Trash talk: These 2 East Coasters are putting waste top of mind
Dive deep into discards on a new Atlantic Voice episode
There's a whiff of immortality to Jane Whitten's home studio, on the outskirts of Summerside, P.E.I.
The artist creates her work almost entirely from discarded plastics, and both her finished products and the source material are everywhere — stacks of yogurt lids by the sofa, chicken pot pie wrappers coiled into mussel-shapes on a side table, Crispers packets sewn into quilts in the spare room.
Whitten has been subbing in this detritus — "unconventional materials," she calls it — for natural fibres in her knitting and basketmaking for years.
"If I can find enough of something, I can make a basket out of it," she said, although her affinity to plastics runs deeper than just the creative challenge.
"It's always been that fascination, of knowing the stuff that's been sort of rejected, is out there. But there surely must be something we can use it for, something we can do with it," she said.
Much of her work doesn't resemble waste at first glance, until the odd shapes invite a viewer in for a second look. "I've tried to make the work look appealing, so it attracts people, or hooks them in," she said.
Whitten's plastic fascination took on a new dimension during the pandemic. Her switch to curbside and online shopping saw the amount of plastic wrappings coming into her home spike, and a new body of work emerge. In 2020, she began using a basket-making technique called "coiling" to create vessels out of her discards.
In 2021, she set out a more systemic approach: create a coiled cylinder basket for each month of the year from the plastic junk she'd accumulated in that time. She kept a journal to detail each bit of waste and its origin story, and tracked the hours that went into coiling that month's sculpture.
The resulting work, Consumed, lays bare her trash for anyone to see, although it takes a close eye to pick out what once lined grocery store shelves. The 12 multicoloured towers are flecked with the gold of Werther's candy wrappers, the silver foil liners of yogurt tubs, and the eye-searing yellow of No Name frozen vegetable bags.
The coils, composed of stuff that slides into and out of homes almost unconsciously, asks people to consider what outlasts a one-time use.
"That's been shown a couple of times now in P.E.I., and people have been quite shocked, I think, actually," she said. "They're saying, 'All those wrappings from just [a] one-person household. How much is coming out of my household?'"
A retired educator, Whitten says environmental messaging plays a big part in her art.
"I think that's part of the responsibility as an artist. I think we have that ability to make an impact, to make some change, and get people thinking, and hopefully we can get on top of this. But there's a lot of plastic out there." she said.
Whitten is still collecting her 2022 trash, although what artwork it may become is still taking shape. And she'd be quite happy to bring an end to the entire series.
"It doesn't mean we need to keep making [plastic] so that I can make beautiful things. I will be quite happy if I run out of materials. But I know I won't."
Some of Whitten's work is on display at the Eptek Art and Culture Centre in Summerside until Nov. 9.
Dedicated to discards
On another island — Newfoundland — an academic shares Whitten's dedication to making visible the largely hidden world of waste.
Josh Lepawsky of St. John's is the co-author of the newly released book Discard Studies, written with fellow Memorial University professor Max Liboiron. The book sprang from a blog of the same name — discard studies is, itself, a relatively new field of academic thought, and the field, blog and book all break down the facets of everything wasted in society.
One of the big myths the authors set out to bust at the beginning of the book is that waste isn't what we mostly think it is: the stuff that fills our garbage cans.
"We mistake this very small part of the overall waste stream, in industrial systems, with our personal waste," Lepawsky said in an interview with CBC Radio's Atlantic Voice.
Lepawsky estimates household waste only accounts for five to 10 per cent of waste overall.
"The vast majority of waste happens, as I like to describe it, upstream — before you or I as individual consumers have purchased our stuff," he said, adding the waste upstream happens in a lot of places, like manufacturing or in resource extraction. Mining, he said, is notorious for creating a lot of waste in order to glean precious end commodities, such as copper or gold.
The fact that consumers deal with a relatively small amount of waste, Lepawsky said, matters in a few key ways. Solutions and policies should be targeting that upstream waste, he said, with a larger recognition that disposability is systemic throughout our society.
"Depending on the sectors you're looking at, the idea of consumer choice really becomes a kind of a non-starter," he said, citing the example of walking into a tech store to buy a new smartphone.
Beyond the bells and whistles of various models, the upstream waste created during the manufacturing of these phones is very similar, he said — and entirely out of consumer control.
Creating change
So how to create change, when most waste is largely invisible in our day-to-day lives?
"Working individually, we're constantly told that's the way that change happens. As if individual action can sort of aggregate up to make large magnitude systemic change," said Lepawsky.
"But what we really need instead of individual action is organized consumer action. And we've seen that work in the past."
Look at seatbelts, said Lepawsky. They didn't become the norm by people installing them after market into their cars. Rather, people organized, pressured, and lobbied for changes to be made upstream — on the automaker's end.
While seatbelts may have sprung from safety concerns, better environmental practices could still take notes.
"All you have to do is find one example, either in a different place or a different time or both, where something similar exists and you can say to yourself, if it exists, it's possible," he said.
"And that doesn't mean it's easy to achieve. But … if it exists, it can be done."
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