Rubbish News
Rubbish has been in mainstream media a far bit this week.
Wayne Gooderham looks at items left in secondhand books, specifically the vast collection Skoob Books in London have collected in their warehouse in Oxford. Pressed flowers, bookmarks, tickets, telegrams, business cards, postcards, photos and maps or among items left in books. Many items were probably accidentally left in the books, so maybe not actively discarded, and rescued from the rubbish category by becoming part of this collection.
The secret contents of secondhand books, 5 December 2012, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/05/secret-contents-secondhand-books?CMP=twt_fd
The Shit London Awards 2012 got press coverage too. The organiser Patrick Dalton is keen to stress that the awards are not commenting on how shit London is, but specific aspects of it.
Categories are:
* UGLIEST BUILDING IN LONDON
* BEST/WORST SHOP NAME
* MOST DEPRESSING VIEW FROM WORK
* BEST PICTURE
New 2012 categories:
* BEST BRITISH PHOTO
* BEST INTERNATIONAL PHOTO
There’s some rubbish (Best international photograph: Possibly soiled mattress, Sydney, Australia, by Katja Forbes) and faeces to be seen (Best photograph: Pigeons and Boris bikes, central London, by Andrew Smith)
but the shitness is broader than rubbish and faeces and incorporates shit signs, shit buildings and shit views.
http://shitlondon.co.uk/shit-london-awards/
The Secret Life of Rubbish has been on BBC4 in a 2 part series:
Episode1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p48tt/The_Secret_Life_of_Rubbish_Episode_1/
Episode 2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p65qn/The_Secret_Life_of_Rubbish_Episode_2/
Archive footage is woven together narrating the recent history of British waste management.
The first programme deals with the decades immediately after the Second World War from post-war Make Do and Mend through to the arrival of supermarkets and consumerism.
The second programme looks at the 1970s and 1980s including the Winter of Discontent in 1978 and the 1974 Labour Government policy War on Waste.
Dr Timothy Cooper examines the War on waste? The politics of waste and recycling in post-war Britain, 1950-1975 (published in 2009 in Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 20, no. 4)
