ABSTRACT Humanity lives amid the sedimented remains of two centuries of industrial waste. This is the so‐called “Anthropocene,” an age in which every inch of the globe has been transformed by an industrial capitalist system that demands accelerating production, endless frontiers of extraction, and the constant disposal of waste. While “disposed of” from the perspective of capital, persistent waste retains biophysical capacities that transform landscapes and the lives of adjacent communities. Waste accumulates unevenly; its presence is often hidden—a deliberate murkiness built into its disposal. In some cases, waste's persistence provides novel opportunities; in many, it distributes serious harms. Drawing on archaeological studies of two marginalized communities living in waste‐filled landscapes in the 1930s, this paper argues that waste's murky latency mediates how communities reproduce their everyday lives. Rather than seeing the social effects of living with waste as simply an extension of uneven capitalist logics, the excavated histories of these two sites show how waste landscapes are the terrain for much more contingent relationships that emerge out of the affordances of latent waste as simultaneously a frontier of unexpected value, a vector of unseen harms, and a source of affectively potent uncertainties.
Haeden Stewart (Tue,) studied this question.