Science as Culture, Volume 8, Number 3, 1999
269
RUBBISH VALUES: Reflections on
the Political Economy of Waste
MARTIN O'BRIEN
To the east of Calcutta, in an area called Dhapa where the
city's wastes are dumped, thousands of people gain a living
from the rotting rubbish. They pick over the piles of garbage
and other items which they sell to middlemen for recycling.
Some use the heaps of rotting waste to grow vegetables which
they sell in the city (Davidson et al, 1992, p. 120).
There's gold in them there landfills ... Pots of it (Swanton,
1998, p. vii).
Thus, we do not find certain things necessary or exclude other
things from consideration because we have certain needs or
wishes, but rather, our understanding of our own needs and
wishes is shaped by the things that we find necessary or that
we exclude from consideration (Hertzberg, 1995, p. 112).
• INTRODUCTION
There are some things in our lives so obvious, so glaringly, manifestly
and ubiquitously essential to carrying on in the world that we often
fail to take note of them. Their facticity is so apparent that, whilst
they do not escape our consciousness entirely, they seem to be
beyond question, beyond analysis and reflection. One clear example
is the process and activity of wasting. This is particularly true in the
social sciences, and especially in the discipline of sociology. Aside
from some moral polemics about conspicuous or excessive consumption, sociology has shied away from any systematic analysis of the
social processes by which things become 'waste' and the social relationships that sustain and organize wastes as wastes. Sociological
approaches to waste treat it as a depletion, dissipation or loss of
value—generally as a by-product of greed, inefficiency or distorted
economic relations. The classic, and oft-affirmed, expression of this
Address correspondence to: Martin O'Brien, School of Education and Social Science, University of Derby,
Mickleover, Derby DE3 5GX, E-mail: m.a.obrien@derby.ac.uk
0950-5431/99/030269-27 © 1999 Process Press
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view is Vance Packard's (1963) The Waste Makers. Whilst there are
libraries filled with sociological analyses of production and consumption, there is next to nothing on waste. It is as if, for the discipline
of sociology as a whole, waste is utterly immaterial (O'Brien, 1999).
In this paper, I argue that waste is culturally, politically and
economically a matter of the greatest sociological significance: that
waste has its own materiality and is organized and sustained through
identifiable social and political relationships. Waste is gendered,
embodied, stratified and capitalized, racialized, industrialized,
militarized and signified because wasting—like producing or consuming—is a contested social process. Waste is not a by-product, an
excess or superfluous shadow of the 'concrete5 systems of production
and consumption. It is not in itself a remaindered energy (Bataille,
1991), the social surplus of a system of capitalized nature
(O'Connor, 1994), the material residue of degraded products (Jackson, 1996) nor even, common-sensically, dirt or 'matter out of place'
(Douglas, 1966).
Just as it makes no sense to theorize a 'product' outside of its
productive framework, or a 'commodity' outside of its consumption
framework, I suggest that it makes no sense to theorize a 'waste'
outside of its wasting framework. Production and consumption are
intertwined dynamics of social change that, on an everyday level,
are achieved through practices, relationships and institutions. In the
same way, I argue, 'wasting' refers to a comparable dynamic of social
change, the elements of which drive technological innovation, instil
and challenge social rights, roles and rules of access, encode cultural
representations, and organize political hierarchies and regulatory
frameworks.
I do not have the space to develop each of these themes as fully
as they deserve. Instead, I explore how a sociological analysis of
wastes (here, as classes of everyday material objects) and wasting
(the practices, relationships and institutions organizing what happens
to those objects) exposes the emergent quality of political-economic
values. I make some remarks in the introduction on 'political economy' as a branch of study or intellectual discipline. In the main,
however, I reserve the term 'political economy' to refer to a regulated
social framework for transacting values, comprising an arrangement
of practices, relationships and institutions. My aim is to explore
some of the practical, relational and institutional connections
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that sustain, disrupt or transform the flows of waste in which
contemporary social life is enmired.
For the purposes of this exploration, I define waste as simultaneously a production resource and a consumption good: a bipolar
object of political regulation and economic exchange. I define wasting
not as a loss of value from objects but as a regulated exchange of
value between objects: a framework or system for the conversion
of value comparable to, and equally important as, a system of
production or consumption. I focus on wasting, as a social process
of value-transformation, as a counterpoint to the analysis of waste, as
an excess or surplus of production and consumption. 1
I develop this analytical framework because an important consequence of the definition of waste as surplus or excess is that the
social processes through which wasting is organized are underresearched and under-theorized. Waste has ended up, categorically,
in the ontological dustbin of social theory. This 'disposal' of waste
from the human sciences' analytical endeavours achieves an apogee
in Mary Douglas' (1966) definition of 'dirt' as 'matter out of place'.
In the inspired analysis oí Purity and Danger, Douglas explored the
taboos, rituals and symbols that construct and maintain dirt as a
separate cultural category; as a cognitive out-take from normal social
life. Dirt is on the 'other side' of order and life, a negative ontology
that grounds cultural categories of being and non-being, rights and
duties in the actions and interactions of people of different genders,
ages and social statuses.
This thesis, extended by Thompson (1979), has inhabited, almost alone, an arid terrain. Sociology, by neglect, has been content
to understand waste through the same conceptual lens that Douglas
conceptualized dirt, but how, exactly, does matter exist 'out of
place', not only as a cultural category, but as a material reality? What
is the materiality of dirt's out-of-placedness? In responding to this
question, I want to turn Purity and Danger on its head and show how,
through social actions, relationships and institutions, the matter of
dirt is put back in place; how the cultural process identified by
Douglas is reversed in the political economy of waste and wasting. If
dirt is matter out of place, wasting is its reversal, the in-placing of
dirt such that dirt, materially, if not common-sensically, is matter
both in-place and out-of-place at the same time.
