Browsing by Subject "Waste"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Artificial intelligence : a critique of our plastic consumption
(2022-05-07) Diamos, Vanessa Zaragoza; Gorman, Carma; Lavigne, Sam (Samuel); Schell, Julie
In this modern age of convenience, we interact with many different types of plastic every day, including microplastics. Microplastics are tiny particles of broken-down plastic. A recent study suggests that people ingest about a credit card’s worth of microplastics each week, which doesn’t even include microplastic exposure through inhalation and direct skin contact. By design, most consumers are unaware of the reproductive, digestive, respiratory, nervous, immune, and environmental impacts of plastic production and packaging. In addition, the labeling on plastic packages is misleading: the recycling logos on the bottom imply consumers can recycle them, which rarely happens, and there are no federal regulations mandating that companies disclose the level of microplastic contamination in their products. These labeling problems prevent consumers from making informed decisions about whether to buy a product packaged in plastic. I suggest ways to remedy these labeling problems through graphic design to educate consumers about the extent of microplastic contamination in the products they buy. These proposed labels reveal the hidden dangers of microplastics on human health, animal health, and the environment while providing accurate information about the packaging’s recyclability and proper disposal.
Climate action strategies for the University of Texas at Austin
(2010-05) Hernandez, Marinoelle; Eaton, David J.; Walker, Jim H.
This report analyzes the current greenhouse gas emissions inventory for The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), reviews the carbon reduction strategies being implemented at UT-Austin and other peer institutions, and offers recommendations for strategies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions at UT-Austin in the future.
Ethics in local government : cultivating a robust ethical environment
(2015-05) Dory, Mary Christine; Wilson, Robert Hines; Evans, Angela
This professional report identifies best practices for building and sustaining an ethical environment within local government. A healthy ethical environment benefits governments and citizens alike by safeguarding the public trust and by protecting resources from loss due to fraud, waste or abuse. Ethics are particularly important -- and apparent -- within local government, due to the direct presence of local services in many citizens' lives. The first half of this report applies leadership and development theory to create an ideal operational framework for an ethical environment at the local government level. Specifically, the report finds that strong organizational values, postconventional reasoning, and adaptive leadership should be incorporated into the basic ethical framework of every local government. The second half of this report addresses the sustainability of ethical environments by analyzing the root cause of recurring ethical risk factors within local government. In particular, the report addresses risk factors involving internal controls, conflicts of interest, the limits of managerial discretion, and data transparency. With respect to each of these vulnerabilities, the report provides a set of policy recommendations tailored to the level of local government. The report concludes that while each local government must ultimately adopt the ethics structure that best suits that particular entity’s needs and resources, the following best practices emerge for building and sustaining an ethical environment within local government: respect for the public trust, strong organizational culture that empowers ethical leadership at all levels, regular risk assessment and risk mitigation activities, appreciation of the power of public perception, and commitment to transparency regarding ethical successes and failures.
Mapping the wastelands : spectacles of wasting in neoliberal Brazilian and Mexican film
(2018-08) Argueta, Arno Jacob; Dominguez-Ruvalcaba, Hector, 1962-; Podalsky, Laura; Arroyo, Jossianna; Moore, Lorraine; Borge, Jason
This project explores representations of waste in films created in Brazil and Mexico in their neoliberal period. By approaching waste as an object that redefines the space it occupies as a wasteland, this dissertation explores the effects of spectacular representations of waste upon the people that inhabit and transit these lands of waste. To analyze this, I explore how certain films frame, symbolically construct and reproduce often-violent acts of wasting on screen. The goal of this dissertation is to expose how the modern desire for cleanliness that discursively frames undesirable byproducts as waste, also denotes certain “wasted beings” as outside modernity and the state. This act subjects these beings to the power of market dynamics that enforce violence and a politics of death. I draw from the work of scholars like Julia Kristeva on abjection, Kevin Bales on disposable beings, Melissa Wright on disposable women, Zygmunt Bauman on wasted beings, and Sayak Valencia on gore capitalism. Specifically, I argue that modernity denotes certain beings as outside the state and its structures of control. As a type of non-state space, the wasteland is ruled by the violent acts of taking life, which are the last reductions of sovereignty, and empowerment.
