The shame and fear of waste have made its facilities invisible, inaccessible, uncontrollable, and unsafe.  Instead of distancing ourselves from waste, design can bring people closer to waste operations and help foster creative solutions to problems intrinisic to waste disposal, issues common to all people.  Waste problems not only have forced us to rethink aesthetics, but have stimulated environmental scientists, engineers, artists, and designers to free the spirit from the limitation of professional conventions and the chains of social taboos and make place for the creation of new landscapes that are strong in form, function,space and meaning.  As landscape architects, we need to reexamine our aesthetic biases and to continue to look for ways to generate new models that incorporate mundane, rejected places with everyday and leisure environments.  Landscape design should not be used to wipe out technological guilt.  Rather, it should be used to move the public to new levels of awareness, concern, and commitment.  Our designs  should invite people to see a fresh interaction of nature and culture - a process in which citizens play an integral role, in which their participation in the management of waste is as inevitable as their consumption of material goods, a process in which waste management is conceived of as not only a problem but an opportunity for designers and for citizens.

                                                                                    - Mira Engler, "Waste Landscapes: Permissible Metaphors in Landscape
                                                                                    Architecture."  Landscape Journal. Spring, 1995. v. 14, n. 1, pp. 10-25.