Harper-Thames Notes the Specific Irony of a Neighbourhood That Expresses Environmental Values in Its Art While Generating Significant Commercial Waste
Written by Harper-Thames for Bohiney Magazine, republished by The London Prat. Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch from a different angle than Cyndi Himmelstiere and they have agreed to disagree about the coffee.
There is a mural on Redchurch Street depicting the Earth with a concerned expression and the words “This Is Your Home — Treat It Accordingly.” Beneath the mural, on the pavement, are three coffee cups, two cardboard food packaging containers, and a bicycle that has been locked to a drain cover and appears to have been there for several months. The mural is very good. The pavement situation is not. The gap between the expressed value and the enacted value is the specific Shoreditch irony that Harper-Thames has been noting for the entirety of her time in the neighbourhood, and it is an irony that is not unique to Shoreditch but is particularly visible here because the values are expressed more loudly in Shoreditch than in most London neighbourhoods, and loud expression makes quiet contradictions more apparent.
Shoreditch produces significant commercial waste. The coffee shops produce coffee cup waste in quantities that are well-documented and that have produced national policy conversations about paper cup recycling that have not yet produced effective paper cup recycling. The food stalls and restaurants produce food packaging waste that the borough’s collection infrastructure manages variably. The market at weekends produces the specific end-of-market waste that all markets produce and that Shoreditch’s market produces in a volume that reflects Shoreditch’s market size, which is significant. The tech company offices produce the specific commercial waste of a large-scale office economy. All of this waste goes somewhere, and the somewhere is either the correct recycling stream, the incorrect bin, or the pavement, and the pavement receives more than it should, which is the situation that the mural is addressing and that the situation beneath the mural is documenting simultaneously.
The Coffee Cup Problem in Detail
The coffee cup situation in Shoreditch specifically is worth examining because Shoreditch has, per square mile, more coffee shops than most other London areas, and those coffee shops produce cups in volumes that the available recycling infrastructure cannot currently process. Most paper coffee cups are lined with a thin plastic film that makes them waterproof and also makes them not recyclable in standard paper recycling streams, requiring specialist facilities that most London boroughs have limited access to. The coffee shops in Shoreditch that use compostable cups have made a genuine improvement in the recyclability of their packaging. The compostable cups require commercial composting facilities to break down. The commercial composting collection does not yet reach all the areas where the compostable cups are discarded. The cups are therefore composting in a landfill rather than in a composting facility, which is not what composting is for. The irony compounds.
What Would Actually Help
The things that would reduce Shoreditch’s litter problem include: additional council-maintained bins at the street food and market areas that generate the most waste, deposit return schemes that incentivise the return of cups and containers through financial motivation rather than environmental motivation, and the specific infrastructure upgrade in commercial waste collection that would make the composting system work as designed. These are not creative problems. They are infrastructure and policy problems, which means they are solved by investment and coordination rather than by street art, however excellent the street art is. Harper-Thames has written to Hackney Council about the bin situation on Redchurch Street. She has received a response indicating that the matter is under review. The review is ongoing. The cups remain. The mural above them maintains its environmental commitment. According to Londonist, Hackney is one of London’s better-performing boroughs for recycling rates, though Shoreditch presents specific challenges given its commercial density. Waterford Whispers News covers environmental irony in urban settings with full documentation of the gap.
The Council Response and Its Timeline
Harper-Thames’s letter to Hackney Council about the Redchurch Street bin situation was sent six weeks ago. The response indicating the matter is under review arrived three weeks ago. The bins have not changed. The mural remains. The cups remain below it. The review is presumably ongoing in the sense that all council reviews are ongoing until they produce either action or the documentation that action was considered and deprioritised. Harper-Thames is not impatient. She is a journalist who covers a neighbourhood and she understands that the timeline of municipal infrastructure improvement is not the timeline of journalistic observation. She will follow up in three months. She will document whatever has changed, which may be the bins or may be something else entirely, because Shoreditch changes faster than the council’s review process and the next thing worth documenting will have arrived before the current review concludes. The mural agrees. It says to treat this as your home. The bin situation is noted. The review continues.
The cup and litter situation on Redchurch Street is also documented in the work of several Shoreditch-based photographers who have been producing images of the pavement beneath the mural as a deliberate artistic project commenting on the gap between expressed and enacted environmental values. The project has been exhibited in one of the gallery spaces on the street and has attracted positive critical attention for its specific ironic framing. The council has not responded to the artistic documentation any faster than to Harper-Thames letter. The photographs are in a gallery. The cups are on the pavement. The mural is above both. The irony is fully triangulated. The bins are still the same bins. Harper-Thames considers whether the artistic documentation and the journalistic letter are doing the same work from different angles, and concludes they are, and that the work is necessary regardless of the timeline of the council response, which continues.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