In these respects, my argument draws on but diverges from both
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functionalist social anthropology and contemporary Marxist political
economy. It diverges from functionalist social anthropology in its
insistence that dirt, pollution or waste is much more than a cultural
category: it is a socially organized material value underpinning divers
sectors of economic and political activity. It diverges from contemporary Marxist political economy in that it focuses on wasting as a
process of value conversion rather than as a vehicle for the systemic
internalization of capitalist production conditions. I do not deny that
either the cultural categorization of dirt or the internalization of such
conditions is a significant point of departure for analyzing waste.
Instead, I want to put an alternative thesis, namely, that the industrialized societies of the contemporary world, as I have explained
elsewhere (O'Brien, 1999), are rubbish societies.2 They are societies
whose modes of self-understanding, whose political, social and cultural systems are infused by a relationship to waste and wasting but
which, at the same time, seek to deny the very fact that wasting is the
basis on which those societies are able to develop and change.
• THE DYNAMISM OF RUBBISH DISCOURSE
An American Company, ETECH, has developed an entirely
new way of cutting the landfill nappy burden. WeeTrain is a
reusable miniature wetness detector which is slipped into
a small, stretchy pocket on the wasteband of the nappy—and,
used in conjunction with common sense training, is supposed
to get babies out of nappies sooner (Green Futures, 1997,
p. 15).
Any culture that is capable of inventing, and rationalizing, an idea
like 'landfill nappy burden' is a culture already steeped in a rubbish
sensibility. It is a culture which sees its activities, interconnections,
problems, opportunities and adventures as tied inextricably to wasting: that is, to processes, strategies and systems for dispersing,
organizing, manipulating and wheeling and dealing in muck and
filth. It is a culture to which muck and filth are central realities of
everyday, institutional and imaginary life: the culture of a rubbish
society.
Compound phrases like 'landfill nappy burden' seem to suggest
that waste is understood, that its 'burdens' can be counted and
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273
controlled. But 'waste'—whether referring to nappies or otherwise—
is a classic 'friction'; its imaginary referents never remain fixed: they
generate personal representations and political discourses that grate
against any culture that tries to tame them. The critical linguistics
school would have a field day with the languages of industrialized
ecology. They are the most productive and dynamic lexical fields of
the present era, inventing and distributing new nouns and verbs at an
astonishing rate of growth; but such languages are fully politicized,
the referents they invoke are a feature of the growth of a political
economy in which institutions and individuals are engaged in
struggles over both meanings and material benefits:
The [Packaging Responsibility Group] says in the medium to
long term between £50m/yr and £100m/yr may be needed
to stimulate activity to meet recovery targets, with £100m/yr
by 2000 to realise objectives. The Lipworth Modified Converter Levy could then operate economically and should
be introduced to raise funds from the packaging chain
(Environment & Business Newsletter, 16 November 1994).
When I first encountered the phrase 'Lipworth Modified
Converter Levy' it reminded me of those early steam-driven apparatuses for raising water from mines—like the engine built by Thomas
Newcomen at the dawn of the eighteenth century—a machine for
extracting the unwanted in order to gain access to the desired. It
turns out, however, that, superficially at least, not only is it nothing
of the kind but it is the exact opposite of such a machine. It is a means
of putting the desired into what appears to be unwanted, a means of
adding value ('raising' coveted funds instead of hazardous water) or,
at least, creating definite value where its status is ambiguous, where
there is value to be had but no-one is able or willing to extract it. The
levy exposes how absolutely necessary it is to establish a political
economy in order for economic value to be realizable at all. There is
not, in the case of waste, a prior political economy whose activities
yield value to society. On the contrary, wasting represents a process
of generating a political economy in order to confer values on
objects. If waste, as the material form of collective dirt, is ambiguous
this is because the process of wasting is a field of social, political and
economic struggle.
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• NO SUCH THING AS DIRT?
'There is no such thing', writes Douglas (1966, p. 5), 'as absolute
dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder':
If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread
or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the
range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt
offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative
movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment.
Dirt is an 'anomaly' that disturbs the certainty and pattern of life.
It is culturally ambivalent. It is, at one and the same time, an
essential element of cosmology and a disruption to that cosmology.
Dirt and its symbols intervene in relations of gender, in ritual
statuses and in the beliefs and hopes of a culture. Here, of course, is
Douglas' famous paradox. 'Dirt' is matter out of place, it is matter
that either is yet to be allotted its cultural and political space in the
ordered world of a total culture or intrudes to disturb a culture's
ordered totality. Yet, it is the very 'out of placedness' that makes dirt
a meaningful cultural category. The very fact that dirt is 'out-placed',
that it is wrongly or ill-fittingly located, is precisely what generates its
unique and inescapable usefulness and worth. It is what enables
a culture to distinguish—in its rules, norms, conventions and
rituals—between order and disorder, being and non-being, life
and death.
It is something of a curiosity, then, that when Douglas turns her
attention to the system of cultural goods (Douglas and Isherwood,
1979) the mis-located and out-placed dirt disappears from view. In
the title and thematic structure of The World of Goods, dirt recedes to
its pre-1966 invisibility. The world of goods is a world of desires and
needs, of cultural systems and social relations, of wants, investments
and wishes. Hence, the reader is urged to set 'the very idea of
consumption ... back into the social process, not merely looked upon
as a result or objective of work... Goods, work and consumption
have been artificially abstracted out of the whole social scheme'
(P- 12).
Surprisingly, given the centrality of dirt and pollution in Purity
and Danger, the 'whole social scheme' enunciated in The World of
Goods no longer has any dirt in it. Dirt has evaporated from the
anthropological schema by which Douglas and Isherwood seek to
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make sense of the practice of consumption and the circulation of
values that accompanies it.
The World of Goods opens by asking why people want goods
(chapter 1) why they save (chapter 2) and the uses of goods (chapter
3). It goes on to consider, amongst other things, consumption
technologies, consumption periodicities and consumption classes.
