Pittsfield, Massachusetts Solid Waste Transfer Station; Verminteressement and the Formation of Living Waste Systems 134 views

At first glance, a municipal solid waste transfer station and a worm bin have little in common. One is an industrial facility designed to receive hundreds of tons of material daily from commercial haulers and tractor trailers; the other fits in a kitchen cabinet. But both are, at their core, the same kind of infrastructure: a designed system for receiving discarded matter and routing it toward its next destination. The transfer station in Pittsfield and the worm bin in the classroom are both obligatory passage points in the language of Actor-Network Theory—nodes through which material must move if it is to be transformed rather than abandoned. Where they differ is in what transformation means. The transfer station is built around the logic of removal: waste enters, is compacted, and is dispatched to a landfill, rendered invisible as efficiently as possible. The worm bin is built around the logic of reception: scraps enter, are metabolized, and exit as castings capable of feeding the next season's roots. Both require infrastructure, labor, routing, and user behavior to function. Both fail when the network around them breaks down. Together, they sit at opposite ends of a spectrum that defines how any society chooses to answer the same fundamental question: when matter has exhausted its first use, what happens next?

BS (Bachelor of Science)

municipal solid waste; transfer station; actor-network theory; urban metabolism; living waste systems; verminteressement

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering Technical Advisor: Lindsay Ivey-Burden STS Advisor: Joshua Earle Technical Team Members: Samantha Saks, Ashley Roa-Martinez, Markus Lin, Stephen Hotchkin

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-05-09