Elizabeth Royte and her book Garbage Land were among my first and favorite discoveries as a garblogger. On Valentine’s day, it seems appropriate to share this recent piece she did for medium.com on “Sex, trash and nature in the city.”
My favorite thing about this article is that Royte reserves her judgement for the littering, but not the public lovemaking, that goes on in our beloved Prospect Park.
Urban Omnibus, a project of the Architectural League of New York, has a fantastic series of blog posts and videos out called City of Systems. The final chapter, Waste Removal, came out two months ago, though I hadn’t seen it until today. Thanks, Annie, for posting it to the the Facebook page. The video features an interview with trashie icon Elizabeth Royte, who gives a brief history of solid waste management in New York and shares what motivated her to write Garbage Land, a must-read for anyone interested in trash. Back in 2007, Royte was the first author in a week-long series of author interviews we featured here called Literary Trash. Check out that interview here. Might be time to revive the theme.
This week around the garblogosphere:
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Thirteen thousand, six hundred and ninety-nine people die each day from preventable diseases related to water. Artist Christine Destrempes decided to represent this daily loss of human life by stringing together 13,699 clear plastic bottle caps and arranging them in a powerful installation.
13,699
According to the artist:
The choice of using plastic bottle caps calls attention to other related environmental issues surrounding bottled water, such as privatization, depletion of aquifers, the environmental impact of plastic waste, the use of fossil fuels in making plastic, the carbon footprint of shipping bottled water, and the leaching of plastic into our water sources. Purchasing bottled water turns a basic human right into a commodity, affecting access for people in developing countries, as well as here in the United States.
Photos of the actual installation are available here. Thanks to Elizabeth Royte—author of the must-read Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It—for the informaiton on this project.
Girls selling water and corn by the roadside in Northern Malawi/Leila Darabi
Summertime. It’s hot and more conscious of my need for water. I suspect I’m not alone in this heightened awareness. For one thing, I’ve been seeig more water stories lately. For staters, some group is building swimming pools out of dumpsters in Brooklyn. Amazing.
Also, I read this morning that a town in Australia has plans to become the first municipality to ban plastic water bottles. They’re pissed about a big water company coming in to drain their resevoir and are fighting back with this piece of legislation.
And in London, I read in this article found via Elizabeth Royte’s blog, the council of Hackney has bought enough bottled water from the fairtrade company Thirsty Planet—which donates a portion of sales to water access in Southern Africa—to build a water pump in Malawi. As Royte points out, charity bottled water is a bit deceptive. The council of Hackney could always have served tap water at meetings and sent money not spent on bottled water directly to Malawi. Agreed.
Bottlemania author Elizabeth Royte‘s waste and water blog has been pretty juicey lately. When it comes to single serving water packaged in plastic, the only thing more disturbing than how many plastic bottles are out there is how few people own them. That is, until they sell them to us and the problem of disposing of them becomes someone else’s problem. The question up for debate is whose problem is it? New York’s State Assembly is negociating the answer to that question now with a bottle bill that Royte points out has taken 20 years to see the light of day. But if you’ve been reading the news, you might have noticed that an unlikely pair have teamed up to sue the state over the bill: megaconglomerate Nestle and Riverkeeper Bobby Kennedy Jr. Very curious. Royte explains the drama in a recent post and subsequent update.
See also RFK Jr.’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times.
Elizabeth Royte covers the “Zero-Waste Zealots” in the trashy new issue of MoJo.
everydaytrash 