From Waste to Energy

TY - CONF

T1 - From Waste to Energy

AU - Lushetich, Natasha

PY - 2025/5/28

Y1 - 2025/5/28

N2 - In everyday usage, ‘waste’ refers to defective or discarded substance, or alternatively to a depleted or exhausted resource. Unlike byproducts, which are usually taken to have at least some, albeit often minor, potential or actual value, waste is value-less, or worse: it is a financial and transportational burden, or a chemical menace. To be sure, there has been no shortage of waste-minimising inventions in recent years, from soluble plastic, solar blankets, electro-chromatic façade cladding and micro-algae cement to sweat-powered biofilms that promise to power all your wearable electronics. However, ‘waste’ is not only an economic category. It is also a profoundly health-related, local-knowledge-based, and often, also, creed-regulated notion, to which the field of waste anthropology testifies. This talk explores (what are usually considered to be) the more questionable innovations in the field of material design, such as radios made of coagulated animal blood, chairs made of cow intestines or glass frames made of human and animal bones. It places these materials in the broader context of environmental interdependence in order to reposition the question of turning waste into energy (as both process and product) along multi-species lines and within long-term time frames.

AB - In everyday usage, ‘waste’ refers to defective or discarded substance, or alternatively to a depleted or exhausted resource. Unlike byproducts, which are usually taken to have at least some, albeit often minor, potential or actual value, waste is value-less, or worse: it is a financial and transportational burden, or a chemical menace. To be sure, there has been no shortage of waste-minimising inventions in recent years, from soluble plastic, solar blankets, electro-chromatic façade cladding and micro-algae cement to sweat-powered biofilms that promise to power all your wearable electronics. However, ‘waste’ is not only an economic category. It is also a profoundly health-related, local-knowledge-based, and often, also, creed-regulated notion, to which the field of waste anthropology testifies. This talk explores (what are usually considered to be) the more questionable innovations in the field of material design, such as radios made of coagulated animal blood, chairs made of cow intestines or glass frames made of human and animal bones. It places these materials in the broader context of environmental interdependence in order to reposition the question of turning waste into energy (as both process and product) along multi-species lines and within long-term time frames.

UR - https://vividglobalsummits.com/2025/Renewable-Energy#keyNoteSpeaker

M3 - Other

T2 - Annual Global Summit on Renewable and Sustainable Energy 2025

Y2 - 26 May 2025 through 28 May 2025

ER -