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December 4, 2008
An image of rubbish or debris floating in Melbourne's iconic river near Swanston Street Bridge:
Terrible we say. It is wrong to throw rubbish into the river as if it were a drain or sewer. There is rubbish or litter everywhere in the city. People should clean it up and take more care or responsibility for their rubbish.
Isn't our consumer society based on excess, disposables and waste? Some argue that we should reduce our consumption. Maybe we need a different way of relating to the waste we produce than moral condemnation that makes people feel guilty?
This review of The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish by Gay Hawkins does this in terms of a micro-politics that illuminates human complex relations with waste and explores the intricacies of our relatedness to waste.
In this piece Hawkins points out that the Productivity Commission has argued that 'Governments and retailers should not proceed with their foreshadowed plan to eliminate plastic bags by the end of 2008 unless its supported by a transparent cost-benefit analysis. The analysis should clarify the problems the ban would seek to address, the response of the community to a ban, and whether or not alternatives - such as tough anti-litter laws and a means for encouraging greater community participation in controlling litter -would achieve better outcomes for the community.'
Though plastic bags weren't really a problem for the Productivity Commission people have made the switch to using green bags and cutting down on the use of plastic bags for shopping. This indicates that a new ethics or set of values about waste is emerging that says economic benefit--profit--isn't the only value.
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There is a whole tradition of writing, which in celebrating suburbia as utopia, sees the city as an urban wasteland full of threats (violence, crime and disease).