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PHOTOGRAPHER, BOSTON.
WASTE
Recycling:
a False Panacea
This photo was taken in Bethany Beach, Delaware. It was strange to find a recycling bin on the beach, because Bethany has no recycling program. This wishful pile of bottles and cans went to the trash. If there's one thing I've learned after studying waste, it's that recycling doesn't rectify the problems we create.
Waste is misunderstood. Rarely do we face the ugly realities of waste and recycling because they challenge a comforting yet fallacious notion that you, an individual, can solve environmental problems.
This collection starts with my photos from Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) – where recycling gets sorted and baled. It then examines how we interact with recycling in our everyday lives.
Paper Mountains at Casella
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I took this photo during my thesis research at Casella, a large Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Massachusetts. MRFs are the middle-men of recycling – they receive all of our paper, plastic, glass and aluminum, sort them into bales, and ship them off to someone who will buy them. Over two-thirds of what goes in to MRFs gets shipped overseas – mostly paper and plastic to countries in Asia.
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If you look close enough, you'll find that people have thrown hoses, tennis balls, and lawn chairs into the recycling. Casella employees are amazed at what people attempt to recycle.
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Paper bales spilled over in another MRF in MA, Save that Stuff. Erik, the founder, laments the needless wastefulness of subscription mail.
Conrad's Bioslurry
This is Conrad – he's holding an engineered bioslurry. This green mixture of food and compostable containers holds powerful methane that gets harvested for energy. The solid remains are sold as fertilizer pellots to farmers, waste free.
Botched Ben and Jerry's
Seeing barrels upon barrels of my favorite Ben and Jerry's flavor at Save that Stuff was...discomforting. Why would so many be tossed uneaten? Businesses in MA have to compost or "recycle" their food waste if it's over a certain tonnage. These pints must have been labeled incorrectly; one typo will makes thousands defunct.
Soup
A truck full of soup and yogurt containers made out of #5 Plastic, or polystyrene. Non-clear polystyrene is typically not municipally recyclable, but Save that Stuff puts in a little extra effort to put stuff to use.
Botched Bottle Caps
A brewery was likely dissatisfied with its order of bottle caps, so it shipped them to Save that Stuff. It's unclear how STS will use them, but to start, Erik gave me a box full to make into art. STS works with local scrap artists, giving them free materials.
Discards at Boston Logan Airport Security
The Sorting Tower
While much of our recycling is sorted out by machines, there are also people in the process. Save that Stuff employees sort out non-recyclables on a conveyor belt atop the yellow tower. That white filmy plastic is not typically recyclable – after China banned the import of recyclables in 2018, everything at the bottom of the tower will go to the incinerator.
Monkey Eating Banana...Wrapped in Plastic
The monkeys at Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica, are experts at stealing tourists' food – which means they sometimes eat plastic.
Keep Baltimore Clean
An overflowing public trash can in my native city of Baltimore. Disobeying the sign, Hampden residents must have left their trash here. People want to get rid of the waste weighing them down.
The Beauty of Bottle Returns
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Disposable, single-use packaging only became popular in the late 1950s. Before then, water, milk, and Coke was sold in refillable and returnable glass packaging.
In Montevideo, Uruguay, this system is still in place. This was taken outside of a restaurant, which left its glass water bottles on the curb to be picked up and refilled. I would love to see that system in the United States.
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The final photo of this collection is aspirational. A system in which we can bypass the chaos of MRFs, the haziness of recycling, and the needlessness of single-use plastic altogether is a non-wasteful waste system worth attaining.
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