As business demands that consumers generate more waste, the imperative to rethink consumer demand for a net-zero age becomes ever more pressing.
It is self-evident that the global waste problem relates to consumption, but how? Micro plastics, mine ‘tailings’ and landfills ‘the height of Mount Everest’ testify to humanity’s insatiable demand for goods and its effect. Waste appears to be that which results from economic activity and from consumption: its leftovers or residues.
Thought about in this way, the solution to the global waste problem is to try to reduce the volume of stuff which becomes waste and to focus on so-called problem wastes, thereby seeking to turn a problem into an economic good. There are numerous examples of the latter, which the emphasis on the circular economy is accelerating – from inedible food, such as orange peel, to crisp packets to wind turbine blades.
Thinking about waste in this way is to attempt a capitalist fix to the problem of waste. It demands the production of more waste, even as it is argued that interventions reduce it.
Take municipal waste – or the stuff that households and businesses place in a range of bins collected by the waste-to-resource industry. In the UK, waste data record the weight of material captured for recycling and recovery, and thereby diverted from landfill. These data create headlines – of recycling rates that are stubbornly flat or even reversing. They also record the amount of ‘residual waste’ collected. Residual waste feeds energy-from-waste plants. It’s the baseline feedstock which qualifies energy-from-waste plants as generating renewable electricity – because it’s diverted from landfill. That same feedstock underpins the long contracts which municipalities across the world are entering into with the waste industry majors. The contracts lock municipalities into supplying waste of a certain volume and particular material character for up to 30 years. As a result, energy from waste and the residual waste feedstock have been captured by finance capital. It’s not just that the returns from energy from waste make it a low-risk/medium yield investment; the guaranteed contractual supply of residual waste enables waste – like water – to be turned into a financial product and traded in financial markets. Energy-from-waste plants reduce the amount of material that ends up in a landfill. The technology and its financialization, however, demand that consumers keep generating high volumes of waste, and well into the future.
Another way of approaching the global waste problem starts from seeing waste not as self-evident, problematic stuff but as a category of value related to the prior category – discard. Not everything that is discarded becomes waste, but to become waste it must first be discarded. Stuff gets discarded through processes and practices of valuation which place discard in particular conduits or routes. These are always context specific, but in broad terms, depending on circumstances and what’s identified as discard, we can give stuff away; we can attempt to sell it, often via platforms such as eBay, Preloved and Vinted; or we can route it in directions which connect to the waste-to-resource industry. Whereas the last is easy and convenient, the other two routes involve time and effort. The consequence is that no-longer-wanted things tend to hang around – which means that, notwithstanding the best intentions, many resort to redirecting them to routes which connect discard to the waste-to-resource industry.
Discard and discarding are baked into social life; they are part and parcel of how humans order their lives socially and culturally. They are also baked into consumption-heavy economies. Since Keynes first highlighted the significance of consumer demand to boosting economic growth, the imperative has been for the consumption of goods and services to expand and then intensify, through planned obsolescence. The result is that many economies are dependent on consumption for growth. But consumption is not just about the purchase of goods and services. We consume when we are doing various activities with and through stuff. Consumption occurs through cooking, washing and ironing, reading, watching TV; it’s doing a sport, it’s going on a holiday, but it’s also things we don’t tend to think of as consumption, things like hill walking, canoeing, biking and climbing. To do all these activities requires stuff, often lots of stuff. This matters, because it shows that when stuff gets discarded, that act of discarding relates to a practice. What is often going on when we discard and replace relates either to the ability to continue to be able to do a practice or to improve our capacities and competences in it. Replacing defective washing machines or fridge-freezers are examples of the first; an upgrade from an entry-level purchase the second.
Thinking about waste in this way sees waste not as resulting from, or the after effect of, consumption but as embedded in ongoing consumption. The implication is that waste policy needs to move upstream. Of primary importance is to rethink the category of the consumer and consumer demand for the net-zero age while simultaneously pulling policy levers which have the effect of generating less discard from practices of consumption. An indirect, rather than direct, approach is likely to be more effective. Accelerating the trend to hybrid working is one possibility. Not only does this result in less commuting and a lower carbon travel footprint, it also demands less by way of professional clothing (fewer clothes purchased and less clothing care), while giving more scope for food preparation. Another possibility is to make it easier for consumers to connect discard to outlets which enable reuse, for example by expanding ‘reverse last-mile’ logistics to include the collection of small scale, low volume items that would otherwise end up in the residual waste stream, and in turn connecting this to centres for used, surplus goods. Both possibilities illustrate how making inroads into the global waste problem necessitates looking in other directions than waste.
Nicky Gregson is Emerita Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University.
The Waste of the World by Nicky Gregson is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £27.99.
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