The problem of waste: sacrifice zones
This is part two in a four-part series. You can find part one here.
We started this series by acknowledging how a persistent waste mentality in design prevents us from effectively addressing our part in the climate crisis. There is no simple way to extricate our industries from this mindset—the problem is large and it is widespread. Every part of this series looks at a piece of this large and interlocking issue, so despite the fact that we are separating them into different topics for clarity, the overlaps will be unavoidable as we delve deeper into each area. Keep that in mind as we venture in and think about how your design specialty touches these topics and how we can seek to change them.
What is a “sacrifice zone”?
We’re starting by focusing on one particular effect of our waste mentality—so-called “sacrifice zones.” Sacrifice zones can be defined for now as areas of the world that industrial and postindustrial* countries have determined are expendable for the purposes of maintaining an economic system of consumption. Many of these areas are in the Global South, which is the half of the planet least responsible for the climate change we are experiencing now. For those readers in the Global North, we may not be used to seeing sacrifice zones, but they exist here as well—they are often situated near places where marginalized communities live (and vice versa, often, marginalized communities are forced to live only in the places that are least desirable). Landfills, refineries, oil fields, and more are places that we have set aside—essentially as ruinable—for industries to continue to grow. These aren’t just places where some vague and inexpressible “capitalism” happens and leaves destruction behind in its wake. These are places that designers have had a hand in creating—though certainly not as big a hand as the capitalists who profit off of what we produce—and that means that they are places that designers can and must have a hand in ending.
For the purposes of this entry, sacrifice zones come in two varieties: areas of the world that are set aside for extractive and manufacturing purposes and areas that are allowed to become uninhabitable as a result of our unwillingness to change our relationship to consumption. The first variety is the factories, refineries, raw material mines, and landfills that make up the building blocks of our global markets. The second variety is the cities and countries that are in danger of becoming submerged, the prairies that are made into deserts, and the forests that are consumed by the fires that are a result of climate change. In general, these are the places that we let fall into wastelands. We’ll look at the first variety in this entry and return to the second at the conclusion of the series.
We mentioned before that many of these sacrifice zones can be found in nations that make up the Global South. These nations are generally poorer and less well-equipped to deal with the changes that are being brought on by a warmer climate—which is why they were allowed to become wasted in the first place. This is a great injustice. The reason that these nations have become impoverished is that their people and their resources were stolen to enrich the lives of some of those in the Global North. This was by design (make no mistake, I use the term design intentionally—strategic destabilization and industrial disruption are forms of design that we use to this day, albeit primarily for economic and not overtly colonial purposes). Victor Papanek called this out in his book, Design for the Real World, decades ago: “It is a curious paradox that those ‘poor’ countries most emphatic in their call for aid are materially rich. Their wealth resides in natural resources and, in the southern part of the globe, enormous sources of alternative energy.” It is not the individual fault of designers like you and me that these nations are in such dire straits—and let’s be unequivocal about this, people like us are often forced to work within the economic and cultural systems that we live within. This limits our choices on what to buy and use to only those products that produce profits for the people at the very top of our economic system, however, many of our jobs exist because this power imbalance is still being exploited.
Mines and money
Maybe one of the most obvious types of sacrifice zones are those places where extraction occurs. Mountains are hollowed out for coal or rare-earth metals and lands are drilled for fossil fuels. Think about how the cheap transfer of material wealth from the Global South directly translates to the economic wealth of the world’s most powerful corporations and buoys their power to dictate the terms of the future for the planet. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) rare-earth metals become part of Apple’s latest products, the profits from which line the accounts of the most valuable company in the world and fund its pledge to become a net-zero, ecological “champion.” All while the DRC languishes. Only 10% of smartphones used in the DRC are Apple devices; the wealth is very much not shared with those that make it possible.
We are looking to renewables as the key to a carbon-free future. That means more batteries. But those batteries aren’t without their costs as well; lithium is a critical resource needed for batteries and it is a difficult resource to extract. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the world’s lithium can be found in the Global South. Leah Thomas points out, in her book The Intersectional Environmentalist, that, “Around 70 percent of the world’s lithium exists in South America, within Indigenous lands. These lithium reserves are primarily concentrated in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, in an area referred to by the industry as the Lithium Triangle.” (Thomas, pg. 121) As we seek to design within renewable industries, take a moment to consider the entire chain of events that lead to the products that we create and advertise; who benefits from our work and who doesn’t? How can we work to eliminate destruction to the planet (the one that we are ostensibly here to preserve) as much as possible with our design?
It isn’t a given that those that live near places where lithium or cobalt is mined need to suffer, whether that be financially, or in terms of environment or habitation. For instance, businesses could invest a fair portion of the profits from places like mining operations into the people that live and work in them. This is almost never the case and the people who toil away mining resources like cobalt or lithium often see their health and livelihoods disintegrate, especially when the mines eventually shut down.
As designers, we have the ability to create products and services that maximize the longevity of use and encourage the reuse of materials and designs rather than endlessly new iterations that aren’t compatible with existing designs. We’ll explore this idea in a later entry. Still, even if we limited this discussion to just the industries of electronics and transportation we could draw down much carbon from the atmosphere and prevent injustices that otherwise would happen out of our line of sight.
Factories and refineries
Another kind of sacrifice zone is that of the factory or refinery. Nothing is mined or extracted here, rather, these places are where raw materials are shipped to be assembled or otherwise created. These zones go hand-in-hand with the types of places that we just read about; often factories or refineries aren’t built in or near the places where the materials that they use are extracted. This can be for a number of reasons, but the simplest is just that a factory will be typically located in a place that is convenient for transportation and shipping, and not all extraction zones fit that bill.
Acres of land are designated (and desecrated) to allow for more laptops to be made, more oil to be produced, and more of the products and packaging we design and use (and then dispose of) every day to be created. We venerate the industrial and product design that comes out of the offices and studios of companies like Apple and Google, but we aren’t encouraged to think about where the devices that those companies design are assembled. This, like the intentionality of transferring wealth from the Global South to the world’s richest corporations, is by design as well. Hardware factories tend to be found in places in the world where labor laws are weak or labor is cheap. Refineries for products like oil are often found in places with easy access to transportation—especially water-based transportation so their products can be exported worldwide.
It isn’t just goods that are produced by assembly lines—harmful externalities are created as well. Water used to cool or clean machinery often leaves factories as toxic, particulates are spewed into the atmosphere, and human rights violations against factory workers or other local inhabitants are found in abundance as well. Naomi Klein wrote about this duality of factory production, stating, “The painful, often lethal impacts of these practices were impossible to deny; it was simply argued that they were the necessary costs of a system that was creating so much wealth that the benefits would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. What has happened instead is that the indifference to life that was expressed in the exploitation of individual workers on factory floors and in the decimation of individual workers on factory floors and in the decimation of individual mountains and rivers have trickled up to swallow our entire planet, turning fertile lands into salt flats, beautiful islands into rubble, and draining once vibrant reefs of their life and color.” (All We Can Save, Klein, pg. 46)
Designed products aren’t without externalities as well. So much of the packaging that we create is made to throw out and so much of that is plastic. Our profession isn’t without its direct climate impacts, but designers can find themselves complicit in this larger process by continuing to draw all of the attention attached to the negative consequences that come with these harmful byproducts away from the people who make them. And that typically happens when we participate in greenwashing campaigns. It is our responsibility as global citizens and as designers to shine a light on the destructive practices within our industries and design niches so as to highlight the people behind the curtain who have been largely insulated from any of the sacrifices that are the source of their success and power.
