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theses

The sanitary response to trash eliminates refuse from both the individual’s and community’s consciousness, transporting waste “away” to unimagined landscapes.(1) While municipal waste hauling companies provide a crucial service for American communities, the carting off of trash from neighborhoods to distant places perpetuates an inability to separate and cycle waste streams into more valuable materials.(2) With many communities lacking engaging waste sites integrated into the fabric of their localities, most American places have lost the ability to creatively manage their trash. (3) This paper identifies the need for incorporating additional waste cycling sites into communities as a way to address America’s unhealthy relationship with waste. It reviews New York City’s Compost Project, an initiative popularizing the closed-loop waste cycle of composting “by giving New Yorkers the knowledge, skills, and opportunities they need to produce and use compost.”(4) Three selected case studies from this project offer a variety of composting methods and compost site experiences - specific criteria informing the design of innovative urban waste landscapes. After reviewing case studies in community composting, this project shifts to proposing a composting initiative for the city of New Brunswick, NJ. Entitled, POP UP Compost Project,(5) this proposal envisions a three-step system including 1) organic collection sites, 2) compost cycling locations, and 3) strategies for re-investing finished compost back into the city. Integral to this proposal is the compost drum - a mobile organic collection unit that retrofits a 55-gallon drum with a “waste window.” Organic collection sites featuring the compost drum will be integrated at New Brunswick Community Farmers Market locations while compost cycling sites will be located at existing community gardens throughout New Brunswick. In many ways, this project is a response to the work of landscape architect, Mira Engler, and her efforts to expand the scope of landscape architecture to include public waste sites. These spaces challenge residents to rethink their connection with waste, demonstrating the process of turning materials deemed valueless into valuable while deconstructing fears and guilt associated with waste. Connecting Engler’s research to the community composting movement, this project seeks to integrate composting sites as dialectic places - messy yet clean, functional yet beautiful(6) - in New Brunswick, NJ. (1) Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Truck with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 3. (2) Mira Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), xxi. (3) Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 4. (4) “NYC Compost Project Overview”, Department of Sanitation New York (DSNY). Accessed March 20, 2016, www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/zerowaste/residents/nyc-compost-project.shtml. (5) In the title, P.O.P. stands for “people operated power” while POP UP refers to the network of temporary organic collection sites operating during market hours in New Brunswick, NJ. (6) Mira Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), xxi.

ETD_7241

M.L.A.

Includes bibliographical references

by Andrew P. Schlesinger

doi:10.7282/T3QZ2D4S

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.