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| weekly solid waste collection |
The weekly collection of solid waste at the roadside of one’s
house is a convenience that has been provided for more than 50 years. But there
was a time before than when a person stoked a fire in an empty 55-gallon drum
or “burn barrel” as we called them. People would burn their fallen leaves, and
discarded kitchen scraps in a backyard pit, too. Houses with a fireplace might
routinely feed newsprint and other paper and wood scraps, and later plastic,
too, on the fire grate. But now each week we hear the sound of the compacting motor
as it presses the bags of refuse into a solid mass that will be disgorged at
the landfill site (or ‘long term storage solution’ as an acquaintance jokes,
since little of it actually biodegrades in the layered environment starved of
oxygen needed by bacteria to consume waste) about 18-20 miles distant.
Regarding the cycle of mass design, production,
distribution, marketing, purchase, use, and eventual disposal, there are design
decisions all along the way. First there is the invention, which is a solution
to a perceived or existing problem. Materials must be created and capabilities
tested to suit the uses in question. There may be a desire to offer a product
at more than one price point, based on name or brand or materials or colors.
Selling in multiple language markets must be taken into account as well. Then
at the opposite end of the life cycle of a thing there comes a decision point
when the owner must either discard, destroy, sell or give to another owner, or
recycle if the materials have some reuse. By the time it appears in a bag at the
side of the road, so many decisions over the thing have passed: from conceiving
a product, executing a design, producing, distributing, marketing, maintaining,
repairing or discarding in some manner. Thus the bag of rubbish at the side of
the road is a sort of palimpsest with layers of human decisions in and on it.
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