Once more, deep thanks to our friend who shared this ‘sludge’ with us.

From: Olden, R. (2016) Sludge. Cultural Geographies, 23(4), pp. 715719. (doi:10.1177/1474474016630966)

We are standing over the inlet of Shieldhall Wastewater Treatment Works where the rush of stuff banished to an underworld of sewers and culverts spews from a protruding pipe to meet the light of day once again: the sewage and wastewater of half a million people….Here at Shieldhall, Scotland’s largest wastewater treatment works, the task is to separate water from waste. Wastewater runs a course which sees it filtered, settled, dredged and then metabolised by nitrifying and carbonaceous bacteria. The rubbish that has been filtered out is sent on to landfill, the sludge and scum is piped to an incinerator and the water that finally runs clear is directed back into the River Clyde. But Shieldhall leaks and spills, and the life of matter doesn’t end with its final relocation. Wastewater at Shieldhall “fails to be contained, fails to be predictable, fails to be calculable, fails to be a technological problem (that can be eliminated), fails to be determinate” (Hird 2012: 465).

Read the above and know why, if you didn’t already, hospitals don’t get built right next to that kind of thing which ‘fails to be contained’ and ‘fails to be a technological problem that can be eliminated‘, anywhere in the world.

Yet one did, in Glasgow, only in Glasgow, in the whole world, either lazily and callously, because the old hospital had ‘always’ been there and that ‘never did anybody any harm‘ in the sickest place in the country, because experts told them that they could contain it or, even, maybe, because crooks wanted the other site to make money.

Where did everyone else but the council want to build the hospital?

Cowglen.

What’s there now?

Sources:

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/153716/1/153716.pdf

Hird, M. 2012: Knowing waste: Towards an Inhuman Epistemology. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, volume 26, pages 453-469.