charlotteslegersmaster-blog

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UPDATE (08-05)

Zoals je hierboven ziet ben ik begonnen met de website, gebaseerd op het ontwerp van de voorlopig gekozen poster, en enkele andere objecten (stickers, vlaggen, ...).

Voor de campagne heb ik besloten het in het Nederlands te houden (in plaats van het zeer algemene ‘clean the street’) en wel meerbepaald in het Antwerps, om zo de lokale bevolking meer als doelpubliek te kunnen bereiken. 

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UPDATE (05-05)

Vorige dinsdag ben ik gaan bespreken met Geert en Jan, en heb besloten om het ‘kleinschalig’ te houden en een soort campagne te starten. De bedoeling is om mensen mee te krijgen door ze exact niets te laten doen. 

Het enige wat de campagne van hen vereist wanneer ze de ‘petitie’ ondertekenen is beloven zelf geen zwerfvuil in de straten achter te laten. Voor deze petitie ben ik begonnen met posters te ontwerpen (enkele van de eerste ontwerpen vind je hierboven terug) en hierna volgt de website!

TO BE CONTINUED!

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UPDATE (29-04)

Na het laatste plenum ben ik beginnen nadenken over manieren waarop ik mijn masterproef ‘grafischer’ kan maken. Het eerste deel is namelijk klaar, de Clean The Street Day’ met bijhorende advertenties, maar nu liep ik wat verloren in het ‘wat verder’ gedeelte.

Na uren en dagen te brainstormen en mensen vragen te stellen rond het onderwerp denk ik dat ik niet perse het activistische verder wil zetten, meer de grafische kant verder uitwerken. Hiervoor wil ik dan ook het vuilnis gebruiken dat ik heb gevonden, als thema. Het fotograferen in catalogusstijl, etc.... Dit is nu nog de vraag, maar hiervoor ben ik als studie al eens illustraties en voorbeeldposters beginnen ontwerpen, waarvan je er hier al 2 kan bekijken.

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UPDATE! (Charlotte Slegers / 08.03.17) 1 • A facebook event has been made after I FINALLY got approval from the city counsel for the event and following street exhibition. The CYS-Day itself will take place on April, 7th. https://www.facebook.com/events/843821475755562??ti=ia 2 • The design of the exhibition is also taking shape. It will be made one of the upcoming weeks! More on this later! 3 • The template for my eco-graffiti is also finnaly being created! After a long search, I finally found a lasercutting business in Antwerp that has enough rest-materials for me to make it with! 4 • This friday, I have a meeting at 'het EcoHuis', Borgerhout, who invited me to create one of my eco-graffiti advertisements on their café walls! YAY!

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CLEAN THE STREET DAY

(copy: Charlotte Slegers, 15/02/2017)

The plan is to keep a ‘Clean the Street’ Day on March, the 1st. For this I have been sending emails to the city counsil to check if I can have my exhibition in the street. (I’ll keep you guys updated on this). To advertise for the CTS-day, yesterday my colleagues and coach pointed out that since I am working around ‘littering’, I shouldn’t make flyers and make even more garbage. So I decided to do it with ‘ECO-GRAFFITI’. It’s just a simple mixture of moss, milk, water and sugar and can be sprayed or painted on any surface. If you repeat the process every 2 weeks, the moss will grow and a natural type of graffiti will appear.

Of course, a facebook page will also be made so I can reach people through the medium of the internet. For this I have been designing banners, with a stencil font, that will also be lasercut (also mailing to companies for this, so I can have a stencil made with rest forms, to prevent extra waste).

In the end, I have decided to design my own pop-up street, ‘exhibition’ wich I am doing at the moment with SketchUp, so this as well can be made with the remains of plastic and wood from their previous clients.

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FOLLOW-UP pt.2

(copy: Charlotte Slegers, 13/02/2017)

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here... So here it is: for my ‘new’ idea, I’ve been designing some flyers that can be distributed in my street/neighbourhood. The plan for this is simple:

STEP 1: design & distribute flyers

STEP 2: clean the street (hopefully with help from my street)

STEP 3: get the green light from the city counsil to exhibit the found ‘trash-art’ in the street.

STEP 4: design & create the exhibition (space).

STEP 5: the exhibition itself.

