Grounding Waste: Towards a Sociology of Waste Networks

Grounding Waste: Towards a Sociology of Waste Networks. This article contributes towards building a sociology of waste. It advances a network analysis framework to understand the position and role of the various actors involved in waste governance in Ireland, North and South. It is the state at the EU and national levels that has sought to deal with waste within the competing sustainability and competitiveness paradigms. However, this article also argues for the critical importance of 'glocal' action around waste management (incinerators in particular) in developing a sociology of waste. The issue of waste is seen in parallel terms to that of money as a new global fluid, which, nevertheless, needs to be governed. A major argument of the article is that we need to take a grounded globalisation approach to build insights into networks of waste and networked political processes of waste governance. Introduction Two seemingly unrelated events occurred in Autumn 2002. On 16 th /17 th September two nuclear freighters came up the Irish Sea bound for Sellafield carrying a deadly cargo of plutonium mixed oxide fuel (MOX) from Japan. It was being sent back to Sellafield due to false safety records but the nuclear industry saw this as a great opportunity to expand into a new line of toxic waste management. A very different fluid also hit the global news on the 20 th /21 st of September, when an unprecedented burst of trading in the City of London led to a £50 billion value added to the stock market. As reported at the time 'Most of the activity took place in a frantic two-minute period which stunned city veterans and pushed trading systems close to collapse (Guardian, 21 st September 2002:1). Indeed one bank lost £100 million in that two-minute frenzy. Money and waste are part of global networks that are material, technical, social and discursive. They both pose the issue of regulation in a global economy where the dominant discourse is deregulatory and in favour of 'free market' operations. However, one is alluring and the other is repulsive, so therefore far less visible sociologically. In the recent and very successful novel Underworld, Don Delillo has a character argue that all civilization has evolved in response to the need to manage waste. However, in social theory waste can be seen as a 'lost continent', a long way behind production and consumption in terms of analysis and …