The Landfill Approaching the Sky

Abstract

This article examines an anthropogenic industrial landscape as a material archive of collective memory, extraction, and the transformations of late socialism and early capitalism, focusing on the phosphogypsum landfill in Kėdainiai, located in the geographical centre of Lithuania. Existing for more than five decades, this white mound of waste is approached not merely as an environmental or industrial by-product, but as a socially constructed landscape that embodies historical, economic, and technological processes. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, the landscape is interpreted as a spatial structure through which memory is accumulated, preserved, and continuously reconfigured.

The analysis adopts a planetary perspective informed by Martin Arboleda’s concept of the planetary mine. This framework enables the conceptualisation of extraction, logistics, industrial production, and waste accumulation as interconnected components of a single global system, in which national borders dissolve and the Earth itself operates as an industrial organism. The article traces the trajectory of phosphates extracted in Morocco, processed into fertilisers in Lithuania, and ultimately deposited as industrial waste in Kėdainiai, thereby revealing the uneven geographical distribution of resources and waste within global production networks.

The growth of the phosphogypsum landfill is interpreted as a reverse form of mining, in which geological time is returned to the Earth’s surface through industrial waste. In this sense, waste appears as a residue of geological time. The text moves across multiple spatial and temporal scales—from an aerial, planetary perspective to the materiality of the Earth’s crust, and from socialist-era industrialisation to contemporary ecological and regulatory transformations marked by large-scale production and excessive consumption. Phosphorites are extracted in Morocco and fertilisers produced in Lithuania, yet supermarket labels declare: “avocados from Mexico, oranges from Spain.” Everything comes from everywhere; we inhabit a global logistical network. These shifts underscore how industrial landscapes persist beyond political systems, economic regimes, and scales of use.

Despite human attempts to regulate, contain, or commodify waste, the Earth continues to regenerate, and industrial wastelands gradually become integrated into emerging ecosystems. This transformation is framed as an ongoing planetary metamorphosis that challenges anthropocentric assumptions of control and permanence.