Morally Ambiguous Trash

In High School, my friend Jenn (with 2 n's) got me a coffee table book simply titled "TRASH" (a product of Alphabet City) for my birthday. In it is an assortment of trash art projects and articles written on our moral and inherent connection with trash. In the introduction, John Knechtel, the books editor, writes, "We are embedded in our own trash- there is no easy way to leap beyond it and build a utopia without garbage, to address the contradiction between the worlds resources and our seemingly unlimited ability to manufacture trash." Whoa. We are connected to our stuff for its value to us at any given moment.

In the book there is a essay titled, "The Ethical Artifact: On Trash" by Barry Allen. Not only are Allen's elegant descriptions of trash mesmerizing, Now performing Off-Broadway, The 'Incidental Utility & Enduring Trash' and next month, 'Quotidian Refuse' but he shows how interconnected we are to our own trash and how trash is dependent on its connectivity to other trash. In other words, anything you own is one burnt out light bulb or crack or missing piece away from becoming trash.

That's true for most items, especially electronic ones, which is Allen's main thesis. Our Trash is becoming more technological and therefore more interconnected to each other. For example, your computers ability to function is dependent on not only the hard drive working, but the screen, keys and battery. Once one of those breaks, the entire computer becomes essentially...Garbage. He calls Trash our "limit of knowledge." When we don't know what to do with something once it has served its single purpose- we throw it away.

In regards to technology, where things can more likely be repaired than not, he has this to say, "The gesture of repair is a refusal to admit that are technology 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." Double whoa. Is calling the Geek squad to fix my computer the same as keeping a loved one on life support? 

Allen likens trash to human mortality several times in his essay. He goes on to talk about how trash has a level of care associated with it- that even when something is no longer useful to us, we still care enough to dispose of it in some way. If we didn't, we would have houses full of unusable items. I don't know how I feel about likening the disposal of my Chinese take out containers to burying my Grandfather. Does this mean we should liken littering to murder and recycling to reincarnation? Deep. 

My biggest question after reading Allen's article is if we care so deeply about our Trash, why do people not have a more vested interest in what happens to it? We don't "throw away" our loved ones- even though we bury them just like we bury our trash. What if instead of landfill, we called it a Garbage graveyard? Do we have a moral obligation to care more for the trash we do produce? Or, like some countries are producing less children, an obligation to produce less trash?


Allen thinks it is impossible 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." It's not just about waste management but being conscientious of what we are using and being sensitive to the objects that mean so much to us for such a short period of time.

So how will you treat your Trash?