plastics
A woman and her family live next to a recycling plant in China, in mountains of plastic waste from Asia, Europe, and the U.S.This documentary reveals the lives of those on the fringes of global capitalist realities, a far cry from the communist dream.
Finn Arne Jørgensen examines the development of the Scandinavian beverage container deposit-refund system, which has the highest return rates in the world, from 1970 to the present day. He reveals the challenges faced when the system was exported internationally and explores the critical role of technological infrastructures and consumer convenience in modern recycling.
In this commentary, Stefan Helmreich considers how Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave, has recently been leveraged into commentaries upon the Anthropocene, and how the image has been adapted to speak to the contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis.
This film follows an 84-year old woman’s campaign to ban the sale of bottled water in the small American town of Concord, Massachusetts.
This film follows a filmmaker as he and his family attempt to live for a year without using oil products.
This film follows a team travelling to Alaska to examine how much of our garbage has ended up in the region’s gyre—a rotating ocean current.
A couple competes to live with zero waste for a whole year, with comedic results.
Artwork and film projects have the potential to expose trash in a variety of forms and help us visualize, acknowledge, and critique larger systems in which plastic waste circulates and operates.
Waste is never completely or permanently “out of sight.” Once discarded, it undergoes transformations, often reappearing elsewhere in new forms. In this volume of RCC Perspectives, scholars from different disciplines—from history and art history, urban geography, environmental studies, and anthropology—investigate the traces waste leaves behind in the course of its travels.
Content
Earth First! 26, no. 6 features articles on the threat to Canadian wilderness through oil sands mining, the global oceans’ invasion by plastic debris, and an update on the state of the journal.
