In: John Knechtel (Ed.) TRASH. Alphabet City Series. MIT Press, 2006. pp. 63-74.

Trash: the emptied out, the used up, the broken, the outgrown, the obsolete; the dispossessed, the lost, the left behind. In Trash, writers, artists, and filmmakers look at how we are defined by what we waste and discover that we are what we throw away. Trash surveys a terrain that ranges from micro (a typology of dust bunnies) to macro (studies of landfill design and the trashed space of urban brownfield sites). It investigates the logic of trash as it is applied to humans and looks at lives intimately dependent on trash, taking us from the abducted girls of Juarez to the recycling communities of China.

Trash explores the ethics and psychology of trash and what these reveal about contemporary industrial society. The investigations range from the whimsical to the disturbing, and offers a variety of approaches to rehabilitating and rediscovering what is too commonly tossed aside.

See: http://alphabet-city.org/issues/trash/