Shoddy

"This is a book about waste transformed, and reuse, repurposing, and recycling -- and how we consume the products of our industry. Through the story of shoddy, Hanna Rose Shell takes up these provocative topics and offers a new way for us to think critically about them. Shoddy is a global potpourri of textile waste manufactured into a saleable commodity: for example, wool that has been sorted, scoured, stuffed into rag-grinding machines, and remade into new clothes and textile and upholstery products. Both of-the-moment and truly historical, the book sends us back to West Yorkshire, 1812 and the birth of the commodification of waste through processing, before pushing us forward again with interviews and images from shoddy towns, waste dumps, textile labs, and rag shredding factories in the US and UK. Along the way we see exposed the political, ethical, environmental, and other ways shoddy has transformed lives and landscapes"--