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FOLLOW-UP

(copy: Charlotte Slegers, 22/01/2017)

So I have been sick this last week, but I did manage to work and think of some new ideas for this project. First: I started the photoshoot-sessions with my waste. I made a mockup as an example of what it could be. 

(Own mockup of my photos)

Further, I also came up with the idea (in the spirit of humanizing and the ‘death’ or mourning of our trash/nature) to also create in memoriam cards and a sort of list/plaque for every piece of trash I encounter.

(Examples of in memoriam cards and an ‘in memoriam’ plaque)

When researching, I noticed that my previous idea; to keep the waste and display it, has already been done numerous times. As the originality of it kind of fell away from the project, I decided to do things differently.

(Hence, the humanizing.)

This all makes that it will kind of be a huge memorial/funeral for our environment.

______

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ME, MY TRASH & I

(copy: Charlotte Slegers, 14/01/2017)

Last tuesday at the mastercoach-moment, I was told to look for ways to convince people, how to make them pay attention to the issue of ‘waste’ - littering. When researching the topic, and previous campaigns around the subject, I found that most of them do this by showing radical/gruesome images or the opposite: showing an image of a beautiful (nature) landscape. This made me think that there is one option they haven’t tried: humanizing the problem. Humanizing our garbage.  Because after all, the garbage is the only thing human in these landscapes. Nature made the meadows. Nature made our forests. Nature made the ivy grow up the house. It did not place those sigarette buds in the grass, just as it did not throw the plastic bottle in the forest.  To do this, I have started thinking about how I can do this through the medium I would most like to use: photography - film. At this moment, I have 4 ideas to try out on this project.

Body bag :  put all the garbage in a large plastic bag, and tie it up in a way it looks like a dead body in a body bag. 

Cemetary : create (scaled) crosses and tiny tombstones and place them with every piece of trash on the street to create a ‘mass grave’ for all the litter.

BFF : keep all my own trash in a bag and carry it around. Take images of ‘our journey’ as if my trash is my friend.

Photoshoot : create a tiny photostudio and photograph every piece of trash I create in a month. 

______

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(Cigarette butt littering in Paris)

4,5 biljoen sigarettenpeuken vervuilen aarde jaarlijks

Ze lijken klein en onschuldig, maar sigarettenpeuken zijn hardnekkig zwerfvuil vol giftige stoffen. Toch schieten de overheid en de industrie niet in actie.

De Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie heeft berekend dat 80 procent van alle sigarettenpeuken in het wild belandt. Dat zijn er 4,5 biljoen per jaar. Die sigarettenfilters zijn allesbehalve biologisch afbreekbaar. Ze bestaan uit plastic, dat in de oceaan verweert tot minuscule snippertjes die in de magen van vissen, vogels en zeezoogdieren terechtkomen.

(Artist Jesús Bubu Negrón made this street rug from cigarette butt wrappers.)

Chemische afval dat gif lekt

Maar filterstompjes zijn ook venijnige brokjes klein chemisch afval. In peuken zijn maar liefst 4.200 chemische afbraakproducten aangetroffen. Vele zijn notoir kankerverwekkend, verstoren de hormoonhuishouding of zijn anderszins ongezond. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat de peuken effectief gif lekken naar de omgeving. Dat gif kan zich ophopen in de voedselketen.

De overheid en de tabaksfabrikanten kennen het probleem. Maar toch gebeurt er weinig of niets. Een verbod op filters – die de sigaret overigens helemaal niet gezonder maken – is taboe. Bij de fabrikanten gebeuren al sinds de jaren zeventig sporadisch experimenten met biologisch afbreekbare filters.

(Portland-based multimedia artist Sean Healy uses cigarette butts, resin, and ink to create these spectacular sculptures.)

Maar die eens zo veelbelovende alternatieven zijn allemaal afgevoerd. Waarom, willen de woordvoerders van de industrie niet kwijt.

