Waste infrastructure as strategy: constructing capitalism through waste in Baltimore, MD, USA

Abstract

Baltimore has a long and colorful history with waste. During the 19th�century, pigs roamed the streets eating garbage off sidewalks, streets, and alleys; horse drawn carriages carted night soil out of privies into the countryside for fertilizer; and these same horses deposited their own manure on streets and in alleys, which was also collected and used to return vital nutrients to rural soils. Today we manage waste streams like recycling, municipal solid waste, sewage sludge and wastewater, and construction and demolition debris through complex public-private networks of collection and disposal. And throughout Baltimore?s history various domestic and community practices have existed to make value from everyday waste streams like rags and food scraps. One constant across all these examples is infrastructure: big and small, people and nonhumans in cities need things like garbage cans, night carts, reduction plants, incinerators, and landfills in order to deal with waste. Waste infrastructure is critical to ensuring the smooth running of things in the city, and making sure that as much value can be extracted from waste while also causing a minimum amount of disruption. Drawing on a combination of archival research and qualitative fieldwork, my dissertation traces how Baltimore City has grown up alongside its waste infrastructure to become the place it is today. Moving from periods in the past where small scale systems of managing and reusing waste dominated the cityscape, to the industrialization of the city and its infrastructure, and into our contemporary era dominated by sustainability rhetoric, I reveal how our waste infrastructure is everything but accidental, and that their spatial and social formations often serve to reinforce already existing economic and political power structures. But I also explore how at various points in the past and today, waste infrastructure and networks have been a space for resistance and defiance of institutional power, providing opportunities for people and nonhumans to exist on the margins or outside of the normal order of things. And I offer counter-narratives to now-popular notions like the circular economy, and practices like waste-to-energy incineration, illustrating how these ?solutions? to waste problems are more discursive than practical. Overall my dissertation uses Baltimore?s histories with waste to describe the evolution of our current throw-away economy, and to make links between the development of consumer culture to the intensification of capitalism.