The Environmental Risk and Everyday Walls: Extraction, Production, and Waste in Drywall

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Pollution, Materials, and Metabolic Rift

Abstract

This paper examines drywall as an understudied yet central material through which contemporary capitalism produces environmental and social risk. Although drywall forms the everyday surfaces of domestic and urban spaces, its material impacts are largely invisible. Drawing on environmental sociology, urban sociology, and material culture studies, I show how drywall’s life cycle—from gypsum extraction to installation and disposal reveals the intertwined ecological and social consequences embedded in ordinary building materials. By foregrounding drywall as an object of sociological inquiry, this paper demonstrates how mundane materials illuminate broader dynamics of capitalist development, environmental inequality, and the normalization of everyday hazards.

Author

• Albert S. Fu, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania