The White Amur and the WasteShark: Hungry machines and circumventive remediations of waste

This paper examines the recent marketing and development of fish-inspired waste drones, designed to “take a bite out of water pollution” by collecting litter from urban waterways. Swimming in canals, rivers, and harbors from Florida to Hong Kong, AI-powered trash-eaters like the WasteShark and Jellyfish-Bot are posited as a solution to the plastic waste problem, modeling aquatic food chains through their marketing as animal-like drones. But are these cleaners truly a form of ecological AI, as their developers tell us, or is this vision of a new technospecies merely a means of skirting around the most pressing structural issues behind aquatic pollution? While much of the scholarship on autonomous technology has fixated on its implications for human labor, fewer have examined how AV infrastructures remediate ideas of environment. My approach, informed by multispecies ethnographies, queer ecologies, as well as work in environmental media studies, traces a throughline between the use of sterilized fish employees for weed management to the current crop of waste-eating fish-bots. In particular, I consider how imaginaries of hunger and waste resourcing frame ideas of environmental and multispecies relation. I ultimately argue that the biomimicry of waste drones serves as a form of circumventive remediation, extending existing paradigms of disposability and bottomhood while only superficially engaging with the social, technological, and natural entanglements of a refuse ecology.