Trans TrashUnderstanding waste streams

Double trash events: “Wasteland” (the film) and “A Close Reading of Ocean Plastics” (lecture)

Two trash events for tonight. We’ll be there!

Trash Talk Lecture: Terrible and Charismatic Waste Max Liboiron
http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/node/758
Where: Geological Lecture Hall (24 Oxford St., Cambridge) MA, USA.
When: Thursday, February 9, 2011 at 6:00 P.M
“Terrible and Charismatic Waste: A Close Reading of Ocean Plastics,” on . at the Geological Lecture Hall (24 Oxford St., Cambridge). The lecture will be followed by a public reception at the Peabody Museum (11 Divinity Ave.).
Max Liboiron writes in http://discardstudies.wordpress.com/. Check it!

Plastics are in every ocean in the world; their complex and largely uncharted effects are intertwined with life on land. Plastic is a unique pollutant that defies current theories of pollution and the pollution-control practices we depend upon.

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History present the free lecture, “Terrible and Charismatic Waste: A Close Reading of Ocean Plastics,” on Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 6:00 P.M. at the Geological Lecture Hall (24 Oxford St., Cambridge). The lecture will be followed by a public reception at the Peabody Museum (11 Divinity Ave.).

In 2001, plastic outweighed plankton in the Pacific Ocean by six to one. Today, that ratio is thirty-six to one. Ocean plastics are outpacing the knowledge and methods designed to investigate and manage them.

While collecting samples from the ocean to measure these plastics, scientists and crew members catch fish for food, and find that their dinner has eaten plastic. They know that plastic chemicals leach and accumulate in the food chain. They decline to eat their catch, but collect the plastics and place them in sample jars.

This illustrated talk will focus on a single sample of ocean plastics taken from the North Pacific Ocean and follow the threads of how it was collected, how samples are used in science and advocacy, their place in the popular imagination, and how an individual specimen can and cannot scale up to illuminate a new global pollution that will characterize the twenty-first century.

The speaker is Max Liboiron, ABD, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University; Regional Co-Director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Additional topics in this series include waste ecologies and urban disaster cleanup.  Join us this Spring for an exploration of the anthropology of waste!