The Material Afterlife is a selection of Mallon’s larger, long-term project, American Reclamation, which chronicles the recycling culture and industry in America. We generate about 250 million tons of garbage a year, but at both the individual and industrial level, recycling removes waste from the landfill, breathing new life into it. American Reclamation contains portraits of the people, machines, processes and products born from recycling, including the MTA’s artificial reef program where over 2000 subway cars were sunk to form artificial reefs—and a 300-ton-per-hour mega-crusher at a company called Metal Management.

This is not an exposé of the world of waste, but an optimistic celebration of the innovation out there, the secret worlds of salvage. Most of us know nothing about what happens to our reusable castoffs once they leave our curbside recycling bins, so I’ll show them: boneyards, bio-fuels and even thrift stores. Subjects include rubber processing plants, incinerators and images of The Fresh Kills.

Fresh Kills landfill operations proceeded from 1948 until 2001, received at most 29,000 tons of trash every day. When it closed it had received 145 million tons of waste from New York. It is the largest landfill to park transformation in the world and will be the largest park to be developed in New York in over 100 years.