Heather Rogers talking about Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
Interview – Heather Rogers – The Hidden Life of Garbage (2005) 51:16
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1LWWSpl82Q
Interview with Ariane Conrad LITTERBUG WORLD: Overproduction, Waste & the Limits of Recycling published on Loud Canary, originally in LiP magazine and anthologized in Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press)
http://loudcanary.com/2011/06/29/litterbug-world-o…
Extract on the semantics of waste:
Ariane Conrad: Would you care to reflect on the semantic shift that occurred: it seems like it went from “garbage” and “trash” to “waste.” With your use of the word “garbage” in your title; are you taking a stand against use of the word “waste”?
Heather Rogers: I use the word “garbage” in the title because I think it’s really recognizable to people. I think that’s what most people call their waste or their discards. That’s why I use it; it’s not a statement of my political or ideological stance on the issue of discards. A lot of people feel very strongly about choosing the right word, and I really respect where that comes from. I think that what we call the things we throw away is very important and it does relate to the way that what we throw out is constructed as dirty and not okay to touch or to consider as having value or being a resource.
In the waste industry, especially the corporate waste industry, there’s been a conscious deployment of specific words to describe what gets thrown away. Often they’ll call it the “waste stream”—they always try to sanitize it. They want discards to be off-limits, but also they want what they do to be perceived as environmentally innocuous. So they call all of the trash that they get from households and cities “municipal solid waste.” They try and transform it into a technical problem, which blankets over the tougher questions about why are we throwing away so much stuff, and what’s in there? Why are there so many resources getting crushed into the ground, or getting burned in the incinerator? Why are we wasting so much? The semantics are a really big part of how the system works and manages public perceptions of it.
