In the edited volume Waste: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Christof Mauch and his collaborators theorize the apparent absence of waste from urban areas by interrogating the facile connection between waste’s awayness and the amount of critical attention it receives both from academic circles and individuals around the world. Mauch and the volume’s contributors join an increasingly large community of scholars, activists, and socially engaged people who describe waste as geographically located outside habitual routes of seeing, and unveil the falsity of such an absence while highlighting plastic materials’ ubiquitous presence in the world—from microparticles in the water supply to clothes to food packaging to computers and daily use objects. The apparent absence has been fueled by globalization and extensive trade treaties between Asian and African countries and the West regarding waste disposal and plastic waste recycling and reusage in a transcontinental fashion: plastic and paper waste from the West arrives in Asia and Africa, where is partially recycled and remade into more packaging and tools that travel back to the West in the form of finite products, with little mention of waste itself. Increased consumerism and sanitization of urban environments as well as a generalized lack of social awareness regarding plastic waste enable uninterrupted import-export cycles which function within their own industries and local economies. One of the most salient examples comes from China, which began importing plastic and paper waste in the 1980s and reached a peak in the twenty-first century, with a 56 percent share of the global market of plastic waste imports going into mostly rural areas for repurposing and recycling. In villages such as 柳絮 Liuxu, plastic permeates bodies, lands, and the atmosphere in a complete reverse of Mauch’s collection title.

王久良 Wang Jiuliang refuses to accept the idea that once waste is not in sight, it should no longer be a concern and asks “Where does the waste go?” to open a transcontinental dialogue which can inform the visual politics of waste in general, and plastic waste in particular. After directing Beijing Besieged by Waste (垃圾围城 Laji Wei Cheng) (2011), Wang started a new project in 2014 and released it in 2016 where he analyzes and uncovers the microeconomies, the entrepreneurship, the migrant labor routes and the deterioration of agricultural practices in China that enable former farmers and people from rural areas to begin their own plastic recycling businesses.