There is no chapter that says why (or how) people make dirt or waste
goods, nor how dirt and waste enter and/or exit the cybernetic
system. The book seeks to reorient social science's understanding of
consumption behaviour and to redefine the nature of 'goods' in every
field from economics to political science, yet strangely omits to
acknowledge that the insight of Purity and Danger is of as much
relevance to a system of consumption as it is to a system of ritual.
The omission is not immaterial. It underpins a specific functional
view of human needs and desires and represents the unspoken
counterpoint to what a 'good' is and is not in The World of Goods. For
example, Douglas and Isherwood write that 'Goods that minister to
physical needs—food or drink—are no less carriers of meaning than
ballet or poetry. Let us put an end to the widespread and misleading
distinction between goods that sustain life and health and others that
service the mind and heart—spiritual goods' (p. 72). This rhetorical
flourish appears to make immediate sense: we can relate to the need
for food and we can grant that some people may desire poetry. But
what of goods that, superficially, satisfy neither 'physical' needs nor
'spiritual' needs?
For example, Douglas and Isherwood contrast Brillat-Savarin's
and Barthes' discussions of the process of coffee making. BrillatSavarin, we learn, 'preferred coffee beans pounded by hand in
Turkish fashion' in a wooden mortar, whilst Barthes was interested
in the poetics of bean-crushing and supplied a semiotics of the
powdering process (pp. 73-4). Yet, neither Brillat-Savarin nor
Barthes, nor beyond them Douglas and Isherwood, indicates what
happened to the coffee dregs after the brew had been savoured. They
do not explore whether the deep brown sludge that remained in the
coffee maker goes on to satisfy any physical or spiritual need. Does
this mean that the sludge is not a good? Has the act of drinking
coffee transformed what the beans are made of from a 'good' to a
'non-good'? Or has it transformed only a cultural representation of
the coffee beans from a visible 'good' to an invisible 'bad'? Has the
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drinking of the coffeed liquid banished the dregs from the
perceptible world of goods? What is the sludge, the sediment that
Brillat-Savarin's brew leaves behind it: is it a good or is it dirt?
Later, in the same chapter, the idea of a sediment, a trace, a
collection of dregs is introduced, but by this stage Douglas and
Isherwood have left behind them the empirical reality of coffee
making and the brown sludge it produces. Now, sediments have
become unsedimented: they have transformed into a coral-like
structure of cultural supports:
The stream of consumable goods leaves a sediment that
builds up the structure of culture like coral islands. The
sediment is the learned set of names and names of sets,
operations to be performed on names, a means of thinking
(p. 75).
Brillat-Savarin's brew, then, leaves two sediments, not one. It
leaves a first sediment that is crucial to culture and to meaningful
social life and it leaves a second sediment that, it must be inferred,
is entirely superfluous and incidental to culture and meaningful
social life. Whilst the sediment of the coffee-making ritual supports
a 'means of thinking', the sedimented sludge of the coffee-making
act is left unthought entirely—a matter of marginal significance.
In the very last chapter of The World of Goods, one finally finds an
oblique reference to the second sediment—a throwaway line in a
political polemic for greater economic and social equality—when
Douglas and Isherwood accuse the inhabitants of 'society's top floor'
of:
shortening everyone's time perspective for the sake of their
own competitive anxiety, generating waste while at the same
time deploring it (p. 203).
What does this mean? Are Douglas and Isherwood saying that
society's 'bottom floor' do not waste? Or that they waste but do not
deplore it? Surely, given the thesis of Purity and Danger, no social
stratum could be understood as existing without a relation to dirt,
pollution, muck and waste?
There are, it appears, two contradictory theses on 'goods' and
'dirt', both of which have been hugely influential in the study of
culture and consumption: (cognitively) dirt is matter out of place
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and (empirically) ritual sediments nurture cultural growth. Yet, it is
feasible to maintain this double standard on the empirical
and cognitive relationships between dirt and culture only if the
materiality of Brillat-Savarin's second sediment is ignored entirely.
• WHERE DIRT MATTERS
In fact, the second sediment itself inhabits a world of values and
transactions, inventions and discoveries: it motivates commercial
innovation and political struggle. In short, there is such a thing as
'dirt'—and where there's dirt, there's money—but the 'anomaly' of
dirt does not lie in the latter's own intrinsic danger or pollution, nor
even in the cultural categories that out-place dirt from normal social
life. Rather, the anomaly is that dirt is a consumption good: it is a
refracted part of the 'world of goods' that comprises a scheme of
production and consumption.
Human scientists, including those whose central aim is to tackle
the materiality of waste, find themselves in an ontological mire when
confronted with the complexities of waste. Tim Jackson (1996), for
example, in an eloquent and persuasive attempt to show the value of
a thermodynamic systems model for understanding industrial activity, represents an economy as a series of discrete, albeit interconnected processes. He urges industrialists and policy-makers to take
up a preventative ecological strategy in which the focus is on the
most efficient circulation of resources around an economy, rather
than on cleaning up 'wasted' resources after their inefficient linear
use. I do not have the space here to do justice to the details of
Jackson's argument so I will draw attention only to two dimensions
of his analysis. First, I will comment on the relationships between
'waste' and 'economy'. Second, I want to comment on the systemic
materiality of waste.
First, Jackson writes (pp. 61-3):
Having served their purpose, [...] degraded products then
pass to a further material stage, which I have called waste
management. After passing through the waste management
sector, materials will leave the economic system and re-enter
the environment (emphasis in original).
Note that the 'waste management stage' must be accomplished in
a 'waste management sector': waste management is only a 'stage'
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in a model that has already sectoralized economic relationships with
the environment. What is the basis of the sectoralization? How,
moreover, has it come about that 'waste management' has come into
existence as a material sector of economic activity? What is the
phenomenology of waste management? The answer is provided
immediately:
Often this last stage [i.e. materials leaving the economic
system via the waste management sector and re-entering the
environment] in the life of products is referred to as disposal.
