Waste and Waste Management

Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning, or a merely technical problem for the likes of sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology, marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more ethnographically multi-species studies begin to document the many ways that our wastes are not only our problem, but become entangled with the lives of nonhumans and the future of the Anthropocene. Introduction: the Productive Afterlife of Waste For many anthropologists and other social scientists waste is a mirror of humanity, a means or intermediary by which to reflect upon ourselves (Knechtel 2007: 9). This is the legacy of Mary Douglas’ (1966) influential definition of “dirt” as that which challenges and reaffirms a given cultural system. According to this structural-symbolic account, along with complementary analyses by Leach (1964) and Dumont (1980), the reason that an inedible animal, a dirty word, untouchable Dalits and rejected rubbish are categorized as objectionable and disposable in the first place is that they each stand in for a basic cognitive, existential and/or linguistic dilemma—a need for meaningful order in a world without it. These ideas remain fundamental for approaches to waste in the human sciences (Moser 2002; Scanlan 2005; Boscagli 2014). But a growing set of approaches and perspectives, often grouped under the name “discard studies” have begun to occupy the gaps left behind by the structural-symbolic approach. Despite many differences, these scholars tend to focus on the productive afterlife of waste—its impact on and significance for humans and nonhumans. More than a symptom of culture, waste is a material that has effects in the world, including local and global political disputes, liberal and illiberal forms of governance, competing assessments of economic and moral value, as well as concerns about environmental pollution and crisis. This essay provides an overview of these recent and emerging discussions in anthropology and beyond. Cleaning and wasting are quite familiar to us, and once discarded their products have to be dealt with somehow, or managed. Yet in many ways research on what becomes of all that we discard has only just begun. Until relatively recently, anthropologists have had little to say about waste management. Arguably this tendency reflects a preference for “social” ideas over “individual” techniques that goes back to formative epistemological distinctions between science and technology, as well as religion and magic (Ingold 2000: 317). But the techniques of waste management are worth appreciating in their own right. If classificatory rules mediate how waste is managed, then the reverse is also true—waste management is more than a byproduct of a distinctly human demand for order, but a process actively involved in reshaping our ideals and imaginations in turn. Today, adequate waste services are considered vital to the governance of cities, industries and refugee camps: a basic human right, an economic opportunity and an ecological imperative. For ethnographers of waste and waste management, it is not enough to wonder why certain things or people are categorized as polluting and disposable, therefore. In addition they ask: a) what specific capacities and affordances characterize waste materialities, their management and meaning; b) who manages wastes and what do they become together in specific entanglements of labor, power, and possibility; and c) how do specific wastes circulate, from whom to whom, and with what significance for specific waste regimes as well as more general global and planetary processes? I consider each of these dimensions of contemporary discard studies in turn, pointing to some of limits and possible future directions for research. The idea of waste management can also be problematic if it suggests human mastery over and control of the physical world. Indeed, the very existence of unusable, unassimilable waste could be seen as proof, pungent and polluting, of our own limitations (Allen 2007: 204). I conclude this essay with a call for renewed attention to the active role of non-human beings and processes in waste management, against the tendency to imagine waste relations exclusively in terms of privileged human violation of or instrumental plan for a passive nature. If infrastructure draws our attention to taken for granted dimensions of social life (Larkin 2013), our everyday dependence upon materials, devices and labor, then waste infrastructure can help us to realize our dependence upon non-human life forms and forces with which we share our bodies, environments and, ultimately, our planet. Streams: Waste Materialities and their Management Disposal raises normative questions about how one ought to rid oneself of things, including what should be discarded when, and where it ought to go. In this sense, making waste is part of what makes us the ethical selves we want to become (Hawkins 2006). Disposal may be done pass on still useful objects to other people, as with the informal transactions of charities, junk yards or garage, car boot and yard sales (Gregson et al. 2007). It may also occur in less permanent ways, as when things are put away temporarily with the possibility of future reclamation or discard (Thompson 1979; Hetherington 2004). Like commodity fetishism, furthermore, the disposal of things can distort perceptions of reality, making the routine appearance and disappearance of things seem phantasmagoric (Kennedy 2007). Taken collectively, wanton disposal can be used to call into question the “invidious distinction” between classes (Veblen 1899), an abusive relationship between society and nature (Lynch 1990; Foster 2002), and the obsolescence built into the designs and desires of consumer capitalism (Packard 1960). But beginning with acts of disposal can establish a false equivalence between the kinds of things disposed of. There is not one kind of discard: nothing is waste in general but only in particular. People may not want food scraps or toxic sludge in their homes, but there is a great deal more to be said about what actual qualities and virtual possibilities distinguish these “out of place” substances: about how they might be or ought to be handled, and about where and to whom they might yet belong. This brings us from individual acts of disposal to the collective management of wastes. The idea of different waste streams comes from sanitary engineering and offers a helpful starting point. Rather than displaced waste in general, one can imagine flows of different materials, with distinct properties and headed for different destinations. Take the familiar practice of disposing of hair, nails and excreta. Precisely because of their lingering association with the person who released them, they can generate moral dilemmas concerning the regimentation and revaluation of bodily traces, including their use in sorcery (Frazer 1980; Gell 1998) or forensics (Reno 2012). The products of human and non-human digestion can just as easily be regarded as an example of creative potentiality, whether raw material for ritual acts (Bourke 