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The Opportunity of Waste

Huron University
Nov 7 2024

LONDON, ON - Huron’s Centre for Global Studies started Allison Lindner on a career that combines global development, environmental research, and the law. Now she is coming back to Huron to recap her journey and present her findings.

When Allison Lindner was in first year at Huron’s Centre for Global Studies (CGS), a professor suggested that she consider an academic career. She told Lindner to find a topic that hadn’t been much researched and then write about it throughout her undergraduate program, so that she would be well positioned for graduate studies.

It was very good advice, and Lindner followed it. She grew up in Guyana and remembered men coming to the door to collect empty bottles and take them to the recycling depot to earn money. “I looked around and found that there wasn’t much work on the informal waste management economy. By the time I got to the end of my degree, I had read and written a lot about waste pickers in Nigeria and Vietnam.” Today, she is a professor herself, teaching law at University College London in the UK and continuing her research.

Lindner began her studies at Huron University, attracted by the global outlook of the CGS program. “I absolutely loved it,” she says now. “I enjoyed the small classes and the fact that I knew all my professors by name. I made friends with people from all corners of the globe.”

After graduating from Huron in 2005, Lindner moved to the U.K. where she enrolled in a ‘law conversion’ program – an intensive one-year course to prepare her to practice law. Still drawn to research, she completed her master’s in international economic law at the University of London. She worked as a legal researcher for several NGOs and the Commonwealth Secretariat and taught at Kent Law School. She later went on to complete her PhD at the University of Kent.

With a unique global perspective gained through her CGS degree, emphasizing studies in globalization and global development, she focused her doctoral thesis on the waste pickers of South Africa. “In the West we think about recycling as putting items in a box to be picked up by the municipality,” she says. “But in many countries, there’s no well-developed recycling infrastructure, and people step in to do what the municipalities can’t, and earn something from it.” The benefits are both economic and environmental.

To help present her research, she worked with a filmmaker to create a documentary about her findings titled, Reclaiming Now, to ensure that the people she interviewed for her research could have a voice in her findings.

She hopes that the documentary, her first film, will be used as a tool for waste management policymakers, and as a pedagogical tool on law and social science curriculums worldwide.

Her research interests continue to focus on waste prevention. “At this moment there’s more inorganic matter in the world than there is organic matter! We have to find a way to prevent, reuse, or recycle it.” One project looks at the best ways to deal with fashion waste shipped from developing countries to West Africa. She is exploring the idea of “upcycling” fabric into new clothes.

Always creative, Lindner is a published poet and an enthusiast for Samba (Brazilian style) dancing.

Lindner says her career path started at Huron’s Centre for Global Studies, where she found her passion. “Huron has a very special place in my heart.”

To learn more about Allison’s research and view a screening of her film, Reclaiming Now, Huron’s Centre for Global Studies will be hosting Allison for an engaging presentation and talk. All community members are invited.

Date: Thursday November 21, 2024
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Theatre, Frank Holmes Centre

Please click here for more information and to RSVP.