JournalTOCs

Worldwide Waste : Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies
Number of Followers: 1

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2399-7117
Published by Ubiquity Press Limited

[40 journals]

Waste in Zero-Waste Households: The Power of Materials and Norms in
Everyday Consumption
- Abstract: This research examines the challenges of everyday waste minimization of ‘zero waste’ practitioners in Chinese cities. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography of a zero-waste community, this article details the processes during which different types of waste were ‘inevitably’ produced in everyday practices, such as those related to shopping and gifting, food provisioning and eating, binning and composting. Using theories of social practice, this article turns away from focusing on individual awareness, behavior, and choice, and instead seeks to explain how practices that people come to perform can be reproduced and reinforced despite individuals’ commitments to change. The findings illuminate how waste generation is subject to culturally and collectively constructed norms and rules, key social relations of love and care, and is embedded in the material arrangements that make up everyday life. The research sheds light on the importance of paying attention to both the more routinized and reflexive aspects of everyday life, and the power of diverse actors in affecting and shaping daily activities of consumption and waste. Published on 2022-11-02 12:41:52
Joining Multiple Collaborations: Toward a Sociomaterial Perspective on
Nuclear Waste Management between Society, Technology and Nature
- Abstract: The article develops a sociomaterial perspective on nuclear waste management by illuminating the role of geological formations and therefore ‘nature’ with respect to site selection procedures. Besides technical barriers (containers) and geotechnical barriers (filling materials), geological formations should serve as ‘natural’ barriers in their function as host rocks in order to isolate radioactive waste for thousands of years. Referring to empirical insights into the German procedure of site selection and ethnographic research on practices in a nuclear chemical laboratory, the contribution illustrates how humans and materials are interwoven in an alliance of multiple sociomaterial collaborations united by the task to isolate a toxic object—here, high-level radioactive waste. In this way, the article sheds light on how nature is addressed not only as a resource for an anthropocentric project but also as an active collaborator in order to master such disposal processes in the long run. Such a sociomaterial perspective aims to enrich sociotechnical considerations by emphasizing the role of nature as an integral part of nuclear waste management and by studying its complexity. Published on 2022-10-12 11:37:50
Standards and Waste: Valuing Food Waste in Consumer Markets
- Abstract: Standards drive waste accumulation, which is particularly evident in the case of food. This article illuminates how food that is discarded due to failed standardized expectations is valued in consumer markets. Theoretically oriented by insights from the sociology of standards and valuation studies, it examines three Swiss organizational initiatives that successfully value food waste. Based on rich qualitative data, the article compares the three valuation processes and finds two central commonalities. On the one hand, the initiatives replace the valuation based on product standards with sensory experience. On the other, the initiatives employ additives that buttress the valuation process. These additives include additionally purchased food that enable the processing of the waste and various judgment devices that help consumers in judging the valued food waste. While improving our knowledge of how waste turns into food again, the article’s main contribution lies in bringing the nexus between standards and waste to our attention. Published on 2022-09-05 11:12:56
Plastic in Lake Titicaca: Tourism and Management of Non-Biodegradable
Waste in the Andes
- Abstract: Plastic has invaded the rural Andean landscape in recent decades. Its increase is due to the emergence of new consumption patterns, the absence of adequate waste management systems, and the persistence of a logic that incorporates waste into nature—which was appropriate when waste was biodegradable. However, the rural indigenous population is aware of plastic’s polluting effects. Tourism, which transmits urban and Western perceptions of cleanliness, is one of the factors that have led to this view. Tourism spreads an ecological perception that supports the sustainability of natural resources. It also spreads a bucolic perception of the landscape. Sometimes, the two discourses complement each other, but they can also clash. From the discard studies paradigm, and based on the case of Amantaní Island (Lake Titicaca, Peruvian Andes), the article shows that tourist demand for a pristine landscape can drive practices that increase the environmental and health risks of plastic waste. Published on 2022-04-20 13:25:47
Recycling Food Waste: An Investigation into the Delicate Process of
Bio-waste Valuation
- Abstract: For more than 20 years, Europe has been encouraging household bio-waste recycling. This trend is spurred by the promise of a circular economy built around the diversion from landfills, the regeneration of farmland and the production of alternatives to fossil fuel energy. It involves valuation processes, through which a value—both economic and environmental—is assigned to the material in circulation. This article investigates the nature of these processes, particularly the ways in which value is created within the chains of actors that make up these industries. Through the analysis of a case of source-separated household bio-waste collection, we show that bio-waste valuation processes are difficult to master. Due to the living, putrescible, unstable and relatively unlucrative nature of this material, valuation processes are fragile assemblages. They largely depend on the policies, infrastructures, practices and material conditions involved in the handling, care, transport and processing of food waste. Published on 2021-12-20 12:00:31
The Discursive Power of Recycling: Valuing Plastic Waste in Cape Town
