By DARCY BENDER, 1/06/2016. After over 17 hours of air travel, one bus and a ferry, I have arrived in China. I first arrived in Hong Kong and took the bus over the longest rail and car suspension bridge in the world from the airport to Kowloon where I stayed for the night. The next day I basically only walked around for an hour before I had to head to the ferry terminal, but I am very excited to return for a workshop there my final week to explore and learn much more about the city.

I am here for three weeks to study waste in the Pearl River Delta. My aim is to understand how the waste systems here operate from the moment something is decided it is no longer wanted all the way to its final resting place. I plan to take pictures, videos and audio of waste systems at all scales and create an interactive map. I have found that looking at the waste of cities can be a very fruitful lens to learn about the social, cultural and political lives of its inhabitants. This topic became much more relevant in this region in particular after the recent landslides of construction and demolition debris in Shenzhen. I hope people are still willing to speak candidly with me about their views on waste.

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Tonight I am staying with a friend that lives in one of the suburbs of Guanzhou. My ferry ride from Hong Kong to Nansha gave me my first look into another type of waste in the region: smog. I was very much looking forward to documenting some of the port and shipping activity from the water, but unless we were close to the shoreline, the ships and cranes were just ghosts because of the dense smog. It made the whole experience feel a bit other-worldly.

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Tomorrow I will be a guest speaker in my friend’s classroom where I will share information about the waste systems in New York and get opinions from her students on what they feel are the biggest issues surrounding waste in the region. I’m hoping their comments will help guide my explorations in Guangzhou where I will be for the next two days before I head to Shenzhen.