Boundary Crossings
Geography and the matter of waste mobilities
It is the case that ‘all societies both throw things away and abandon them’ (Gregson et
al. 2007a, 697). Such divestment does not mean that those things, commonly called
waste, cease to exist rather it often marks the beginning of relocation and
rematerialisation processes which are conducted at varying scales, from the molecular
to the international over different time periods, and with varying amounts of human
intervention and environmental impact. These things called waste are moved, with
different degrees of design and legality, from place to place (and sometimes back
again) and their constituent parts deconstructed, reconstructed and transformed,
intentionally or otherwise, altering physical states and levels of toxicity; essentially
waste has multiple mobilities. At one level these material functionalities of waste’s
evolving trajectories are well known, if not well managed, resulting in manifold conflicts
in communities particularly over the siting of waste management facilities such as
landfills and incinerators. However much of this work has tended to treat waste as
rather fixed in its state and location. I argue in this short essay that there is a growing
body of research that is directly, and more helpfully, engaging with elements of waste’s
mobilities and much of this is intensely geographical in its configuration. Importantly, in
this context, the emergent research is replete with boundary crossing activity not least
in literal terms of identifying the dynamic spatial [re]distribution of wastes (in toto or by
its constituent parts) across political and administrative constituencies. It also demands
broader interdisciplinary interaction between those engaging with waste in the fields of
science, governance and engineering. In addition, however, I suggest that this
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research could be enriched by extending the realm of analysis beyond mobilities of
waste matter past and present to consider how proposed development trajectories,
such as governmental calls to move towards a green, smart, low carbon economy
(Forfás 2009; Department of Energy and Climate Change 2010), will contribute to the
dynamics of waste in the future.
Although it is not the purpose of this essay to review the extensive discussion about
the meanings and definitions of waste, this is done comprehensively elsewhere (see
for example Girling 2005 and Scanlan 2006), it is important to acknowledge that the
term can be used as a verb, noun and adjective to cover practices and states of being
in addition to physical ‘things’. This semantic flexibility is important as it reflects the
intersections between cultural connotations of wasting and of being wasted as well as
the substances that constitute waste which are the focus of this essay (see Pye 2010
for further discussions of these intersections). Even within the abridged terrain of
material waste there are manifold, and often contradictory, interpretations of what that
waste is and how it should be conceptualised and managed, which are variable across
time, space and within communities. Some, for example advocates of the zero waste
movement, call for the abandonment of the term waste to be replaced by resource
(Palmer 2005). Others, albeit in a more critical way, also reject the conceptualisation of
waste as an end point arguing for its ‘ever-present potential; as an intrinsic part of all
economic activity’ (The Waste of the World 2009), linked recursively to practices of
commodification, consumption and divestment (Gregson et al. 2007b), obsolescence
and materiality (Hetherington 2010), policy and governance (Davies 2008). It is from
this latter perspective that attention to the mobility of waste comes to the fore, for while
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the relocation and rematerialisation of material waste is not a new endeavour, the
volume, complexity and global reach of such processes is unprecedented.
Waste mobilities research
Research examining what I term waste mobilities goes far beyond the issue of how
waste is transported and considers processes of waste relocation and rematerialisation
and its impact ‘across a whole range of sociocultural, economic and political milieu’
(Shaw and Hesse 2010, 306). For brevity and clarity the research is collated below into
four interrelated sub-themes: mapping flows; following things; illegal mobilities and
immobilities.
1. Mapping flows - This broad church of research is fundamentally concerned
with fusing the physical and political trajectories of end-of-life matter;
highlighting the interrelationship between trade, regulation and environment
justice. The Basel Action Network and Greenpeace have, for example,
combined visual documentation with toxicological and forensic data analysis
(such as the excavation of data from dumped hard drives), to highlight flows of
waste across global commons and international borders. This work has raised
ethical, legal and moral issues related to the moving and dumping of waste
(particularly in terms of whether that e-waste such as computers can be
accurately termed recyclable), but it presents a somewhat one-dimensional
account of the flows of global waste. The focus is primarily on the impacts of ewaste trade from the global North to the global South on living (predominantly
environmental) and working (economic and social) conditions of those who
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receive that waste. This is not to deny the profound injustices that emanate from
such flows of ‘recyclables’, but subsequent research has shown that the flows
are embedded within more complicated patterns of inter- and intra-regional
trade and politics (Khoo and Rau 2009; Lepawsky and McNabb 2010). Work
related to mapping flows of waste has already begun to tackle the traditional
boundaries between trade economics and landscapes of international
environmental injustice, but there is certainly further space for more nuanced
work collecting and interrogating international waste trade data in conjunction
with critical multilevel governance analysis.
2. Following things - More specific than the mapping of flows described above
the collaborative work of the Waste of the World projecti focuses on bringing
end-of-life objects, for example derelict ships, into the academic practice of
commodity chain analysis by examining the internal, often highly complex,
constituencies of particular waste materials (see Gregson et al. 2010a; 2010b).
