Reading a waste-to-energy plant as spatial text: The semiotics of erasure in waste design

Abstract

Switzerland’s reputation for order and cleanliness is deeply ingrained in both its national identity and international perception, underpinning a deep infrastructural commitment to seamless waste management. This is my starting point for reading the Giubiasco waste-to-energy plant as a spatial text of erasure, and for highlighting the communicative potential of built environments. Drawing on fieldwork observations, visual documentation, and interviews, this article examines how language, space, and materiality mediate the tension between the visibility and erasure of waste, and how semiotic and spatial-material resources are deployed within the architectural and communicative design of waste infrastructures. Directed toward discourse-oriented studies of semiotic erasure, my analysis identifies three multimodally realized tactics – aesthetic obfuscation, commodification, and sanitization – through which the plant enacts erasure through its exterior and interior design. These tactics extend to other infrastructural and semiotic landscapes, linking material practices to broader socio-political and environmental narratives. Ultimately, I propose that waste is thus never merely matter out of place, but negotiated within spatial, rhetorical, and aesthetic technologies of deflection.