Humans eat, consume, metabolize, and produce trash. Trash, one may say, is the one material that binds us together in our human experience across our cultural and social differences. Currently, Americans produce 5.91 tons of trash, only 25% is recycled. The rest is part of an environmentally tasking global waste infrastructure that results in most waste being shipped to landfills located in poor countries. Our project takes on the fundamental question: What do we do with our garbage? It attempts to imagine a more locally and regionally based infrastructure that is socially caring, environmentally responsible, and economically nutritious for our communities, cities, and planet. On a global scale, we intend to eliminate the transportation to poor countries for disposal in their landfills. At the local level, we propose a social space between the street and the sidewalk to improve the efficiency of garbage collection and separation processes. If this metabolic process of consumption and waste operates more locally and is rooted in our daily life, the current global waste loop would shrink. This would greatly reduce the number of landfills and increase the sense of care harbored on both individual and community levels.
