Plastic waste is at the heart of Katie Conlon's PhD research.
IN THE MIDST of today’s environmental crisis, Ph.D. candidate Katie Conlon says the world shouldn’t want to simply manage waste. Instead, it should create a new system for understanding materials and resources so we can have honest conversations about what we use with the aim of reducing or eliminating waste altogether.
This is the foundation of Conlon’s research in the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning at PSU, which has garnered her a National Science Foundation fellowship, a Fulbright award and, most recently, a National Geographic Explorer research award. Through this work, she’s hoping to help change the world’s views on waste.
“Waste management implies [waste simply] has to be managed, that waste is not a problem,” Conlon said. Instead, she has in mind a network of “community resource coordination centers” that would recycle or remove waste and then minimize the flow of what’s left to landfills.
Conlon has researched the impact of plastic waste for several years, a subject she was inspired to pursue after spending time in West Africa as a member of the Peace Corps. When items are shipped around the world, she said, plastic packing material is leftover. If communities don’t have the access or technology to recycle it, plastics pile up.
She is focused on working with communities to find local waste solutions that work with their specific situation. Starting this summer, she will implement an intensive fieldwork project across the Himalayan belt, which will include spending time in communities in northern Indian states and various spots across Nepal and Bhutan.
She will team up with an Indian university professor, a filmmaker, local grad students and partners from various local waste awareness groups—including the Eco-Tourism and Conservation Society of Sikkim and the Waste Warriors in Dharamshala—to create a social media campaign focused on how different communities in the Himalayas tackle waste challenges. The group will produce 23 short videos documenting their field visits, which will be shared on Instagram (@Himalayas2Sea_PlasticFree).
Mary Ann Rozance, one of Conlon’s PSU classmates, said she admires Conlon’s optimistic personality, which is vital in her work.
“I think her optimism comes from working with communities that are finding solutions and ways to push back and tackle the issue,” Rozance said. The research “can be really depressing because things are happening that [communities] have no control over, but it can be really heartening because they have found ways to push back against the system, and we can learn from that.”
Every community has its own approach, Conlon said. For example, in the Indian territory of Ladakh, they have an unusual way of preventing garbage from being dumped into the Indus River. If a family isn’t sorting its waste properly, it gets a warning. If that same family receives a second warning, one of its members is required to work in the town’s materials recovery facility for a day to gain an understanding of the process and its importance to the community.
“I wanted a Ph.D. not to get stuck in academia, but to serve the public.”
Conlon is set to graduate this spring. Originally from Portland, she said growing up in the Pacific Northwest had a formative impact on why she is pursuing her work to begin with. PSU’s emphasis on sustainability made it a natural choice for her, especially since it offered unique opportunities through the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program.
IGERT was a nationwide fellowship through the National Science Foundation (NSF) that included five years of tuition remission. It was the flagship effort of the NSF to educate future American natural and social scientists in areas beyond their discipline until the agency discontinued the program.
“The faculty and students that were involved in the IGERT program were able to continue their research and engagement without that framework because PSU had long built its graduate programs around engaged scholarship in the first place,” said Aaron Golub, associate professor and director of PSU’s School of Urban Studies and Planning. Golub serves as Conlon’s dissertation committee chair and principle adviser.
PSU’s different programs and their relationship with the city showed Conlon the truth behind the school’s motto, “Let knowledge serve the city,” and it made the university an ideal option to host her research.
“(PSU) seemed like a perfect fit for me because it really helped push me into being actively engaged,” she said. “I wanted a Ph.D. not to get stuck in academia, but to serve the public.”
JENNIFER LADWIG, a graduate assistant in the Office of University Communications, is working toward her master’s in book publishing.