- Abstract: Recycling has come to be seen as a key strategy for tackling plastic pollution in South Africa, enabled by the rising popularity of circular economy policies globally. This paper explains how recycling operates discursively, positioning waste as an economic opportunity, with the effect of making it plausible to ignore the multi-scaler inequitable dynamics of waste that have been well documented by critical waste scholars. Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered over 13 months as part of the Valuing Plastic Project in Cape Town. Research involved establishing and evaluating a small-scale recycling scheme at Eluvukweni Church in the township of Crossroads on the outskirts of Cape Town. The methodology combined elements of participatory action research and discourse analysis to understand how ideas circulate in a way that perpetuates the status quo. This paper argues that the discursive power of recycling is enabled by concepts of circular economy and waste entrepreneurship, which position waste as a resource that unlocks job opportunities for people in poverty. As a consequence, environmental groups’ resistance to recycling as the solution to plastic pollution in South Africa continues to be constrained by the assumption that plastic waste is valuable, and that the plastic industry is able to regulate itself. Published on 2021-11-04 07:41:02
Plastic Mut(e)ability: Limited Promises of Plasticity
- Abstract: Plastics are supposed to be infinitely mutable. Yet the enduring legacies of plastic waste and its derivatives persist to tell a different tale. In this paper, based on empirical data from a rapidly urbanising village in Rajasthan, western India, we take the reader into the unfolding ‘social life’ of plastic (im)mutabilities. In tracing plastic’s complicity in configuring new objects, subject-object relations, markets, ensuing socio-economic hierarchies, and the ecological, biological and ethical traces of plastic waste, we present the picture of a plasticised socio-material realm. Here old socio-economic hegemonies and forms of violence are re-entrenched and new relations of deprivation and dependence forged in plastic, linked to wider (capitalist) processes of resource extraction, and abandonment. Therefore, we situate plastic’s multiple (im)mutabilities within an unfolding story of new openings, closures and mutations across scale, inflected by the complex legacies of caste, gender, race and region. Finally, the notion of plastic mut(e)abilities is developed to include occasions of productive hacks and crafts with plastic ‘waste’–ongoing plastic mutabilities–by a marginalised woman which allude to limited possibilities of socio-material change. This helps recover some of the promises of plastic co-produced at the delicate margins and the liminal spaces of a plasticised society. Published on 2021-10-18 14:07:25
Piles of Plastic on Darkening Himalayan Peaks: Changing Cosmopolitics of
‘Pollution’ in Limi, Western Nepal
- Abstract: This article explores plastic and other non-compostable waste pollution in the Limi Valley, in Nepal’s impoverished Humla district along the northern-western Nepal border. The Himalaya currently undergoes rapid environmental transformation. Environmental degradation, disappearing glaciers and climate change-related floods are increasingly shaping its landscape. At the same time, motorable roads and telephone connections as well as new modes of governance are arriving to its remotest areas linking Limi to the expanding Chinese market (and to a lesser extent the Nepali and Indian ones) with the consequence that an increasing amount of plastic packaging, wrappings, containers and single-use plastic items (as well as non-degradable electronic items) are reaching these villages. This article argues that these new challenges can be best understood and addressed as part of cosmopolitical ecologies of the Himalaya. They require a significant number of decisions at multiple levels, involving different forms of knowledge and moral frameworks dealing with issues of causality, responsibility, prioritization and action. Arising out of an international project and a ‘stakeholders’ workshop as a ‘collaborative event’, this article offers an opportunity to reflect on the predicament of Himalayan people and contribute to the debate on non-compostable waste pollution as linked to a wide range of environmental challenges including those related to climate change. These issues intersect and compound requiring a wide spectrum of responses at different levels bringing together socio-economic, political and cosmological dimensions. Mediation by a wide range of operators, potentially understood as ‘cultural brokers’, turns out to be decisive in the design and implementation of any strategy. Published on 2021-09-09 12:00:03
‘Stingy, Stingy, Stingy Government’: Mixed Responses to the
Introduction of the Plastic Carrier Bag Levy in Japan
- Abstract: Since 1 July 2020, all retail businesses in Japan have been required by law to charge customers for plastic carrier bags in order to reduce the use of single-use plastic and to encourage consumers to change their lifestyles. This has resulted in more shoppers using their own bags, but has also drawn more emotional responses. This article analyses reactions to the plastic carrier bag levy in konbini (convenience stores) and discusses how it has changed customer service and shopping routines, at the same time as affecting notions of convenience, generosity, and propriety. The levy is also challenging consumers’ notions of cleanliness and pollution, as the plastic bag is changing from something that can both protect its contents from dirt and pollution (as a carrier bag) and protect the environment from its dirty contents (as a waste bag) to something that in itself pollutes the environment. Published on 2021-06-24 12:26:32
Cambridge, Carnaval, and the ‘Actually Existing Circularity’ of
Plastics
- Abstract: This article draws on comparative ethnographic research on plastic consumption, (re)use, and disposal in households and collective spaces in Cambridge (England) and Montevideo (Uruguay). Focusing on practices of re-use by individuals and collectives, it argues that these constitute forms of ‘actually existing circularity’ that provide an alternative to circular economy schemes premised on retained corporate ownership. In the context of discussions of the circular economy that are often limited to the macro policy level, this article thus provides a degree of granularity and a focus on everyday practices. Connecting with debates around materiality, it argues both that we must play close attention to the synthetic materials that surround us in everyday life, and that a focus on materials can help demonstrate the way that commodity status can be undone through projects of collective, inventive re-use that spill out beyond the household. Finally, it points to the potentially disenfranchising elements of dominant business-friendly circular economy visions and the way that these might disrupt complex materials pathways and cultures of re-use and repair rather than straight-forward linear economies. Published on 2021-05-27 11:52:52