(Eos-magazine)

http://www.gva.be/cnt/aid921232/4-5-biljoen-sigarettenpeuken-vervuilen-aarde-jaarlijks

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Nog tot en met woensdag vindt in Antwerpen het internationale afvalcongres ISWA plaats. Meer dan 1.200 vertegenwoordigers van diverse bedrijven en instanties, beleidsmakers en academici uit 92 landen zoeken er samen naar een oplossing voor het wereldwijde afvalprobleem. Hoe groot dat afvalprobleem nu precies is, werd voor het eerst becijferd door ISWA (International Solid Waste Association) en UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme). Zij stelden hun Global Waste Management Outlook voor, het allereerste wereldwijde overzicht van afvalbeheer. Knowhow van Vlaamse bedrijven 'Uit het rapport blijkt dat er jaarlijks 7 tot 10 miljard ton afval geproduceerd wordt en dat 3 miljard mensen geen toegang hebben tot een gecontroleerde afvalverwerking. 70 procent van het afval wordt gewoon gedumpt. Het komt in de aarde, de oceanen en de atmosfeer terecht en dat heeft vernietigende gevolgen voor de gezondheid', zegt David Newman, voorzitter van ISWA. Hij vindt dat het afvalbeheer samen met de klimaatverandering de grootste uitdaging vormt op milieugebied. Overheden wereldwijd moeten zich dringend bewust worden van het probleem en actie ondernemen. Newman prees daarbij de Vlaamse aanpak. Een van de redenen om het congres in Antwerpen te organiseren, was net het Vlaams afvalbeleid en de knowhow van de Vlaamse bedrijven op dat gebied. Antwerpse haven 'Wij zijn inderdaad al tientallen jaren bezig om ons afval zo goed mogelijk te verwerken en we kunnen goede cijfers voorleggen. In Vlaanderen wordt 72 procent van het afval momenteel gerecycleerd', zegt Antwerps schepen voor Stadsonderhoud Philip Heylen, die het ISWA-congres voorzit. Naast allerlei voordrachten en presentaties brengen de congresdeelnemers de komende dagen ook een bezoek aan onder meer Isvag, Umicore, Indaver, Hooge Maey en de Antwerpse haven om te kijken hoe zij afvalverwerking precies aanpakken. (Belga/AVE)

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SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON LITTERING BEHAVIOR  A DISSERTATION

Presented to The Faculty of the Division of Graduate Studies and Research by Stuart Norman Robinson 

Entire study/paper:

https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/29521/robinson_stuart_n_197505_phd_69598.pdf

(p.84-92) (...) As hypothesized, littering was more likely in a dirty area than in a clean area. Festinger's theory of social comparison proposed that when placed in ambiguous situations, individuals turn to environmental cues to evaluate what is "correct" behavior. It is possible that consen­sual validation influenced students to litter in a dirty post office and not to litter in a clean one. Besides being well supported by the large num­bers of notices littered in both Dirty-Anonymous and Dirty-Non-Anonymous conditions, this explanation received much face validity from the casual remarks made by the subjects during the experiment. When approached by the experimenter and asked why they littered, many litterers often commented on the acceptability of littering in the post office. Comments like, "Everyone litters in the post office," or, "The place is messy al­ready; a little more won't be noticed," were typical. If the situation was somewhat ambiguous as suggested by the low levels of litter during the clean conditions, the presence of litter on the floor in the post office quite possibly convinced the norm-conscious students that littering was socially acceptable. As defined in the beginning of this paper, litter is trash discarded or scattered about in disorder over a socially inappropriate area. It ap­pears that the likelihood of an area being littered is determined some­what by the social acceptability of littering in that area. The results suggest that this norm is indicated, among other things, by the present condition of the area.

This assumption receives further support from the questionnaire data, Both litterers and disposers suggested higher fines for littering in the woods than from a car window or on the sidewalk, Acceptability seems to be related to location, Further support for this concept can be construed from the biographical item about the subjects' bedroom, Over 80 per cent of both litterers and disposers consider the room where they sleep to be clean, More study is necessary, however, to verify these assumptions, another hypothesis was supported, Littering was more likely when an individual's anonymity was maintained than when an individual's name was identified with his actions, Zimbardo's theory predicted this behavior and suggested that it is a result of the weakening social con­trols that are based on guilt and shame, According to Zimbardo, if others cannot identify you or single you out, they cannot evaluate, criti­cize, judge, or punish you, many aspects of the data, besides the limited occurrence of lit­ter during non-anonymous conditions, supported this point of view, A sample of students who ranked "self-respect, 11 "true friendship," and "honesty" as highly as did this group are likely to be concerned about social evaluation and punishment, Although the fines suggested by dis­posers were not significantly different than those suggested by litterers, a sign test (Guilford & Fruchter, 1973) revealed that disposers did sug­gest significantly higher fines than litterers did on each item of Heberlein's scale (e. <. 05). This might imply that disposers were more con­cerned about the consequences of their actions than litterers and there­fore littered less often. Indeed, Heberlein (1971) found that, in general, non-litterers were people who were more aware of the consequences of their behavior and more willing to accept responsibility for their actions. Although Z7 per cent of the students were observed littering, only 16. 5 per cent of the questionnaire sample admitted to littering in a public building with trash cans near. Also, more people admitted to littering without receptacles nearby than when cans were present. Are litterers, then, less likely to admit their normative deviations? Assuming that they see the receptacles, does littering with cans nearby elicit greater concern for social evaluation than littering with no alternatives present? 