But this stage is not just a question of throwing materials away
and forgetting about them. The product will depart from the
economic system and even from our consciousness. But we
should always remember that materials we have disposed of
continue to be subject to the laws of nature (p. 63).
Waste management, then, is the last stage before materials leave
the economic system: wastes are not things that have already left the
system, they are produced and reproduced by it. If they were not
part of the system, they could not be managed by it. What is it, then,
that 'leaves' the system? Jackson contends that it is 'materials' that
leave the system. Yet this formulation of the process forgets that an
economic 'system' refers not to an arrangement of material objects
but, rather, to an arrangement of material values. It is, in simplified
form, a system of values that effectuates personal and social opportunities and preclusions. No industrial sector exists because of the
material objectivity of what it manages. Industrial sectors exist
because of the values that can be extruded from the exchange of
those objects. This is why what is waste today will not be waste
tomorrow and why what was, common-sensically, waste yesterday is
now incorporated as an economic 'sector'. Furthermore, no economic decision has ever been made on the basis of the material
objectivity of products. Economic decisions are made on the basis of
the material value of products: on the basis of what some use of some
product may generate outside of its inherent material objectivity.
Second, I am not disputing that materials may be subject to the
operation of 'natural laws'. The point is that there are important
differences between the industrial and the economic, as there are
between the objective and the valuable. Material objectivity is not the
basis of economic activity. Once it is recognized that an economy is
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related only contingently to the objectivity of the things distributed
within it, it is but a short step to recognizing that what leaves an
economic system is not that objectivity. Objects never leave an
economic system as such, because, qua their objectivity, they never
enter it in the first place—even if, on another plane of analysis, it is
granted that they may pass in and out of industrial sectors. Only
certain dimensions of the values of material objects are economically
depleted, converted and dispersed. Waste management is precisely
the political economic activity that demonstrates this beyond doubt:
'waste' does not go away.
If the physical and engineering sciences, as well as the human and
policy sciences, have addressed waste as a temporary nuisance that
can be 'cleaned up' or 'recovered', they struggle enormously to
comprehend the immeasurable objectivity of nuclear 'waste'. Here is
a material object that refuses to 'depart from the economic system';
one whose depletion is on a time scale so vast that it exceeds any
conceivable scientific culture's capacity to 'clean up' the stains it
leaves behind. Hence, the enormous current investment in trying to
decipher the problem of whether radioactive reactor residues should
be placed in a 'reversible' storage technology unambiguously within
the economic system or in a partially 'safe' and 'irreversible' storage
technology that seeks (impossibly) to 'dispose' of the problem.
It is not my intention to undermine or reject what Jackson is
arguing. Rather, I want to point out that the remarkable dominance
of systems theory in contemporary applied social and environmental
sciences is a cultural force, not a natural reflection of the reality of
the world. In particular, the dominance of functionalist systems
theory in applied social science and thermodynamic systems theory
in applied environmental science has created some peculiar but
telling homologies between completely different analytical enterprises. Compare Fine and Leopold (1993), for example, who
(following Marx) distinguish between productive consumption and
final consumption in a system of provision. Productive consumption
refers to the commodities consumed by industry and the economic
system in generating goods and services. Final consumption refers to
the exit of commodities from the system of exchange through their
use by individuals and groups. A system of provision, for Fine and
Leopold, corresponds to the ways in which materials, investment,
energy and labour are organized to realize a product or service. The
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most problematic, and least explored, element of this schema parallels the conceptual difficulties that Jackson's distinction between
industrial and economic systems encountered. It is the idea that
'final consumption' represents the exit of commodities from a system
of exchange.
In the case of nuclear waste, it is strikingly obvious that, whilst it
may lie around threatening planetary life even when it is not actively
being 'exchanged', it cannot be said to have been 'finally consumed'
by individuals and groups. Yet, nuclear waste only exposes in an
obvious way what waste stands for: a means of managing the
transformation of values characteristic of a world of goods. It indicates, clearly and frighteningly, that dirt matters: that dirt and waste
have their own material objectivity that is not merely their 'outplacedness' and is not identical to the material objectivity of the
'needed' and 'desired' consumption goods in the formalized worlds
of systems theory. Nuclear waste is the glowing tip of an (increasingly value-laden) rubbish heap that contains the brown sludge of
Brillat-Savarin's brew, sensitizing us to the never-ending economic
materiality of waste.
• ALCHEMISTS OF THE RUBBISH SOCIETY
On the night of 28 November 1988, Shanti lost her meagre
possessions in the fire that consumed the makeshift houses in
the Salimpur Netaji Colony, one of the many slums beside the
railway track running through Calcutta. Shanti's shack was
made of highly inflammable materials: plastic sheets, bamboo,
jute bags and whatever else would give protection from the
scorching sun and torrential rain (Davidson et al., 1992,
p. 113).
Let us imagine that, armed with some version of a systems
model, the industrial sectors of the world's economies eliminated
99.9% of all their wastes: where would Shanti live? Out of what
would Shanti and the millions of other oppressed, excluded and
exploited people of the world build the scanty shelters that provide
them with protection? If Shanti's house is constructed from the
discarded and unwanted materials that have undergone their 'final
consumption' phase, does this mean that her house is waste in the
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common-sense meaning of this term: a superfluous and pointless
nuisance? Or does it mean that the meagre construction materials of
her home are not valuable enough for organized exploitation?
