All photography by Quill Lemons
Landfills As Museums
An education initiative from Slow Factory Foundation, powered by adidas with special thanks to Waste Management.
How often do you think about where your trash ends up? Not the paper and plastic you honourably recycle — the stuff that you put in the “everything else” bin. The packaging and miscellaneous rubbish that you’re not sure what to do with; where does it all go?
“Trash doesn’t just go away. There is no ‘away’; where are these things going?” says Slow Factory Founder, Céline Semaan. “Trash is a necessary byproduct of our existence... We need to observe waste as a new resource, and we have to think of waste as an asset.”
At the end of 2019, Slow Factory took a group of adidas creators, designers and community leaders, and 20 students from Parsons and Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) on an 8-hour drive from New York to Waste Management’s landfill site in Pennsylvania to find out exactly where our landfill waste ends up.
The visit was part of Slow Factory’s education initiative, Landfills as Museums. Through visits to landfill sites and in-depth workshops, Slow Factory hopes to give students and designers a visceral understanding of the scale of even the best-managed landfills — and how they can begin to design the solutions.
“This has to stop becoming a polarized
and political issue and start to become a human issue.”
Shiara Robinson, Athlete, Womenswear Designer, and adidas Runners NYC Captain shared her experience during the subsequent workshop: “I just expected to see a bunch of steamy, wet garbage, and I was so pleasantly surprised to see how beautiful it was and how well it’s maintained.”
Céline Semaan of Slow Factory believes that if designers visit these sites, it will encourage them to consider the end-of-life process in their work and avoid having future products ever reach these landfills.
“A Waste Management representative mentioned that 600 trucks had dumped loads in just that one day,” shared Lexie Lerman, a student in Systems & Collections at Parsons School of Design. “It reaffirms that trying to design things to stay out of the landfills is the most important thing.”
Following a tour of the Waste Management site, the Slow Factory team facilitated a waste-led design workshop focusing on circular design systems and textile waste. During the workshop, Dr. Theanne Schiros, Science and Sustainability Professor at FIT got clear on the urgency of this problem: “This has to stop becoming a polarized and political issue and start to become a human issue.”
Jessie Zapo, founder of Girls Run NYC, a running collective of women who are from all walks of life, spoke of how the experience impacted her approach and belief that individuals and communities, together, can affect positive change: “We all have a responsibility. My consumption habits have changed since visiting the landfill site because I know my waste is not just disappearing. If we changed the way we consume and produce things we would have a better chance of managing waste in a circular way.”
With an ambition to scale-up and roll out Landfills as Museums to other cities, the ultimate aim is to explore new waste-led design practises and examine how we can collectively re-engineer systems to reuse and divert materials from landfills.
“A Waste Management representative mentioned that 600 trucks had dumped loads in just that one day. It reaffirms that trying to design things to stay out of the landfills is the most important thing.”