Our culturally-driven lifestyles encourage consumption, easy access to the newest products, and freedom of movement. Any attempt to create incentives to stay and buy locally is framed as oppressive or as a loss of some inherent human right to travel and enjoy the world—even if that right isn’t a universal one—and when the individual right to consume is enshrined above the global right to exist, the factories that destroy our lands will continue to pop up.
Landfills and toxic waste dumps
The last major type of sacrifice zone in the first category is the places where we dump our waste. While it is assumed that a global economy based on relatively cheap goods is one that will result in an improved standard of living for everyone (eventually), one thing that this economy definitely creates is garbage. A lot of it. Much of what we use is designed to be thrown away after we are done with it. Perhaps if we all lived near the dumps and landfills that so much of our stuff winds up in we’d feel differently about how much we throw away. We aren’t going to say too much about landfills in this entry, but what connects them to the topic of “sacrifice zones” is the attitude with which we build them and the places that we choose for them to go.
We don’t build landfills or toxic waste dumps in suburbs or in the midst of luxury shopping centers, we build them in places that are often out of the way of places where white people would go or live. Too often they are found in the middle of places that are populated by marginalized communities. “Startlingly, as of 2019, race is still the number one indicator of where toxic waste facilities are located in the U.S. According to Paul Mohai, an environmental justice expert and professor at the University of Michigan, even when socioeconomic factors are similar across white and non-white communities, the community of color is still more likely to be near environmental hazards. The fight for environmental justice remains urgent, even more so as we face the climate crisis.” (The Intersectional Environmentalist, Thomas, pgs. 54-55) Like so much of what we have covered so far, this isn’t a coincidence, it is the outcome of design. In this case, though, it is the result of multiple design choices; the first is that of choosing to make sure that our waste is out of sight of white people (who tend to be more privileged and have higher levels of disposable income), the second is a failure to design products that have long lives or are able to be easily recycled or upcycled.
We have the ability to affect change in truly remarkable ways when we resist or support those who resist, the exploitative methods of designing products only with an eye for creating profits.
Continuing to grow
“The design philosopher Tony Fry has described the work of most modern design as defuturing: producing material and social ‘worlds’ that actually rob the future of possibilities.” (Design after Capitalism, Wisinsky, pg. 115)
The continued existence of these sacrifice zones are critically important failures that all of us need to pay more attention to, designers or not. But as climate designers, we know that there are levers of power and influence that are within our control to move. When we consider the entire chain of events that come together to become the products that we help create, we can take steps to mitigate any associated adverse outcomes. Those steps may include running any design concerns up the chain to project managers or creative directors, bringing known or widespread design issues up to your design niche’s professional association, or even asking your elected official to introduce legislation that would address those negative outcomes. Designers communicate priorities with everything that we make. What are your priorities as designers and how can we achieve them?
One very important thing to remember about sacrifice zones is that they aren’t just contained to the places they are now. They will continue to grow as long as those in power continue to be able to live away from them; if they are willing to sacrifice the zones that they already have, they will sacrifice more and more as long as profits grow. What we need to realize is that as long as any place is able to be considered expendable, every place can be. The entire planet is, ultimately, a sacrifice zone. And it is the only planet we have.
*There is no such thing as a nation that is postindustrial, just nations that have moved the industries that they rely on to parts of the world that are easier to exploit.
So, call-to-action time
Designers of any discipline, who are some designers—or what are some designs—that you have seen that either address the issues of this series? What are some that you have seen that make things worse? Sound off in the comments section over on our Mighty Networks site!
Reading recommendations for this entry: Design after Capitalism by Matthew Wisinsky, The Intersectional Environmentalist by Leah Thomas, All We Can Save edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson
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This entry was written by
Matt McGillvray
Matt is a designer and illustrator living near Portland, Maine, and has been working for more than a decade doing branding, illustration, web design, print design, social media posts, and even a little SEO.
When not designing he’s usually reading, writing, or running. His current big writing project is a book about design and climate change. He is a chronic teller of puns and will not apologize for that.