Waste Dialogues at Wreck Beach

Wreck Beach is part of the traditional territory of the Musqueam First Nation, known as Ulksen, or the nose. This study reads the site through its waste, treating deposition as a dialogue between ecological and anthropogenic cycles. Context mapping, waste mapping, and site axonometrics locate where material gathers and what puts it there, from beach fires and foot traffic to motorized boating. A longitudinal elevation traces waste presence from 25,000 years of glacial deposition through UBC's 1912 campus construction, mid-century log booms, and the 1973 formation of the Wreck Beach Preservation Society, while a transverse elevation reads soil pH, decomposition rates, and the competing cycles of native and invasive species. The analysis became the ground for RE:SCAPE, a proposal for participatory waste cycles on the same site.