Bringing in the Garbage: Opening a Critical Space for Vehicle Disposal Practices

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship among practices and policies of waste/ing and economic structures to make visible the implications of vehicle disposal policies for environmental policy and theory. Consequently, I attempt to build upon the small body of literature that is now critically engaging with waste production and resulting actions/inaction in the form of policies of management. In doing this I use waste as a lens to examine the interrelationships among environmental degradation and economic and political structures. Further, I examine these phenomena in relation to a physical object, the automobile, to add materiality to abstract notions of waste as it relates to both the political and the economic. Through vehicle recycling policies, I analyze how underlying economic structures in contemporary capitalism result in specific responses to the "problems" of waste as well as how the related responses, or "solutions" perpetuate an un-ecological industrial system which severely restricts the possibilities of making substantial change in the production of environmental harms.