Re-classify Your Garbage
Ever feel like everything you learned in college amounted to a pile of trash? Now, how about if that were a positive? In a piece that ran in the New York Times last week, Edward Rothstein turns a cultural critic’s eye on garbage in the modern age, referencing an NYU course offered last fall on creating a museum for the Department of Sanitation (from the syllabus: “What is the cognitive, practical, and cultural role of garbage in contemporary life?”) while making some wry observations about how and why we’ve come full-circle to embrace our refuse.
I first spotted this on Murketing, where Rob Walker followed up his post with an interesting link to a guy who literally sells trash — in little plastic cubes — and his prices are rising.
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All this leads me to wonder: How accurate is Rothstein’s cultural barometer? Granted, there’s nothing new under the sun (or the mountains of trash baking in its heat). I remember re-interpreting trash from childhood D.I.Y. projects, designing many an aesthetically-questionable birdfeeder out of a rinsed-out Sprite liter bottle. But I think we’ve progressed since then, and if Rothstein is right, it’s with a renewed “feeling of virtue that seems to transcend considerations of cost.” Help kick-start my creative juices with some of your own ideas. How have you managed to re-classify your garbage?