Other aspects of the data, not systematically recorded, suggest that anonymous litterers were less concerned about littering than were nonanonymous litterers. Take, for example, the questionnaire return rate. About 7 per cent more disposers returned questionnaires than litterers. Of the 346 litterers who returned their questionnaires, 41 per cent had littered non-anonymously and 59 per cent had littered anony­mously. Although this difference was not significant (e. <. 05), it ap­pears that not only might litterers be more concerned about social evaluation than disposers, but non-anonymous litterers might be more concerned than anonymous litterers because they were more reluctant to send in their questionnaires. These assumptions are supported further by student comments recorded by the experimenter during the sessions. When asked how they felt about littering, more non-anonymous students expressed con­cern about being discovered and sanctioned than anonymous students. One student who carried his notice out of the post office area said he did so simply because it had his name on it. Finally, the failure to demonstrate that the address of the no­tice affected disposing behavior is of great importance to Zimbardo's de-individuation theory. If the occurrence of deviations from normative behavior are augmented by anonymity because of a weakening of the social controls based on guilt and shame, and if it is assumed that this fear of social evaluation is what increased anonymous littering behavior over non-anonymous littering behavior, then how would Zimbardo's the­ory account for the absence of an anonymity effect with disposing behav­ior? The apparent discrepancy can be dealt with very logically. Litter­ing trash on the floor is an action very susceptible to social evaluation since it would be somewhat embarrassing for a litterer to be caught lit­tering by an antilittering peer. On the other hand, throwing a piece of trash in a trash can is accompanied by no social consequences whatso­ever. No one is going to approach a disposer and commend or admon­ish his behavior. It appears that there is no fear, guilt, or shame in­volved in disposing of notices and, therefore, the same number of peo­ple disposed of anonymous notices as non-anonymous notices. Such information is far from conclusive evidence for Zimbardo's idea's, but the relationships revealed so far are interesting, to say the least. A third hypothesis also received considerable support from these results. An individual's attitude toward littering was not related to his littering behavior. The theoretical discussion in Chapter II sug­gested that littering behavior would be inconsistent with littering beliefs and feelings in a college setting in which a norm of antilittering prevails. According to Wicker (1969) such inconsistency could have re­sulted from a number of variables. First, the accuracy with which a person's beliefs are measured can be questioned. Even though the atti­tude scales used were observed to be very reliable and considerably discriminative of specific attitudes toward littering, they might be com­pletely invalid. Indeed, they received no behavioral validation from these studies or those by Heberlein (1971). They did, however, com­pare littering attitudes with attitudes toward other minor offenses and assess littering numerous materials in a variety of specific situations, and this breadth and specificity should be considered before questioning their validity. A second set of variables that may influence the occurrence of littering attitude-littering behavior inconsistency may be the situational variables involved. Attitudes about other aspects of the situation, fears of punishment, and the extent to which a student feels he is able to act on his attitudes and is personally involved with the issue, all may influence consistency. Attitudes toward littering were given moderate im­portance with respect to other minor deviant behaviors by the entire sample. Littering ranked second in importance superseded by only "failing to put out a campfire" on Heberlein's scale -- a result that repli­cated an earlier finding (Heberlein, 1971). Also, littering items were given moderate importance on the modified scale. These responses suggest the existence of general antilittering norms on campus, a pre­vailing attitude which certainly could account for the failure of a general questionnaire to discriminate among litterers and disposers. When placed in the specific situation of the post office, surrounded by litter­ing peers, the more general antilittering norm is likely to change into a specific pro-littering norm. Values, on the other hand, did not predict littering behavior as hypothesized. It was believed that an individual's values toward litter­ing would be related to his littering behavior. The results, however, showed essentially no difference between the value hierarchy of litter­ers as compared with disposers. Both litterers and disposers ranked a "world of beauty" about 12 and "clean" about 13 ( 18 = least impor­tant). Values, then, were not shown to be stable determinants of behav­ior in this situation with these techniques and procedures. A possible explanation of these results may be found in the stan­dard deviations of the value items. They ranged from about 3. 8 to 7. 9 for both scales, much larger than any of the items on the other scales. Also the range of the average value rankings was limited from 5 to 14. These statistics suggest the possibility that the value scales did not discriminate adequately between the values as they have in previous studies. A second explanation for the :failure of the data to support the hypothesis is that the hypothesis was wrong. If the key values--"world of beauty" and "clean"- -were as unimportant to this sample of students as indicated by their high ranking, it is surprising that some subjects did not litter at all. Maybe what should be explained is why, in a sample which does not value a world of beauty or being clean, do some students still not litter. A third explanation was suggested earlier in Chapter II and Chap­ter III. Value-behavior consistency may be the exception rather than the rule. Values, as described in Chapter II, traditionally have been considered as general concepts in that clusters of attitudes compose a value. The proposed relationship between a world of beauty with a spe­cific behavior like littering in a post office may appear to be somewhat extended. Nevertheless, previous research demonstrated the behav­ioral validity of so me values. This study, however, failed to demon­strate the behavioral validity of "world of beauty" and "clean. 11 It is apparent that more studies comparing the behavioral validity of attitude and value scales are necessary. 

