Blaes and Bings: Reimagining the West Lothian Oil Shale Industry

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Post-medieval Archaeology and Pollution", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In this paper I explore changing valuations of oil shale waste – blaes– in West Lothian, Scotland. Around 150 million cubic metres of blaes remains here in vast heaps called bings, the remnants of a short-lived but globally significant oil industry, active between 1851 and 1962.

While the bings are relatively nontoxic, they are material witnesses to the dirty and wasteful history of the oil industry. Nonetheless, as discard studies scholars have demonstrated, definitions of what waste actually 'is' are far from fixed (Reno 2018).

In this sense, the blaes and bings also present other opportunities: sites of leisure, habitats, and raw material for construction. Examining the origins and shifting understandings of this material over 170 years, I suggest this heritage of hydrocarbon exploitation may yet prove valuable as we face an ever more polluted planet.

Reno, Josh. 2018. “What Is Waste?” Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 1(1), 1–10.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Post-medieval Archaeology and Pollution   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow