Trash Talk: Rotterdam's Circularity Program and Environmental Parks

An visual insight into a research project centred on garbage and waste.

In Dutch, the recycling centers are called 'Milieuparken,' which roughly translates to Environmental Parks in English. When researching a topic for this Fieldwork project, I was struck by curiosity over why what was an essentially a garbage site for recycleable products was being rebranded as a 'park' by the municipality.

I found this to be quite an interesting question for anthropology, for it highlights just how socially constructed our idea of waste is. This notion became strikingly relevant to the challenge of transitioning towards a circular economy that many industrialised nations such as the Netherlands are facing today. One man's trash is so often claimed to be another man's treasure, and Rotterdam's municipality leaned into this idea in their Circularity policy. I found this rebranding to be an interesting and highly creative strategy from the municipality's side, even though it is much more complex and difficult than they would have liked it to be - as evidenced by our team's research report.

The weird thing I noticed is that there were no pictures of these parks online, so I had no idea what to expect when I visited the site with my team. This uncertainty inspired me to visually document what we saw, as it subverted my expectations of what a waste facility could be like. Transitioning towards a circular economy requires reshaping how we view waste, and the pictures I took hopefully represent how we might be pushed to see beauty in the scraps we leave behind on this Earth.