Jennifer Clapp discusses in her paper “The Distancing of Waste: Overconsumption in a Global Economy” the growing distance, mentally and physically from our waste - particularly in industrialized nations. This distance has made the urban metabolism increase its throughput of materials into and out of the city, while literally stopping up its pipes.
One especially problematic idea that has come to be the norm in the United States is not just the idea that trash goes “away”, but also the idea that anything that is ‘flushable’ should be flushed. This combined with rising incomes, increased consumption, product innovation, and the rise of synthetic materials has created and urban woe that just a decade ago was not considered to be a growing concern - the ‘fatberg’. Masses of congealed fats flow through city sewers picking up any solid waste in its path until lumps of solid mass arrive at the waste water treatment plant. In the last decade, these ‘fatbergs’ have amassed extra tonnage thanks to the advent of the adult, ‘flushable’ wet wipe. These wet wipes exponentially increase the mass accumulated through the sewers, tangling solid waste with fat, hair, and other items that don’t biodegrade by the time they reach the wastewater treatment plant.
The concept of ‘flushing’ has a similar sense of ‘away’ in these industrialized nations. Citizens don’t know where their waste goes necessarily, they just know it flows out of the cities metabolism and makes way for new materials and wet wipes to flow in. The sludge that remains converges with other politically charged waste streams, often flowing very far ‘away’.
- Caroline Larose