Inside the Sanitation System: Mierle Ukeles, Urban Ecology and the Social Circulation of Garbage

In the contemporary developed world, garbage en masse only becomes visible when something goes wrong. To be sure there are examples of "homeless" gar bage barges, shunted from port to port, and sanitation strikes, such as New York City's week-long 1968 work stoppage.1 Such events temporarily bring trash into public visibility and consciousness, but these are aberrations that occur only against the backdrop of the comfortable invisibility of the garbage that we cease lessly produce. Since most people do not live in conditions rife with garbage, what is cast off is both out of sight and out of mind. This essay seeks to reveal the hidden circulation of garbage in New York City. It focuses on garbage not as a technological problem, or even as a narrow environmental problem, but as a pervasive social process that connects us all. In this I follow Cynthia Deitering's suggestion that the 1980s saw "a shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste" (196) and that this shift caused us to "perceive [...] our own complicity in postindustrial ecosystems" (197).2