Waste around New Haven

Around New Haven, I always find people carrying packaging boxes that they may have just emptied off a new item. The dustbins of the city are full of these brown card board boxes. Even inside the buildings, the dustbins always have a lot of cardboard.

Packaging material here can be perpetually found lying on the streets. Such stuff tells differnt stories of the place. That people are constantly engaging in newer products. That perhaps people are constantly changing, and hence constantly buying new products. That the University is buying a lot of new product all the time. That packaging in the US is intensive...so on and so forth.

However, all this material never goes to any further use. The nature of garbage in New Haven is much different than what I would find in Indian cities. There are many times when people may walk up to a dustbin and pick up thigs from it. It's absolutely a normal practice to so it in the US. But what is also tells about this society is that it's limits of seeing the potential of 'material'. The inventive minds of India would try and use up much of all the material before it actually finds place in the garbage can.

For example, we save most of our packaging, often turning it into containers, cutting it for smaller things, selling it to the nearby raddi wala for some money -- in the process of which we mobilize a lot of things and ideas. It gives rise to a certain kind of culture and chain of entrepreneurs. There is no such dimension here. Social space is very flat, and further reduced by the ingress of computer and technology. Technology has made this place, to a large extent, physically immobile. And on the other hand, they crave for more and more speed. Thus landscapes are flat, and textures are plainer...