What, then, is waste? 'Waste', I will suggest, is the archetypal
consumption good of a rubbish society: 'simply another raw material', says Vasant Kumar of Cambridge University, that, with the
help of modern day alchemists, can be turned into cash (Swanton,
1998, p. vii). But, contrary to popular opinion, the alchemists of the
rubbish society are not primarily the scientists and technicians whose
researches and inventions provide the industrial machinery for
waste's rehabilitation. The alchemists of the rubbish society are town
planners, environmental health departments, European Commissioners, Government Ministers and the Mafia: they are organized
through bureaucratic and trading, rather than scholarly and scientific, organizations. The paraphernalia of their quasi-magical material conversions are definitions, plans and policies rather than
gadgets, tools and gizmos. They thrive on the dynamism of rubbish
and their political-economic role is precisely to maintain its material
ambiguity: as matter out of and in place at the same time. It is this
socially created and politically regulated ambiguity that underlies the
economic value of dirt and determines that no social scheme is
'whole' without it: the material ambiguity of waste is the endlessly
deferred completion of the social scheme of the rubbish society.
I I Rubbish through the looking glass
Obviously waste is a resource but waste ultimately is also a
product for which no economic use has been found, can you
see what I'm saying? I mean that's another way of defining it.
It's a resource but anything you don't use as a resource is then
a product for which economic use has not been found
(17, p. 3. Interview with a Borough Client Services Officer,
27 September 1995).
One of the striking characteristics of the materiality of rubbish is
precisely how important it has become to extrude economic value
from it. In contrast to common-sense conceptions of rubbish, it
emerges that waste is not that which has no value; rather, it is that
which motivates the search for value. The reference to finding an
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'economic use' in the quote above is instructive: the search is not for
a social or environmental or personal use. It is the search to renew,
revitalize, refurbish and reaffirm the value of something that appears,
superficially, to possess no value. Waste appears, here, as the mirror
image of itself in itself: a resource and not a resource, a potential
value and a potential non-value simultaneously. This is not a theoretical contradiction: it is the very being of waste in the rubbish society.
In this society, the stage of final consumption is simultaneously the
stage of productive consumption: the 'exit' of value from systems of
exchange through their consumption and use by individuals is the
immediate 'entry' of value into systems of exchange as materials for
the generation of goods and services.
In fact, waste never loses its consumption value, for the value of
waste underpins major economic sectors, providing incomes for
multinational conglomerates, local authorities and individual refuse
operatives alike. Total UK spending on waste management alone—
not including recycling, landfill-mining, and other forms of recovery—reached £2.8billion per annum in 1994. 'By 1995', notes
Dicker (1997, p. 40):
... recycling had become a giant industry. The German Association for waste management and recycling, the BDE, had
approximately 1,000 member firms and each employing about
150 people. Estimates for the total turnover of the industry lie
between DM80 billion and DM100 billion. This puts it on a
par with the insurance industry in Germany and well ahead of
sectors such as telecommunications and engineering. It
dwarfs the retail and steel sectors.
The Danish waste tax—which was intended to minimize waste
arising but which in fact merely led to a diversion of wastes from
landfill to recycling schemes—netted DKr 625 million in its first year
of operation {Warmer Bulletin 55, July 1997, p. 2). In this context, it
is not surprising that one of the healthiest economic sectors of the
present day is the waste sector. For example, Waste Management
International announced pre-tax profits of £38.7 million for 1994,
up 12.4% on 1993. Another waste management company, Shanks &
McEwan, in spite of trading difficulties and internal boardroom
disputes, made half year profits of £9.4 million in 1993; similar high
profit ratios characterize much of the waste industry. As might be
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expected in a market of this kind, even the insurance industries have
been keen to cash in by establishing separate environmental management and risk services to cope with the increasing demand for
environmental insurance specifically arising from wastes and pollution. Companies are merging and re-organizing to become stronger
in the face of increasing competition in the provision of environmental (financial) services. Nor, in this context, is it surprising that the
competitive struggle to extract value from waste has resulted in fierce
legal contests between contractors and between contractors and local
authorities. Private waste contractors have challenged each other in
the courts in order to wrest lucrative waste contracts away from
competitors (Riley, 1995). They have also challenged local authorities via the same route in order to make sure that no-one involved in
planning and decision-making about waste can own shares in any
waste disposal companies competing for contracts (Environment and
Business Newsletter, 22 September 1993, p. 2),
In this profitable, intensely competitive and highly active field one
might expect that the 'product' with which the industry deals would
be relatively clear cut; that all of the contributors in this stream of
economic values would know exactly what they were dealing with,
but this is not at all the case. The policy definition of 'waste' is
purposefully ambiguous with no clear statement about the substance
out of which the former is made. In some cases, 'waste' has been
defined as a fuel for energy. This definition has been developed
partly in order to enable a number of European states (notably the
UK) to achieve an increase in the proportion of energy generated
from 'renewable' sources. The idea that any portion of the 500
million tonnes of industrial, commercial, agricultural and household
garbage constitutes a 'renewable resource' is a leap of imagination so
large it can only be accounted for by asserting that some people have
vested interests in its incineration.
In other cases, a semantic and logical carousel has been erected
to cope with the divergent and conflicting interests that have become
entrenched in the exchange and management of rubbish. The UK
Environmental Protection Act (EPA) [part II; section (75) 2] argues
that an item which is waste may cease to be waste when it has been
recovered within the meaning of the Framework Directive. In other
words, you can never be sure that something really is 'waste' because
waste exists only so long as it inhabits a defined waste-management
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stream—and even there, paradoxically, it generates value, whereupon it is not waste at all. For example, a used bottle that is reused
by refilling it is not waste (it has been 'recovered'). The same bottle
in a bottle bank that gets crushed and is reused later for a different
purpose is waste according to the EPA. Although the material
objectivity of the bottle is the same and although in both cases the
bottle is used again for a second time, nonetheless, one placing of the
bottle makes it 'not waste' and the other placing makes it 'waste'.
Yet, even in its second placing, the 'waste' bottle is not an object for
which an 'economic use has not been found'.
