit some while harming others. This means that our waste infrastructure is more than just the bins, collection trucks, and sorting equipment; it is a materialization of our political and ethical decisions about which people, places, and things are valued, and which are treated as disposable.
The hopeful part is that, once we start to see our local waste infrastructure, we can also start to change it. In Maine, it is an excellent time to do just that. In 2021, the state became the first in the nation to pass an Extended Producer Responsibility law for packaging, shifting some of the costs and responsibility for managing packaging waste materials from municipalities to the companies that design and sell the packaging in the first place. This law intends not only to reimburse participating cities and towns for eligible recycling program costs but also to establish a dedicated funding stream for infrastructure investments and public education.
In other words, Maine communities have a unique opportunity to re-imagine our state’s waste infrastructure and speak up for what we want to see. This is a chance to move beyond a narrow focus on recycling and invest in robust, equitable reuse and refill systems in our communities. We can also encourage producers to redesign products and packaging for refill and reuse rather than single-use, disposable options.
The next time you notice a recycling or trash bin in your community, ask; who built this system, who does it serve, and whether there is a better option. Then speak up.
References
Anand, Nikhil. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478091110.
Liboiron, Max, and Josh Lepawsky. 2022. Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. MIT Press.