Waste is hard to define, and its subjectivity and social underpinnings are widely acknowledged. It is commonly said, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” However, as Josh Reno puts it, this is an important insight not into what waste is, but what it is considered to be. That is, the adage sheds more light on the “interpretive flexibility” of value than on that of waste itself. This is all to say that while considering something as waste might be subjective, we do privilege some definitions of waste over others; namely, the utilitarian definition of waste as something almost entirely lacking in value. Wastesmap attempts to enliven such waste-talk in the Anthropocene. It presents the flip-side of progress by showing some of the waste it generates, hoping to provoke thoughts about the environments that this progress lays waste to. One of these environments was the Schuylkill River which was the site of indiscriminate waste dumping for many years until the passage of the (amended) Clean Water Act of 1972. Today, the toxic industrial waste has been largely replaced by more benign trash like plastic bottle caps and cigarette butts. Many thousands of years from now, when our achievements and failures will have been reduced to soil strata, scientists will identify our geological epoch—the Anthropocene—from wastes seen here, styrofoam containers and plastic bottle caps.