'Waste', then, is a multipurpose and multidimensional object
providing several distinct satisfactions for its different users. It occupies the market niches of: fuel, recoverable, recyclable, residue or
dredgings (amongst others), all of which circulate in different economic and political networks, and all of which in practice, in spite of
(and sometimes because of) the EPA, are subject to different regulation and valuation systems. The waste 'sector' is a transformative
political economy that bestows different values on objects that are
never economically 'wasted' but, rather, undergo a process of valueconversion. If consumption is the mirror of production, waste is
simultaneously the reflection and refraction of both.
• THE CONVERSION OF VALUE
[In] order to satisfy the demands of large-scale production,
more and more of nature has to be destroyed. In this sense
production under capitalism is consumption, not production;
it gobbles that which is already there, and gives nothing back
but waste (Brennan, 1993, p. 138).
Since it depends on 'no longer being with', waste is nothing
as such, it has a negative ontology. Waste is thus always in
excess of being and—in Heidegger's terms—cannot be taken as
'ready-to-hand' (an investment of entities with human
signification) as long as waste remains 'that which is to be
shed' (van Loon, 1997, pp. 8-9).
It is common to conceive of waste as 'nothing'. Yet, precisely
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285
nothing could be further from the truth than this: every placement,
every channelling, every organization of waste delivers a positive
value to someone, somewhere.3 It involves an organization of labour
(and an arrangement for its exploitation), a negotiated pricing system, a formalized system for carrying values from one institution to
another, and a political hierarchy of controls and licensing conditions
to co-ordinate membership of the waste-exploiting club (such as the
European Waste Club, based in Madrid, or the National Association
of Waste Disposal Contractors, based in London). In fact, it is more
important that these relationships are established around wastes than
for any other potential commodity for the simple reason that nobody
owns them. Of all the commodities of industrial societies, wastes are
certainly the most peculiar insofar as they are the only profitgenerating commodities that no-one seeks to possess: when a
journalist is caught rooting through the bin-bags of celebrities s/he is
charged, not with theft of property, but with trespass or invasion of
privacy. Wastes are licensed to different organizations in different
stages of their perpetually commodified lives in order to distribute
the values they provide; but no-one 'owns' them. Whereas, for
example, the UK Minerals Authority owns all the coal under the
British Isles, there is no comparable UK Waste Authority that owns
all the rubbish in your attic and your kitchen swing-bin (yet!).
The consequence of this strange state of affairs is the emergence
of ingenious forms of valuation. The 'Lipworth Modified Converter
Levy', referred to above, is only one example of a network of
competing valuation systems. Another example is the emergence of
new forms of currency through which to trade wastes, such as the
system of Packaging Recovery Notes (colloquially known as
'Prunes') which can be traded against the costs of packaging recycling and, ultimately, exchanged for cash. This is a new scheme
which aims to increase the economic benefits of packaging recycling
by formalizing and streamlining the trade-ability and saleability of
waste commodities. Alternatively, the cash prices paid for waste
commodities (such as glass) can be varied regionally (Environment
and Business Newsletter, 22 September 1993, p. 5), in order to
offset the transport costs of moving the rubbish raw materials from
source to processor, or the values of those commodities can be
'weighted' according to where and how their values are channelled—
through recycling, incineration or disposal arrangements, for
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example (Environment and Business Newsletter, 6 October 1993,
p. 1).
Lest it be thought that such schemes are simply marginal efforts
to extract the insignificant traces of value from commodities that are
on their last economic legs, Bontoux et al. (1996, pp. 9-10) remind
us that:
The amounts of resources at stake are enormous: tens of
millions of tonnes of each [recyclable] material across Europe.
The market forces have so far been clearly unable to fully
mobilize this potential resource but this does not mean that
recycling these currently lost resources cannot be profitable.
Today, out of 600 million tonnes of secondary raw materials
generated every year in the world, 200 million are traded
internationally.
The amounts and values of those resources are so enormous,
in fact, that they attract the attentions of organized (as well as
unorganized) crime:
Ministers from the world's richest nations will today launch a
crackdown on a 'phenomenal' increase in green crime. Smuggling banned chemicals, waste and wildlife—often by the
Mafia—is now worth up to $40bn (£24bn) a year, making it
the biggest illegal trade after drugs (Lean, 1998, p. 4).
This last quotation illuminates Michael Thompson's (1998,
p. 62) assertion that 'something like' a law of waste would be: 'the
greater the physical and social distance waste travels the more
shadiness there will be'.
The point is that there exists a political economy of rubbish—
with both licit and illicit forms—that is identifiable in its own right.
There is no justification for conceiving of waste as 'nothing' or
merely as an excess of consumption or 'being'. Waste, contra to the
sociological canon bequeathed by Simmel (1990) and Veblen
(1953), and proposed with vigour by Deleuze and Guattari (1983)
and Bataille (1991), is neither the by-product of conspicuous consumption nor the remaindered energy of an excessive economy.
Waste has its own positive being in a society awash with rubbish: a
being that is a manufactured part of the world of goods and involves
labour, exchange, licensing, regulation and profiteering. Elsewhere
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287
(O'Brien, 1999; O'Brien and Penna, 1998; following Schultz, 1993),
I have noted that recycling schemes, dependent on unpaid labour in
the household, comprise a form of extractive labour which targets
economically valuable objects in the industrial-domestic complex
and supplies industry with a steadily increasing supply of raw materials. To return to my earlier theoretical discussion, here is a classic
case of 'final consumption' (the exit of goods from a system of
economic values) serving as 'productive consumption' (the entry
of economic values as a system of goods).
Many industries currently manufacture products with a view to
their re-entry into systems of provision—many bottles and cans,
packets and paper, cars and even supermarket trolleys are now made
as objects that can be recycled when the appropriate political economic arrangements for realizing their value are in place. A portion of
material value, as an element of productive consumption, is built
into the commodity form of the object as an element of the process
of final consumption. Hence, waste is not a joint or nearly identical
product of consumer goods (Hardin, 1998, p. 10). It comprises,
increasingly, what the product actually is. 'Waste' appears as a rising
proportion of the commodity-value of production, and 'wasting' as
an increasingly central condition of productive activity. Moreover,
the 'building in' of value is not merely a technical achievement. In
order to valorise rubbish-capital an arrangement of institutional
relationships must be established that organizes more or less stable
channels through which rubbish-values can flow. It is necessary, in
short, to create rubbish-relationships, to organize the wasting process
politically and temporally.
