Craig Borowiak

Waste:Life

In 2024, I commenced work for a new book project that I am tentatively calling Waste:Life.

Whether it’s CO2 emissions warming the planet or mountains of e-waste shipped to the Global South, waste has become a defining feature of the 21st-century Anthropocene. While waste is often associated with life’s destruction—oceanic dead zones, species extinction, toxicity, human and environmental collapse—the relationship between waste and life is far more complex. On one hand, waste is an inherent aspect of living processes: all organisms generate some form of waste, and some waste begets life. On the other hand, the scale of contemporary human waste has generated some intriguing scenarios. Recent studies, for example, have revealed that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that vast expanse of plastic waste in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, hosts a thriving and unique aquatic ecosystem. The very plastic waste that is destroying many forms of marine life is simultaneously nurturing others. Meanwhile, in South Asia, the endangered Greater Adjutant stork finds a perilous form of safety in urban dumps. It finds refuge in refuse. Even more unsettling is the discovery of microplastics in brain tissue and human embryos. Such examples challenge simplistic characterizations of waste as a problem while raising existential questions about the integrity of living beings.

The Waste:Life project explores the relationship between waste and life from multiple angles. It inquires about the meaning of both concepts and about the symbolic regimes that maintain the boundaries between “living” and “wasting.” What do waste and life mean in different disciplinary and cultural contexts? Are those meanings shifting? Drawing from the emergent field of Discard Studies, the project aims to push beyond conventional waste management frameworks and to evoke broader reflection on the systems and power dynamics that generate, represent, and distribute both waste and life, often in ways that contribute to environmental injustice and colonial legacies. Relatedly, it interrogates cultural logics of abjection and efficiency that render some life as essential and others as excessive, wasted, or destined for wastelands. From a different, more uplifting angle, I also explore creative and life-affirming repurposing of waste, whether through art, compost, engineering, or the circular economy.

In 2025/2026, I will be leading a faculty seminar on Waste:Life at Haverford College’s John B Hurford ’60 Center for Arts and Humanities. For more information, visit https://www.haverford.edu/hcah/groups-seminars-forums/faculty-seminars.