1891), a practical resource (Guillet 1983), or as representative of the cosmos itself (Walens 1981). Disposed of in sufficient quantities biological effluent can also spread pestilence and miasmatic stenches (Barnes 2006). A Eurocentric historiography of modern technological and medical innovations belies the uneven development of waste service provision, as a result of which marginalized subjects may be held accountable for their disproportionate exposure to disease (Briggs and Briggs 2006), thereby obfuscating the right to effective wastewater treatment (Zimmer et al. 2014). Even where disposal systems are put in place, however, people continue to subsist in their margins, both challenging and sustaining the system at the same time. Parisian sewermen (Reid 1991) and London toshers (Pike 2004) can turn collectively managed sewage into a source of material enrichment, whereas Aghori Hindu ascetics consume corpses and excrement to attain divine transcendence (Parry 1982). Productive tensions arise, not only concerning whether bodily waste is more moral/material pollutant or spiritual/practical resource, but to what extent it is to be managed by the state, self-discipline, or some combination of both (Laporte 2002). The spread of sewerage can radically transform relations between waste producers, workers, and products. Where excretion becomes associated with water infrastructure and metabolic visions of the modern city (Gandy 2004), public latrines transform into private bathrooms and negotiations with “night soil” workers are transferred to bureaucrats, politicians and plumbers (Van der Geest 2002a). Scientific models of polluting wastewater, which mandate careful regulation, may rest uneasily with alternative perceptions of landscapes, furthermore, as with the tensions between (post)colonial, industrial and Hindu assessments of the sacred Ganges (Alley 2002). Household rubbish or Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is an outcome of parallel transformations in urban infrastructure (a management of solids rather than liquids). MSW—the mass waste of populations—is what most people mean when they refer to garbage, trash, or discard. This is the image of waste that comes most readily to mind when policy reforms or environmental risks are publicly debated and discussed: waste enclosed in black bags or left in the open as litter. As such, MSW infrastructure can further shape personal identity and social judgment. Japanese citizens may proudly display their recyclables for neighbors to admire (Hawkins 2006: 107-110), while Cypriots and Chinese migrants are both judged as culturally repugnant for littering public space with what should have been left for waste workers to collect (Argyrou 1997; Dürr 2010). But using MSW as a synecdoche for all waste would be a mistake. For one thing, the amount of MSW in any society is typically dwarfed by the wastes of commercial enterprise. Consider the category of “food waste,” which calls to mind consumer and retailer misuse of edible goods. While important, it is dwarfed by the many expenditures and losses of agricultural production, which never make it to the marketplace yet still must be dealt with (Krzywoszynska 2012). Industrial wastes exist in such quantity and variety that they inspire entirely new products in capitalist industry. At different times petroleum spirit, coal-tar and glycerin were all externalities of production that gradually became revalued as essential products (O’Brien 2007). But far more waste is disposed of than reused. Industrial wastes thus pose a far greater risk to environmental and human health and safety, leading to worldwide debates surrounding pollution from resource extraction and commodity manufacture (Kirsch 2014; Little 2014). These harmful materials are commonly known as “toxic” or “hazardous” waste streams, owing their categorical separation from MSW to a further division of waste labor. Toxic wastes are, by definition, more dangerous as a result of their distinct physical properties and ideal methods of treatment. The category of toxic waste is also productive of new economic arrangements and international policies. Industries and states regard toxic waste as the most economically attractive waste to ship abroad to places with reduced regulatory restrictions, as is the case with the growing, global stream of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE or E-Waste) and the controversial ship-breaking industry, both of which involve objects that are profitable to reuse and recycle and highly toxic to strip and dispose of (Gabrys 2011; Gregson and Crang 2010; Crang et al. 2012). Other industrial waste streams can be singled out as uniquely destructive in ways that challenge the causal simplicity of the waste stream metaphor and, more broadly, the metaphor of managerial control. The degradation of plastics, for instance, releases chemical plasticizers, the flow of which through living bodies and environments can be difficult to trace and may entail severe health risks (Strong and Garruto 1991; Duffield et al. 1994; Liboiron 2013b). Similarly, nuclear wastes require additional technological and regulatory innovations to contain their singular capacity for contamination and accumulation (Garcier 2012). Radioactive by-products make clear the familiar temporality of less troubling forms of waste and the manageable and imaginable time-scales of their breakdown. The contamination of nuclear wastes exceeds human lifespans, involving a planetary “deep time” beyond familiar temporal horizons (Ialenti 2014). Though much the same could be said of the average MSW landfill, which can release methane with twenty-five times the greenhouse potential of carbon dioxide through the decay of ordinary biodegradable trash. In this way, a casually discarded banana peel or the belch of an ordinary dairy cow both contribute to the planet’s transition to a new geological epoch, also known as the Anthropocene (Ogden et al. 2013). Waste streams needn’t be environmentally toxic to generate moral concerns and controversial property relations. Similarly challenging are abundant biomedical wastes (Parry and Gere 2006: 140). When it comes to Assisted Reproductive Technologies, the possibility of embryos or umbilical cords becoming waste may be foreclosed altogether, even as forms of disposal are increasingly central to biomedical practice (Thompson 2007: 264; Santoro 2009). So too with medical charities which seek to reuse the many usable items that hospitals and clinics discard in order to protect patient health and avoid legal liability. To the extent that aid workers revalue medical discards as a form of humanitarian care or Christian blessing for recipients abroad, they may strongly resist the notion that they are helping to dispose of something worthless (Halvorson 2012). An analysis of different waste streams reveals distinct material capacities, which shape the ways that these by-products can be managed and the uses to which they are put. This flow of various waste streams depends on the mediation of waste management infrastructure and the broader socio-material relations of which they are a part.