In our book, Discard Studies: wasting, systems, and power, Max Liborion and I write about defamiliarization and problem framing. in the context of the book we’re talking about how personal experience with garbage and waste […]
Tag: pollution
Precaution, PFAS, and Pattern Collapse
In 1854 in the Soho district of London England a cholera outbreak was killing people. You probably know this story. Its usually told with a physician named John Snow in the role of hero who […]
Chemicals and Coalitions
Chemicals are an issue over which a powerful coalition disagree.
What is a sacrifice zone?
The idea of “sacrifice zones” has been around since the 1970s. Former US President Richard Nixon may or may not have written a secret order permitting such zones in the US.
Sorting Out In Berlin
While in Berlin, Germany for HKW’s Participatory Planet project, myself and other participants visited an ALBA sorting facility on the east side of the city. The site sorts ~140,000 tonnes per year of waste metals, […]
What is insignificant impact?
US geopolitical worries, largely focused on rivalry with China, have given permission for the federal government to offer an overt industrial policy for semiconductor manufacturing. The US has embarked on a massively state funded program […]
"Current costs to remove perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs), a subclass of PFAS, from the environment at the same rate they are being added were estimated here at 20 to 7000 trillion USD per year."
--Ling, A.L. 2024. “Estimated Scale of Costs to Remove PFAS from the Environment at Current Emission Rates.” Science of the Total Environment 918. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170647.
Carbon Fixation
It is common practice for companies in the electronics sector to publish annual environmental reports. These reports can be very enlightening. After all, they represent a story about a given company in a situation in […]
Software Centricity
Discard studies offers an important concept for tech criticism: defamiliarization. The concept comes from the worlds of art and theatre and basically refers to some sort of device that helps make the familiar or taken […]
Video Talk: scale, magnitude, and action
This is a short talk I gave for an invitation to the Prada Frames “Materials in Flux” symposium.
Electronic Planet Research Lab 
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