Recycling is perhaps the most easily recognizable social arrangement of a rubbish political economy but it would be wrong to
presume that it is the only such arrangement. Value is given to
rubbish by burning it as well as by burying it, storing it or mining it.
Consider the case of 'thermal recycling'—burning rubbish in an
incinerator to generate energy. Burning rubbish is a complex task
that is regulated under law—in some English Boroughs householders
are not allowed to burn their own garden waste and setting fire to
your old mattresses or the pile of old cardigans at the bottom of your
wardrobe can land you in court. Just as individual householders are
subject to the strictures of the legal system, so companies who apply
for licences to burn waste in commercial incinerators must comply
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with a welter of environmental, health and safety regulations. But the
commercial task is yet more complicated by the fact that the
value-channels—the ways of realizing the economic values of rubbish—are fully politicized: the contexts in which the values of wastes
are converted, the temporal rhythms of the conversion process and
the addition or subtraction of different means of conversion are
dynamic elements in the management and extraction of value.
LJ Rubbish relationships
The movement of rubbish values through institutionally regulated
networks demands both the creation of economic relationships between 'rubbish' and other objects and services and the negotiation of
periodicities, or temporal phases during which rubbish releases its
economic values for exploitation. Such periodicities must parallel the
investment, monitoring and accounting cycles of the industries and
enterprises that take charge of different components of the rubbish
channels. These two conditions comprise a commodification relationship—a negotiated order of value that is inflected by government
policy, the market price of related goods and services and the
constraints and opportunities facing waste transporters, contractors
and licensers.
The commodification of waste is illuminating because it reveals
that, in order to valorise rubbish-capital, it is necessary to intervene
into the relationships between specific institutions and organizations.
Commodification is not a single transformative act that suddenly
determines a market price for an object: it is a moment in a complex
realignment of institutional relationships that draws on and, in some
cases, disrupts, the values of other commodified objects. For example, O'Brien et al. (1996) noted that the commodity value of waste
as a fuel for energy generation has been inflected by the politically
motivated privatization of the utilities. The research reports that a
Local Authority Environmental Services Committee met to discuss
the construction of an energy-generating waste incinerator as a
solution to their waste management problems. Amongst other things,
the Committee noted that:
Electricity privatisation has ushered in a new method of
subsidising renewable energy projects and waste is considered
as a renewable fuel. In future, such waste to energy projects as
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289
[the project] would be supported by a levy on all electricity
users, known as the non-fossil fuel obligation (Minutes of an
Environmental Services Committee, p. 2; cited in O'Brien
et al, 1996, p. 96).
The 'renewability' of waste—i.e. the definition of waste as a
non-diminishing resource—is a compact acknowledgement of altered
relationships between Local Authorities responsible for waste management and private sector operatives battling to profit from waste.
The Local Authority has a vested interest in retaining some influence
over the plant (in order to ensure that its 'renewable' waste management strategy is 'sustainable') but the plant operator has a vested
interest in avoiding contributions to Local Authority services under
the 1989 Local Government and Housing Act. Consequently, a
financial and regulatory compromise between the private energygeneration company and the Local Authority has to be reached.
Thus, the Local Authority proposes:
An equity investment of.£5M to justify investors' confidence
in the project. [Borough consortium's] maximum equity investment indicated at 18% i.e. £900,000 in order to exclude
[the company] from local authority company control provisions of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 [Ibid,
appendix A, p. l/c3; cited in O'Brien et al., 1996, p. 96).
Here, the Local Authority takes an investment decision about
project development based on the political and economic constraints
enshrined in the 1989 Act. The decision protects the project from
section 52 of the Act covering private-public sector commercial
arrangements. By taking a specific level of equity in the project, the
Local Authority offsets the benefits gained from a return on investment in the scheme against the regulations under which the company
would have to operate if the initial investment were higher.
These data extracts are introduced to illustrate that negotiations
around the commodity status of objects are often not directed
towards the objects themselves but towards the socio-economic and
political transactions through which the object must pass in order for
it to be a commodity. The commodification of wastes depends on
establishing relationships between public and private organizations
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because they each separately have access to different techniques and
opportunities for realizing the values of wastes.
The commodification of waste goods and services is not a single
situation, a once-and-for-all event. Instead, it is a negotiation of
values and balancing of costs. The report from Her Majesty's
Inspectorate of Pollution (as was) authorizing the construction of the
plant uses the familiar formula to protect plant operators from too
much liability:
The authorisation is subject to the conditions in Schedules 1
to 8 [of the EPA]. Aspects of the process not regulated by
those conditions are subject to a general condition implied by
section 7(4) of the 1990 Act that the person carrying it on
must use the best available techniques not entailing excessive
cost [BATNEEC] (cited in O'Brien et al.s 1996, p. 95).
A complex political and economic agenda addressing the
financial, investment and technical details of the plant's construction
and operation is reduplicated in the conditions under which the plant
carries out its waste-managing and energy-generating services. These
services similarly criss-cross a number of social and economic transactions, persisting at several distinct levels. It can be noted, for
example, that the waste-managing, energy-generating company consists of three contractual sections: private members of the company
(construction and operations contracts); sale of electricity (Electrical
Supply Industry); and supply of refuse (sponsoring Local Authorities). Each of these groups holds different responsibilities and has
different interests in the scheme's commodities.