It extends the work of geographical chemists such as Shu et al. (2004) and
critical nanotechnology enquiries ( Anderson et al. 2007) by acknowledging that
the mutating materialities of waste do not restrict themselves to a particular
scale of interaction, but intersect with wider environments, often colliding
negatively with valued materials, resources and people. Confirming the findings
of Khoo and Rau (2009) research within the Waste of the World project also
illustrates the undeniable politics surrounding the movement of waste such that
‘the places in the world where the arts of transience are most vividly articulated
are precisely those places where materials and ‘wastes’ are lightly regulated or
unregulated and those where end-of-life goods inexorably find their way to as a
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result’ (Gregson et al. 2010a, 8). Although equally concerned with the
economics and politics of moving waste it is the attention to its organic and
inorganic vitality (its atomic mobility perhaps) through processes of
deconstruction and reconstruction that marks this body of work’s most
significant contribution to the arena of waste mobilities.
3. Illegal mobilities - Spaces opened up by regulatory inadequacies facilitate not
just trade in licit waste across nation state boundaries but also the illicit
movement of materials. However examining the geographies of illegal activities
is always fraught with problems of data collection, verification and even
personal safety (Fitzgerald and Hamilton 1996; Gavin et al. 2010). Nonetheless
existing studies already indicate that waste (and more particularly the rewards
that can be made from its illegal movement and disposal) has become a target
for criminal activity. This has been documented by journalists, legal
commissions and less frequently by academics as occurring within nation states
from Italy to the United States (The State of New Jersey Commission of
Investigation 2004; Mengozzi 2010) as well as across international borders
(Edwards 2010; Kelly 2010). In the Republic of Ireland during the 2000s local
authority waste data regularly recorded the ‘disappearance’ of significant
volumes of waste (Davies and O’Callaghan-Platt 2008), driven by a large cost
differential between landfill charges in the Republic and in Northern Ireland
(€200 compared to €50 in 2004). More than a quarter of a million tonnes of
illegally dumped Irish household and commercial waste will need to be
repatriated over the forthcoming years costing more than €36 million to the Irish
taxpayer (Kelly 2010). Illegal waste mobility is not restricted to household and
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commercial waste. The United States Geological Survey have identified
unrecorded and unmonitored large scale military dumping of low level
radioactive and chemical weapons waste off the United States coastline and in
international waters (Karl 2001; New Scientist 2008). However, and
notwithstanding the cases detailed above, in the realm of waste it is clear that
‘collective scholarly understanding of the nature, pattern, scale, forms and
meanings of illicit transnational activities remains far from adequate’ (van
Schendel and Abraham 2005, 32).
4. The impacts of waste immobilities – While it is argued throughout this essay
that the mobility of waste is a defining characteristic of the things we throw away
it is also clear that waste also resides, for differing periods of time, in particular
places in particular states. Processes of decomposition and degradation occur
over very different time periods depending on the material qualities of the waste
in question and the environments in which it is situated. Indeed the long decaytime of many modern products as diverse as children’s nappies and nuclear
waste are common features of waste management debates (Garcier 2009;
Sharp et al. 2010). It is this enduring presence of waste that has permitted, for
example, the study of garbology to unpick the stories of past consumption and
wasting practices (Weberman 1980; Rathje and Murphy 2001). The problematic
presence of waste has also been the subject of work examining citizen activism
within cities, particularly in terms of it being used as a political tool by preventing
municipal waste collections (Davies 2007; Moore 2009), but it is not just activists
who use waste as a political tool. The work of Sundberg and Kaserman (2007)
and Sundberg (2008), for example, illustrates how government and media both
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used materials abandoned by those seeking to cross the Mexico-United States
border to heighten anxiety about the threats to nature and nationhood that such
border crossing activity might bring. In these readings the literal manifestation of
waste through the relics of livelihood struggles to illicitly cross borders (water
bottles, clothes, food packaging and human defecation) are simplistically allied
to a contamination of pristine nature. Here it is the prehistory of the waste that is
primarily of interest; where it has come from, who brought it and what that says
about the carrier of that waste.
This essay does not claim that the scholarship gathered here is a coherent body of
work, although there are certainly conceptual linkages throughout the themes with
regard to geopolitical boundaries and identities. Rather it seeks to highlight the
commonly identified dynamism of waste and its shifting geographies. Essentially that
waste moves (and is moved) through time and space between places and is changed
by (but also changes) the wider environments it interfaces with in unpredictable ways.
Related to the identification of this rather physical transience is a recurring call within
the work for greater connectivity between the often disparate spaces of technology,
policy and culture to attend to these waste mobilities. One area that receives limited
attention in the literature to date however is how future waste mobilities might evolve.
Future waste mobilities
Creating a geographical imagining of future waste mobilities might take a variety of
forms from a simple extrapolation of current patterns, in terms of quality and quantity of
current waste flows, to a more visionary configuration of potential practices and
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associated waste materials. The former is more easily attainable although the
limitations of data collection in the arena of licit waste activities and mobilities, not to
mention the difficulty of charting illicit practices, have already been documented.
