Though we are the most wasteful people in the history of the world,
very few of us know what becomes of our waste. In Waste Away,
Joshua O. Reno reveals how North Americans have been shaped by
their preferred means of disposal: sanitary landfill. Based on the
author's fieldwork as a common laborer at a large, transnational
landfill on the outskirts of Detroit, the book argues that waste
management helps our possessions and dwellings to last by removing
the transient materials they shed and sending them elsewhere.
Ethnography conducted with waste workers shows how they conceal and
contain other people's wastes, all while negotiating the filth of
their occupation, holding on to middle-class aspirations, and
occasionally scavenging worthwhile stuff from the trash. Waste Away
also traces the circumstances that led one community to host two
landfills and made Michigan a leading importer of foreign waste.
Focusing on local activists opposed to the transnational waste
trade with Canada, the book's ethnography analyzes their attempts
to politicize the removal of waste out of sight that many take for
granted. Documenting these different ways of relating to the
management of North American rubbish, Waste Away demonstrates how
the landfills we create remake us in turn, often behind our backs
and beneath our notice.
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