Sludge

Abstract

This article narrates a journey taken with wastewater at Shieldhall Wastewater Treatment Works in Glasgow as it courses through a number of treatment areas engineered to separate out solids and clear water. The journey is taken by two water scientists and a cultural geographer who follow the slowing and settling, filtering and dredging, bubbling and churning, as the wastewater system seeks to order material chaos – ‘turbidity’ as it is known here. But between the water sampling and testing undertaken on the journey, these attempts to categorise and make meaning of the stuff at Shieldhall, waste continues to resist determination. Its meanings leak, and its pathways through space and time spill out in unpredictable ways. This article considers what Hird has referred to as the ‘fully inhuman’ exuberance of waste to explore how life at this wastewater facility opens on to an uncertain future, and urges us to remember it.