Despite these challenges current predictions suggest global waste production will
double over the next 20 years with growing contributions from emerging nations,
increased population and more complex waste streams (Williams 2009). A United
Nations report which extrapolates current trends suggests e-waste in South Africa and
China increasing anywhere between 200 and 400 per cent with India’s e-waste
growing by 500 per cent (UNEP 2009b).
What the impact of decarbonisation strategies, for example, will be on waste streams
and flows is barely examined by these forecasting projections. Innovations (such as
information communication technologies, nanotechnologies and transgenics), and the
materials which both help to construct and of which they are constructed, may be
presented as efficient in terms of supporting low carbon development but what
happens when the materials are worn out or damaged and need to be replaced?
Where will these end-of-life smart materials go, in what ways will their composition
decompose over time and what regulatory and technical frameworks will be required to
contain them? Essentially what will be the new spatial signatures of these novel endof-life materials? Large scale off-shore windfarms, for example, will require
manufacture and resources for their own construction and these facilities, once
battered by wind and rain and corroded by marine environments, will need to be
decommissioned, deconstructed and disposed ofii. Even eco-efficient technologies will
be productive of wastes in new ways.
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There are few documents in the public realm that talk about the end-of-life strategies
for these new developments and academic attention to life-cycle analysis of
renewables is embryonic (Weinzettel et al. 2009; Rule et al. 2009; Berger et al. 2010)
and dissociated from discussions about governance and regulation. It is left to civil
society organisations to campaign for a future-proofed policy approach that
incorporates attention to the back end of the new green economy. The Silicon Valley
Toxics Coalition (SVTC), for example, produced a white paper in which it argued for an
elimination of toxic materials in solar technologies and an extended producer
responsibility framework (SVTC 2009).
As with other emerging technologies while photovoltaic waste volumes are small at
present the European consortium of photovoltaic industries, PV Cycle, estimates that
volumes will reach 132,750 tonnes by 2030 (PV Cycle 2007). SVTC are also calling for
greater cradle-to-grave regulation of nanotechnologies (SVTC 2008) to avoid problems
similar to those experienced by people living around the electronics industry in
California in the 1980s that led to groundwater pollution. They identify data, technology
and safety gaps in the regulatory framework that mean a limited understanding of
nanotechnology materials and their potential health impacts and environmental toxicity
within a weakly monitored system. The role for a more sensitive scalar analysis is clear
in their report which argues that ‘[n]anotoxicology research is critical because, just as
the unique properties of nanomaterials are difficult to predict from the properties of
their bulk form, the health hazards of nanoscale materials can be equally
unpredictable’ (SVTC 2008, 7). The very size of nanomaterials means they have
9
unprecedented mobility for a manufactured material and potential hazards related to
inhalation, increased reactivity and unintended bioavailability have been mooted.
Equally nanomaterials may have different impacts on environments and health than
their bulk counterparts. Nanosilver, for instance, while not toxic in its common form has
been linked by researchers and environmental groups to cellular changes in humans
and wider environmental disruption (Maynard et al. 2006; Nel et al. 2006; Senjen
2007). Ultimately it is still very much the case that human agents are unable to fully or
precisely comprehend the impact of their manipulations on the wider environment
(Bennett 2004, 157). As noted by Gregson et al. (2010a, 1067) following the ‘second
law of thermodynamics ... material, matter, cannot be got rid of or destroyed, but rather
can only transform, mutate, morph’. Therefore when envisioning a future waste
landscape it is reasonable to expect that materials and their mobilities will retain the
capacity to surprise humans.
Conclusion: making space for waste
Previous essays in this boundary crossing space have already made a strong case for
mobility to have a space at the high table of geographical enquiry (Shaw and Hesse
2010) and the issues presented here serve to reinforce that calling with specific
attention to waste mobilities past, present and future. Essentially it is necessary to
extend, intellectually and temporally, conversations between the technical and the
social in terms of current waste practices whilst also recognising the unsettling
capacity of waste to return (Crang 2010). Even apparently rational strategies for a
greener economy will be disrupted if they fail to address the materialities of waste
embodied in that restructured economy. For, as articulated by Gay Hawkins in relation
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to ‘things’ in general, wastes also have ‘the capacity to assert themselves...[and] can
capture humans as much as humans like to think they have the world of things [here
read waste] under control’ (2009, 188). To attend to the things that are called trash,
garbage or waste, their materialities, where they go and how they evolve is not a waste
of space but surely at the very heart of geographical enquiry.
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i
See http://www.thewasteoftheworld.org/html/overview.html. The project, funded under ESRC’s Large
Grant Scheme, involves researchers in geography, anthropology and materials science from the
University of Sheffield, Durham University, University College London and Goldsmiths College London,
and connects the UK with South Asia (particularly India and Bangladesh), as well as the US, Europe and
Kazakhstan.
ii
According to the Danish Wind Industry Association modern wind turbines are designed to work for
some 120 000 hours of operation throughout their design lifetime of 20 years although useful lifetimes
will depend on the quality of the turbine and the local conditions.
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