The White Amur and the WasteShark

Hungry machines and circumventive remediations of waste

Bibliographic Data

ID4464591
AuthorsLisa Yin Han (0000-0002-5328-3775, Pitzer College, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume8
Issue2
Pages557-574
Publication date2025-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486241304970
OpenAlexW4405822137
LanguageEN
References cited29

This paper examines the recent marketing and development of fish-inspired waste drones, designed to "take a bite out of water pollution" by collecting litter from urban waterways. Swimming in canals, rivers, and harbors from Florida to Hong Kong, AI-powered trash-eaters like the WasteShark and Jellyfish-Bot are posited as a solution to the plastic waste problem, modeling aquatic food chains through their marketing as animal-like drones. But are these cleaners truly a form of ecological AI, as their developers tell us, or is this vision of a new technospecies merely a means of skirting around the most pressing structural issues behind aquatic pollution? While much of the scholarship on autonomous technology has fixated on its implications for human labor, fewer have examined how AV infrastructures remediate ideas of environment. My approach, informed by multispecies ethnographies, queer ecologies, as well as work in environmental media studies, traces a throughline between the use of sterilized fish employees for weed management to the current crop of waste-eating fish-bots. In particular, I consider how imaginaries of hunger and waste resourcing frame ideas of environmental and multispecies relation. I ultimately argue that the biomimicry of waste drones serves as a form of circumventive remediation, extending existing paradigms of disposability and bottomhood while only superficially engaging with the social, technological, and natural entanglements of a refuse ecology

Biology · Microplastics and Plastic Pollution · Recycling and Waste Management Techniques · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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