Narrative salvage
(2016-05) Shapland, Jennifer Ann; Houser, Heather; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Bennett, Chad; Lewis, Randolph
Narrative Salvage brings together contemporary writing and film of what I call wastescapes: places made expendable—wasted—under late capitalism. In hybrid works of the 2000s by Bonnie Jo Campbell, Agnes Varda, Natasha Trethewey, Brenda Longfellow, Rebecca Solnit, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Eileen Myles, I analyze tactile and emotional representations of everyday life in the wastescape. Each of the four chapters examines a particular wastescape featured by these writers and filmmakers: the postindustrial junkyard, the oil-slicked Gulf Coast, the nuclear waste strewn Nevada desert, and the melting Arctic tundra. Within these spaces, I track practices of repurposing that occur in the inhabitants’ everyday lives and analyze the potential for writing and film to reclaim and transform place through representation. I argue that waste is a crucial site of trans-corporeal experience, which in Stacy Alaimo's words constitutes a "literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature." The trans-corporeal wastescape affects ecosystems, human communities, and material objects; however, the representation of waste has not been a primary focus in environmental criticism. Narrative Salvage addresses this gap by approaching waste interdisciplinarily, drawing on the critical tools of environmental studies, sociology, and material culture studies. Practices of repurposing in the works I study dismantle the ideologies that create wastescapes by calling into question the production of value and rejection of waste that undergird capitalist and patriarchal enterprise. In the deviant ethics of the wastescape, the telos of progress loses its hold, making way for makeshift epistemologies and queer temporalities of continuous making do and regeneration. These experimental contemporary works' alinear, fragmented, and polyvocal forms embrace the vital ongoingness of decay and contamination. In Narrative Salvage, adamantly personal literatures and films of the wastescape urge audiences to rethink waste by seeing it anew, by defamiliarizing it, and in so doing help to rethink the human's relationship to—immersion within—place and environment.
Re-imagining environmental waste : an ecocritical reading of contemporary African women writers
(2018-05-02) Fawaz, Yasmina; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Tissières, Hélène; Tchumkam, Hervé; Brower, Benjamin; Picherit, Hervé
The field of ecocriticism has been growing rapidly since its beginnings in the early 1990s. Since then, critics like Elizabeth Deloughrey and Byron Caminero-Santangelo have indicated the importance of considering African works and their postcolonial contexts in these inquiries, as well as the remaining need to engage with francophone parts of the continent. With a growing interest in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism galvanized by the increasing environmental disasters across the African continent and the globe, contemporary women writers Ananda Devi, Tanella Boni and Fatou Diome offer invaluable perspectives on the various forms of environmental waste as they consider some of the myriad connections between material, human and cultural elements of pollution and degradation. Through the study of three novels, Devi’s Eve de ses décombres (2006), Boni’s Les baigneurs du lac Rose (1995), and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), this project articulates the ways in which these African writers go beyond portrayals of exploitation and waste by re-imagining polluted landscapes and gesture instead to the continent’s potential for material and cultural renewal.
The recyclists : bikes, borders and basura
(2009-12) Melanson, Michael P., 1978-; Dahlby, Tracy; Minutaglio, Bill; Cash, Wanda
In January, 2009, I joined Bikes Across Borders, a local grassroots organization, on their yearly bike caravan to Mexico. The group works to promote bicycles, both here and in Mexico, as an environmentally and financially sound alternative to motorized transportation. Each winter, members ride bicycles they build out of salvaged parts to border cities in Mexico. They give these bicycles to maquiladora workers who would otherwise spend a large portion of their income on transportation. These workers make a fraction of what they would in the U.S. and live in shacks amid the pollution from the factories they work in. This is the story of one group’s attempt at making a difference in the lives of these workers.
Waste/land/scape : Regina Vater, Cecilia Vicuña, and the aesthetics of garbage
(2023-08-13) Caston, Eva; Nelson, Adele; Flaherty, George; Chambers, Edward; Lara, Fernando
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, young artists Regina Vater and Cecilia Vicuña experimented with waste as artistic material, and the designation of specific spaces as “wastelands.” Typically, scholars have framed this reappropriation of waste as indicative of an ecocritical politic that revealed the environmental costs of capitalist extraction of resources and an endless cycle of consumption. In this thesis, however, I argue that both artists used garbage because of its abject qualities and its undesirable status. I trace two distinct moments in each artists’ trajectory, namely their first experimentations with trash and their renegotiation of their artistic praxis in the wake of exile. In Vater’s Magi(o)cean (1970) and Vicuña’s Casa Espiral (1966), both artists engaged with the societal desire to hide and erase the presence of trash. That erasure led them to instate an “aesthetics of garbage,” which made visible the precarious conditions of their respective home countries Brazil and Chile. Brazil’s military dictatorship was instituted in 1964, and Chile would follow suit in 1973. Because of these political shifts, Vater left for New York in 1973 and Vicuña went to London in 1972. Their lives in exile and the discomfiting experience of displacement impelled both artists to play with debris differently. In Vater’s first video work Luxo-Lixo (1973) and Vicuña’s book Saborami (1973), the artists foreground debris’ essentially fragmentary nature, inspiring a new way of working and understanding space, particularly when parsing the experience of diaspora and the violence at home. These analyses of Vater and Vicuña unpack the disjunctive spatial politics of the city and suggest that the framework of waste is a critical mode of study.