Opening the Bin: Ontology of Waste Containment

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - I

Abstract

Realities are filled with vortices, currents, storms, fluxes, and flows. Containers keep in place what would otherwise fluctuate and flow endlessly. Yet while they block and stop fluctuations, containers can also be deployed to engender fluxes and flows. The presentation looks at how waste containment participates in the creation of waste streams. It asks what and how containers become in relation to waste, what they do to waste, and how they organise human and non-human relations. The containers are crucial in and for waste management. Containment is a technology of making waste manageable. The container is a place of order. It collects refuse, confines it, at once hides and designates what is wasted. What is placed inside a container is hidden from plain sight. Containment thereby comes to epitomize how our relation to waste is usually marked by exclusion: we do not want it but only wish to get rid of it. Yet the way stuff mixes, comingles, rots, tarnishes, ferments, grows moldy, and decomposes in the waste container also makes it a place of disorder. The things we have discarded persist and continue to accumulate in the afterlife and next world of the container. Besides attending to their role in waste management, the presentation examines how waste containers are also part of an ethics of waste and alternative way of relating to waste in the practices of dumpster divers.

Authors

• Olli Pyyhtinen, Tampere University

• Ville Savolainen, Tampere University