Culture, Values, and Garbage

Trash Talk Project

In 2009, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Trash Talk project was developed in order to better understand the lifecycle of garbage. The project uses small location tags that frequently update the position of a given item of trash and sends this information to researchers. Through this system, researchers have tracked over 3,000 pieces of individual garbage in New York, Seattle, and London. In many Western societies, including the United States, a value association of “out of sight, out of mind” governs many people's relationships to trash.

The goals of Trash Talk include the reworking of refuse infrastructures and behavioral change in consumers. What is most prescient about the project is how it illustrates the complex ways in which culture, values, and garbage are intertwined. While a person viewing the project data might become more aware of the problems with the attitude that once an item leaves one's possession it is no longer of consequence, actually motivating that person—and millions of others—to act on the data and to change practices is a much more complex matter.

Human Connections to Garbage

The Trash Talk project emphasizes the complex, yet overlooked, relationships that garbage and people share. In terms of their relationship to garbage, all people interact with it on two levels. One is a material connection, indicative of the physical and sensory contacts that people have with garbage. In some households, this connection begins with an individual removing an item from packaging, disposing of that item in the kitchen receptacle, placing that item and others into a larger bin, taking that bin to the curbside, and then the material connection ends. Others, including workers in sanitation plants and recycling centers, then continue a material connection with the garbage, but the material connection of the consumer and the garbage ends with the bin on the curbside.

The second connection that people maintain with garbage is an ideational one. Unlike the material one, which is manifested in things that can be touched, moved, and sensed, the ideational connection operates on the level of cognition. The differentiation of an item of value from an item of trash, for example, has nothing to do with the material principles of the object. Instead, humans determine whether the object is of value or whether it is considered trash. The decision of whether an individual decides to dispose of a broken radio or to consider it an heirloom to be kept is highly subjective and rooted in the value systems of a culture.

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