Granting the fact that judgments such as these are made more easily after a study than before, it can be suggested that some aspects of the procedure might have been unnecessary, For example, eight observations were unnecessary for a variable with as strong an effect as condition of the area, Four would have been adequate, Eight sessions were necessary, however, to demonstrate the weaker effects of address of the notice, Also, two value scales and two attitude scales might not have been necessary. Possibly the same information could have been obtained from one each, On the other hand, the sample size was not too large, Five- thousand subjects revealed 1500 litterers, 300 of whom returned ques- tionnaires, The 20 per cent return rate, however, does suggest the possibility of response bias, It is conceivable that people who care lit­tle about littering also might not consider filling out and returning a questionnaire very important, They might even have littered the ques- tionnaire forms in the post office, Since about 7 per cent more dispos- ers than litterers returned their questionnaires, the possibility remains that litterers are more sensitive to social evaluation than are disposers, Finally, the homogeneity of the sample severely limits the generalizations that can be made from the results, The circumstances limited the study not only to the college campus but to the Georgia Institute of Technology campus, In so doing, the study not only investigated southern college student behavior but specifically engineering college student behavior. Because the students in the sample were predominantly southern male engineering and applied science vocational students, the results cannot be generalized easily to the typical American college student. Such a situation serves to emphasize the need of replication with a more heterogeneous sample. 

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(Ordinary garbage from Malawi)

Artfully laid out garbage: photography by Pascal Rostain

The word rude comes from the latin rudus, which means garbage (well, rubble, to be exact), and the French have coined rudologie, meaning the science of garbage as an discipline (think anthropology meets geography meets waste management).

Rudologie was recently raised to an art form by Pascal Rostain, a photographer and former paparazzi who has an exhibit (and book) of nicely laid out garbage.  Consistent to his former profession, a large part of his work is taking pictures of the garbage of stars; should you wish to know what to expect from Madonna’s garbage, or Ronald Reagan’s, he’s your man.

His work also includes garbage from ordinary people all over the world, from Paris suburbs to Malawi or Malaysia.

(Bruce Willis’ garbage.)

Curiosity prodded Rostain to look through Serge Gainsbourg’s garbage, and what he found somewhat surprised him: there was no secret Gainsbourg, there was only garbage that matched the public persona: packs of Gitane cigarettes and bottles of Ricard pastis, all empty.

Beyond the paparazzi interest, garbage reveals a lot about an individual or an era.  It is a snapshot of consumerism, of eating, of leisure.

Rostain is of course not the first to sift through garbage for anthropological interest; William Rathje’s garbage project (“an anthropology of garbage”) started a good 35 years ago.  And turning garbage into art is also not new, from work using found objects to the work of Tim Noble or Sue Webster, for instance, or HA Schult.   Art photography is not unique, either; Chris Jordan, in particular, has made amazing work out of repeated patterns of waste or consumer items (check out his Intolerable Beauty series, in particular).  

