Can we alchemize our waste? 

As swelling sea levels drown entire countries, the global order is in the midst of catalysing a new kind of sovereignty: an island-nation of flotsam and jetsam, latched onto drifting plastic debris coalescing somewhere in the Pacific. Entire villages in the cartographies of waste disposal are buried under mountains of subcontracted rubbish, the substrate and precursor of a hazardous salvage economy. Forever chemicals from single-use plastics leach into water systems, disproportionately poisoning and sterilizing children, migrants, refugees and other bodies deemed ‘single-use'. 

In a digital age where a deluge of information slips through the sieves of consciousness, forgotten in the blink of an eye, the remnants of fervent consumption present a uniquely analogue quandary: plastic awkwardly refuses to die, to be relegated to the easy panacea that is forgetfulness. 

Approaching the complex relations of discard and debris as they trouble human notions of life and death, fiction writer Choo Yi Feng draws on lives and locales from his debut short fiction collection The Waiting Room (2024). Through his speculative fiction writing the author extends an invitation to meditate on the sticky afterlives of waste, which are corroborated by Choo Yi Feng’s scientific background as an ecologist. As humans try and fail, day after day, to forget the traces of our discarded world, the question arises: What if, instead, we imbibed the knowledge that our vast, global repository of rubbish has to offer us?