Waste beds are not new land but old land chemically rearranged by industry

Evidence

It has been said that the waste beds made new land, but that is a lie. The waste beds are actually old land, chemically rearranged. This greasy sludge used to be limestone and freshwater and rich soil. The new terrain is old land that has been pulverized, extracted, and poured out the end of a pipe. It is known as Solvay waste, after the Solvay Process Company that left it behind. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1147

Categorization

• XREF: Rewrites the booster narrative of ‘reclamation’ — connects to the commodity-marketplace critique (ch48) and to habitat-restoration themes (ch20, ch71): what passes for making land is actually destroying the land that was there.
• SEED: An essay angle on the rhetoric of ‘making new land’ — how industrial byproduct gets narrated as creation when it is really destruction in disguise.