Waste & Discards

They say “out of sight, out of mind”. The phrase certainly seems to ring true for many things most people prefer not to think about —like waste, the risk of a future pandemic, or climate change — until they become so problematic we can no longer afford to ignore the mounting problems they create.

Waste provides a particularly salient example of our attempts to remove from view that which we consider unpleasant or problematic. For decades the prevailing strategy for dealing with waste has been to “get rid of it”—by burning or burial. But things seem to be changing. The media, animal welfare activists, toxicologists and elementary school classrooms alike have helped to focus our attention on the waste that has escaped our attempts to make them “go away”. Plastics are pooling in our ocean, building up on our beaches, strangling wildlife, breaking down into microscopic bits and making their way into human bodies and whole ecosystems – places they should not be. Chemical wastes seep into soils and create legacies of contamination for communities saddled with the heavy burden of proof. We increasingly understand there is no “away” and everywhere is someone’s backyard. Landfill capacity is dwindling and the exportation of waste from many affluent countries has led many developing nations to issue moratoriums on waste imports of textiles, electronics, or recyclable plastics. Meanwhile governments struggle to meet waste reduction targets and spend increasingly large portions of their tax payer-funded budgets simply trying to manage the wide array of wastes produced by society—from hazardous chemicals, mattresses and the plastic used to wrap our vegetables to imperfect apples and outdated smartphones. The idea that we can recycle ourselves out of pervasive waste problems seems to have, finally, given way to a recognition that there must be other solutions.

Economic anthropology’s holistic and cross-cultural lens reminds us that the current impasse is linked not only to materials themselves, but to economic systems based on linear models of extraction-production-consumption and disposal. These systems have historical roots in very specific economic and cultural logics. They are societal constructions, and represent only a small range of possibilities, among many. The anthropological record is full of examples of people who have made their livings by frugally utilizing a resource to its fullest extent —and in fundamentally regenerative ways. From studies of night soil and black earth to permaculture methods and the finer uses of every piece of a buffalo carcass, these cases illustrate that the linear economic model that dominates the global capitalist economy is far from pre-determined.

The anthropology of waste and discards also draws our attention to the frictions and infractions of articulating systems of value in a global society marked by significant inequality. Many, all around the world, build good lives by salvaging the value that resides in the discards of others. The same object is, for the wealthy, waste and for those less fortunate, a discard full of value free for the taking (for now). And yet the people who deal with waste— whose ingenuity and resourcefulness help to generate value for their own families and for materials economies—are often considered as abject as the discards they salvage. The anthropology of waste thus makes particularly explicit the various means through which inequality operates. Waste work is classed and raced in both local contexts and within a global division of labor and significant global inequality.

This spring I invite you to take a journey with me to explore the economic anthropology of waste and discards. In a world with increased virgin resource scarcity, climate change, growing inequality and the coming end of cheap nature – how might we come to rethink value? How might we reimagine value generation and critically interrogate dominant economic logics that at once tell us there is scarcity and simultaneously produce an abundance of waste. How might we best understand the various people who, for a range of reasons and rationales, work to recover the value left behind by capitalist ruins? And how can we understand the various forms and practices of salvaging and circulating value – those that have been around as long as anyone can remember and those that are just emerging in the cracks of a failing system?

My guests this spring will help us to think through these questions and surely many others. Please subscribe to Mergers and Acquisitions to listen!