Nice idea, but it's a waste of waste

By Daniel Nelson

The Rubbish Collection

Image by Katherine Leedale

There’s a love letter from another visitor in the rubbish, too: “I am telling you this because I am always thinking about you, although you hug Ana like twice a day but when I think of you, it doesn’t allow me to learn sometimes.”

Fortunately, the names have been blocked out of that note, which was collected along with every other item of rubbish left by the museum visitors and staff in July.

The only items that weren’t collected, photographed and sent for treatment were sanitary towels and used nappies.

Artist Joshua Sofaer has spent two weeks preparing a display of some of the tons of waste, and the result is on show until 14 September.

There’s biodiesel from the cafes, a stash of ewaste, multi-coloured aluminium bales made from drink cans, fly ash breeze blocks, six bags of woodchips, enough stationery to start a chain of shops, piles of pellets made from abandoned milk bottles, two tonnes of glass sand, sludge cake representing 3.6 million litres of sewage waste.

There are individual items as well: a small snooker table, undamaged crockery, 16.5 pairs of shoes.

And for a couple of exhibits, Sofaer has turned the detritus into artworks – like his large circle of plastic spoons.

It’s an interesting project, but the museum has missed a trick. It failed to follow up its boldness in commissioning the exhibit with an equally bold display. The captions are tiny and much of the information is underplayed.

Sewage, for example, has a high yuk factor, particularly for children, and more should surely have been made of the amount of waste, how it can be treated and used and why it often isn’t. That goes for the plastics and metals and other recycled materials: 590 kilogrammes of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) flakes were retrieved – but what’s the national total? How easy is it to process? Is reprocessing commercially worthwhile? Who’s responsible?

Ok, it needn’t have been turned into a full-scale mega-exhibition about rubbish, but it could have been far more dramatic, wondrous, provocative, colourful, imaginative. It looks rather sad and lost, floating somewhat aimlessly in a shapeless room with no focus and tiny, badly-placed labels. It’s neither sufficiently informative nor sufficiently artistic.

The most positive element is a sentence at the end of a label about anaerobic digestion of food waste to produce fertilizer: “In the future waste from the Museum café and restaurants will be processed in this way.

·         http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/exhibitions/rubbish_collection.aspx The Rubbish Collection is at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, SW7 , until 14 September