Bizcommunity -18 February 2020
BY: REBECCA HODES
"Much of what we know about human history comes from studying things that have been discarded. The archaeology of dumpsites and middens has long informed us about societies and their pasts. This has included how people survived and sustained themselves, what they gathered, made, amassed and discarded.
The analgesic Grand-pa is among the most common pharmatrash in this study. Rebecca Hodes
Histories of rubbish have also shown that beliefs about sanitation, and what makes for a clean environment, change. These changes are, in turn, influenced by developments in technology, forms of governance, and consumer norms.
I conducted a study on an archive of medical materials, collected over three years from public waste sites around South Africa’s Eastern Cape. What I refer to as ‘pharmatrash’ serves as a proxy for which medicines were provided or purchased, consumed, and then discarded. Pharmatrash in post-apartheid South Africa shows the vast proliferation of medical waste, the result of increased access to healthcare products in both the public and private sectors – and on the formal and informal markets.
I set about unpacking the meaning of the rubbish that I found. I was able to identify preferences in particular settings for certain drugs – legal and illegal. These preferences reflected global market flows, advances in science, medicine and marketing, local and domestic modes of consumption, and changing social norms and desires."
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