Furthermore, the Local Authority stipulated a condition on the
acceptability of the plant to the effect that the business will ensure
protection from market forces for 20 years in the first instance. Thus,
the Local Authority is protected from the market and the company
is protected from political controls over its operations and both have
entered into an agreement to renew the resource 'waste' for a
specified period of time. The commodity of waste is thereby conditioned (market and political protection) and established temporally
(the phase lasts for 20 years). At the same time, the parameters of the
commodity are divided into three discrete, albeit connected, units:
operation, (energy-) service supply and fuel (or 'raw materials')
supply.
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291
'Waste'—as a corporal manifestation of dirt in contemporary
society—is ambiguous not because of its culturally anomalous role in
human relationships. It is ambiguous because it is organized as such
in a political economy of rubbish values. Again, what is waste?
... my normal response would be it's [i.e. waste] a material at
the end of a chain of use and re-use, that no longer has any
particular value but then there is the caveat of course of waste
that then goes on to produce energy from combustion you
could argue still has some value. So it might well be that other
than that it would be the final residue of the final process
which has drawn out all valuable commodities from a material
and I am talking then of the final residue—whatever that
might be (I93 p. 1. Interview with a Principal Environmental
Health Officer, 1996).
The 'final' residue; 'whatever that might be': what 'final residue'?
Is the 'final residue' the roofing of Shanti's shack, or does this latter
constitute the commodity-form of a valuable material? Is the 'final
residue' the object that is left after what Fine and Leopold name
'final consumption'? Or is the final residue a phantasmatic residue of
value that resists the efforts of industrial sectors to economize their
total operations? In fact, the 'final' residue is never reached for there
is never a final residue of value: the final residue, as it is exposed here,
is the trace of a political economy that never reaches completion: it
is the unrepresentable constituent of a political economy in a state of
perpetual emergence.
Indeed, this emergent quality of the political economy of waste is
a driving force in European integration: it is an economy of valuecomparability and a struggle over what tactics will most effectively
marketize waste. This is precisely the position of the European
Commission, whose review of the 5th Action Programme on the
Environment proposed that:,
The EU should develop instruments for achieving more effective waste management, such as taxes or charges, re-use or
recovery systems, and along with the Member States of
the EU should explore the possibilities for the creation and
functioning of markets for recycled products (Stern, 1996,
p. 42).
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Anyone, today, foolhardy enough to believe the neo-liberal
mantra that markets, left to themselves, will result in the 'efficient'
use of materials, energy and labour should examine the market for
waste. This is a market whose rational economic actors are begging,
cajoling, threatening and coercing the states of Europe to intervene
politically into the circulation of wastes precisely because the 'spontaneous' emergence of markets does not generate the values that they
want out of the rubbish heap. The instruments of this extended
economy of rubbish values involve the law courts, Government
ministries and departments, import-export regulations and taxpayers' subsidies of waste company operations. These instruments
certainly streamline and channel the values of waste commodities but
they appear to do nothing at all to stop waste arising. In fact, it
appears that their aim and purpose is quite different: not to reduce
waste arisings at all but to organize their profitability in a rubbish
political economy.
• CONCLUSION
To transform the valueless into the valuable, the repugnant into the
desirable, dirt into matter (in short, to reverse the process of putting
matter 'out of place', as Mary Douglas defines dirt) is an impressive
feat of political and technical development. It requires changes in
social and economic policy, manipulations of national and international law, the development of networks and markets through
which the values of muck and garbage can be realized, the organization of monitoring and accountancy systems and the instigation of
new technical procedures for containing and channelling the materials as they flow from the depths of excrescence to the heights of
affluence. If you add up all of the 'values' that rubbish represents you
will find that, if any drastic change in our relationships to waste were
to occur, economies would shudder if not die. If, tomorrow, the
industrialized societies of the world decided no longer to produce
and distribute the values of rubbish, the ensuing global economic
shocks would make the recession of the 1930s look like a mislaid ten
dollar bill.
So, finally, the 'Lipworth Modified Converter Levy' really does
make sense: it is an enigmatic engine indeed comparable to the
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293
Newcomen steam apparatus but it is a political economic invention,
rather than a mechanical invention, for raising value from rubbish.
• Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Les Levidow, Martin O'Connor, Joost van
Loon and Tom Horlick-Jones for comments, suggestions and advice
on this paper. Thanks to Hugh McLachlan for the Hertzberg
reference.
D NOTES
1. In what follows, I use the terms 'rubbish' and 'waste' interchangeably. This is
not because I am insensitive to the nuanced differences between their everyday
meanings but because I am primarily concerned to demonstrate waste's political,
social and economic materiality. Aside from some preliminary comments below, I
leave a more detailed analysis of rubbish discourses for an ensuing paper. The
paper is based in part on ESRC/EPSRC-funded research into coal and waste as
fuels for energy-generation [Economic and Social Research Council/Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council research project funded under the Global
Environmental Change programme, award number L320253136: 'An Environmental and Social Life Cycle Comparison of Coal and Waste as Fuels']. Extracts
from interviews and industry documents presented in the paper derive from the
data collected for that project, some of which appear in O'Brien et al. (1996). The
paper is part of a developing personal research programme into the sociology of
waste and wasting. My longer-term aim is to exhibit and, at least partially, rectify
sociology's ignorance of the discourses and social processes in which waste is
embroiled.
2. I define such societies in O'Brien (1999) as apogenic societies. 'Apo' from the
Greek aporipto—to throw out or excress—combined with genic from Greek/Latin
genesis. Such societies are apogenic to the extent that the means by which they seek
to remove and dispose of ostensibly valueless rubbish creates the appearance of a
value in commodified wastes. The phrase 'apogenesis' is an allusion to Ivan Illich's
term 'iatrogenesis'. Thanks again to Anna Tsatsaroni for helping me with this; any
error is mine.
3. I am not suggesting that such placements and channellings do not have negative
effects. I am merely observing that, in the context of the positive political economy
of waste I am unravelling, there is no warrant for the theoretical proposition that
waste is 'nothing' or comprises a negative ontology.
D
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