Trash and treasure

How will this age be remembered? After the stone age, the bronze age, the steam age and the information age, what material or innovation will most define the current era? According to a new exhibition at London’s Design Museum, the most ubiquitous hallmark of the Anthropocene is not a game changing material, nor the mastery of technology. It’s trash.

“We are arguably living in the waste age,” says Justin McGuirk, the museum’s chief curator, who has spent three years rifling through rubbish with co-curator Gemma Curtin to put together this timely show. “The production of waste is absolutely central to our way of life, a fundamental part of how