But Rostain’s work is the only one that lays out the garbage, carefully sorted out by size and shape, and simply takes pictures – as if it were an illustration plate for a zoology book.  Strangely compelling.

We like to ignore garbage, just toss it into some imaginary “away”.  But Rostain’s work shows that this is willful blindness on our part – there is a weird beauty in objects of all kind, and they present us with a mirror of who we are.

https://enviropaul.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/artfully-laid-out-garbage-photography-by-pascal-rostain/

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Litterati: A Digital Landfill of Good-Looking Trash

Litterati  is Jeff Kirschner’s photographic, geo-tagging, anti-litter campaign. The instructions:

1. Find a piece of litter 2. Photograph it with Instagram 3. Add the hashtag “#litterati” 4. Throw away or recycle the litter

Jeff Kirscher on Good:

At first, it was just me. I’d photograph and pick up ten things a day. Litter became approachable. Picking it up became surprisingly enjoyable, even artistic. More importantly, I was documenting my personal impact on cleaning the earth. Pretty soon, others began contributing to the Digital Landfill—a photo gallery of all the litter that had been picked up and properly discarded. It wasn’t long before several thousand pieces had been collected and a community was born.

Then came the Great Wall of China. More specifically, a Litterati-tagged photo of a plastic wrapper laying on the walkway of one of the world’s greatest man-made wonders. That picture inspired the design of a global map which uses GPS to display where litter is being collected. We saw people from opposite sides of the world contributing to the same cause. It was a powerful reminder of how we are truly all connected. As the Litterati movement grew, participants began tagging items with additional descriptors, providing insight to the most commonly found brands and products. Suddenly there was data.

The pull of Litterati, at least for me, is that it formalizes both a way of seeing and a virtual community for that way of seeing. This is the “data” that Kirscher mentions.  What emerges from Litterati is  a visual culture of everyday, escaped trash. Many of the photographs are beautiful, imbuing the trash with pathos, grace, or humour. Some are just pictures of trash. But like Andy Hugh‘s work, they are portraits, and these portraits shift the litter from “matter out of place,” to a well-framed, well-placed object of contemplation.

“Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.” ― John Berger

https://discardstudies.com/2013/07/29/litterati-a-digital-landfill-of-good-looking-trash/

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Madlen Hirtentreu just loves photographing bins

Madlen Hirtentreu: Trash bins

They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. For one Estonian photographer, trash isn’t just treasure, but a rich, and possibly stinky font of creative inspiration. Madlen Hirtentreu got in touch recently with a simple missive: “I usually capture images with [an] analog camera and lately started to photograph trash bins in the early mornings… have a look.” There’s not too much more to say about the project really, but have a look we did, and found something oddly compelling about these pictures of dustbins. Each overspilling vessel tells a story go what once was: the parties, the shared pizzas, the lunches grabbed on the go, the mop cast aside for a newer, shinier number. It’s rather poignant in a way, but rather comical too. Essentially though, it’s just pictures of bins, and there’s nothing really too wrong with that.

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/madlen-hirtentreu-bins

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Olympus Tough Grainy Film Street Photography in NYC

by: Michael Kowalczyk

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A history of New York City’s solid waste management in photographs

By the nineteenth century, New York City was persistently and famously filthy. While other urban centers had begun to clean up their streets, approaching vessels could still smell New York far out to sea. Yet,  the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) was founded in 1881 as the Department of Street Cleaning and became one of the first sanitation agencies in the world that democratically cleaned and picked up snow from every street, regardless of socioeconomic class or neighborhood. One of the Department’s first Commissioners, Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., pioneered such current practices as recycling, street sweeping, and a dedicated uniformed cleaning and collection force called the White Wings.

Today, the New York City Department of Sanitation is the largest sanitation department in the world, and the only department with both an artist-in-residence and an anthropologist-in-residence. Not only does the DSNY continue to pick up waste and snow, it is also integral as first responders in urban disasters, such as 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy.

This is an abbreviated history via archival photographs of NYC’s municipal waste collection history.

https://discardstudies.com/2013/10/13/a-history-of-new-york-citys-solid-waste-management-in-photographs/

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TRASH IN THE STREETS OF ANTWERP