Global Waste Regimes and Local Waste Stewardship: Troy Compost and Cultural Innovation
Guy Schaffer
MS/Ph.D. Student, Science and Technology Studies
Abstract
The contemporary U.S. waste stream poses threats to environment, human health, and
economy, but is managed to a point of near-invisibility by private haulers and municipal
collection. However, a variety of actors and groups are working to make these problems
visible, to pose alternatives to a throwaway culture and to “fix” the waste system. In this
project, I work with one such group—an assortment of activists, researchers, organizers and
farmers called Troy Compost—that opposes itself to a variety of structural problems in the
U.S. waste system, as well as large-scale shifts toward forms of resource recovery that
privilege industry, greenwash waste problems, and move resources out of communities.
Instead, Troy Compost is working to develop a waste system that privileges the local and
radically questions the division between waste and resource. In order to examine the cultural
innovations developed in this context, I use participant observation at meetings and
interviews with activists, I examine reports and public presentations, and work with the group
to design and implement an alternative, decentralized resource recovery system for food and
yard waste. How do these actors understand the relationships between waste and ownership,
innovation, justice, environment and health? And how do these imaginaries of waste and
society draw from and challenge status-quo formulations of waste problems, recovery
solutions, and the responsibilities of individuals?
Guy Schaffer is a secondyear student in the
MS/PhD
program
in
Science and Technology
Studies, where he studies
waste and waste systems
using
participatory
methods and a pitchfork.
Science and Technology Studies is an interdisciplinary
field that studies the complexly interconnected and
entangled social, technical, cultural and political
economic systems that make up the late industrial world,
with an eye not for the intractable complicatedness of
the sociotechnical condition, but its navigability, its
perverse sense--the problem is not to show that citizens,
decision makers and scientists are lost in a sea of
unnavigable knowledge, but to provide maps that situate
us and show us ways forward.
Studying Compost, Studying Garbage
The bulk of my current work on this project is in
the form of participant observation at Troy
Compost meetings. This work has included
helping to draft a report to city council along
with the Citizen’s Working Group on
Composting, organizing meetings, making
connections with local waste managers and
composters. In this process, I’m also working to
elicit articulations of advocates’ assessments of
waste problems, and the cultural innovation
work that promises to construct new structures
for dealing with waste.
But the twin foci of this project—global waste
regimes and emergent, local waste regimes—
require multiple modes of inquiry. I am
performing discourse analysis of municipal solid
waste literatures with an interest in tracking
down changing concepts of “waste producers”
in changing policy environments, semistructured interviews with the managers of
municipal composting programs, stewarding a
neighborhood-scale compost pile that can
collect foodscraps from 20 households, and
working on a mapping project that can display
not only the movement of wastes across states
and between nations, but the concentration of
resources in this and other neighborhood-scale
composting projects.
Proposed neighborhood-scale composting
sites in Troy
Building a compost bin at the Food
Cycles lot in North Troy.
Waste is a Global Problem
The global waste system has produced a variety of interconnected
problems that play out on the levels of climate, ecosystems, social
justice and human health. There is too much trash, to be sure, but
that’s just the tip of the garbage barge: wastes are harmful in their
concentration in landfills and in their distribution across landscapes;
they influence ecological and social systems in their movement
across national borders and through oceans and groundwater; they
impact the people who move garbage around, those who live near
garbage, and those who have garbage pass through their lives.
There is too much trash, but it is generated, moved around,
processed, and disposed of in ways that are both social and
technical, and have wide-reaching and deleterious effects.
The patterns of production, circulation and destruction that define
the life of global trash—and its tendency to “bite back”—can be
viewed as a global waste regime (Gille, 2007). Trying to shift—or
even trying to think—global waste regimes is never straightforward.
It requires navigation between the scales of global waste and
everyday disposal. Linking
waste practices to waste
problems becomes a site for
knowledge production on the
part of waste advocates.
Waste is a Local Problem
Troy Compost frames trash as not just a global problem but a local
one, whose effects can be seen in local institutions and behavior
and visible in local landscapes. Beyond the problems of landfills and
leachates, or the sheer cost of waste disposal—$1.5 million per year
for Troy in tipping fees alone—the problem of trash is a cultural
problem, and the tackling it requires new kinds of value systems and
new kinds of social structures.
Throwing out trash is throwing out resources, as Troy’s compost
advocates are quick to point out. And not just in the sense that
organic waste can be composted or digested to produce methane.
It’s throwing out opportunities for new systems of resource
recovery that can bring communities together. More than that,
callous disposal nurtures a throwaway attitude. “A city that throws
away a banana peel is going to throw away people. It’s as simple
as that,” explained Abby Lublin—prominent member of Troy
Compost—at the group’s presentation to City Council. For these
advocates, the problems
of waste are at once
environmental and
social, local and global.
Abby Lublin presents a
plan for a municipal
composting system to
Troy’s City Council .
EPA scientists board the Mobro
4000, the garbage barge that spent
months at sea in 1987 looking for a
place to unload its cargo.
Cultural Innovations
The emergent waste regime that members of Troy Compost
are designing, discussing, and constructing involves a variety
of departures from disposal-as-usual. It isn’t just green bins
and foodscraps collection that these advocates are after;
Troy compost envisions a city in which composting is exciting
and “sexy,” in which communities can come together around
a neighborhood compost bin and kids can learn about
organic gardening by tending the compost heap. Troy
compost envisions a fundamental shift in the attitude of Troy
residents toward disposal, and the process of engineering
this shift may be seen as a cultural innovation.
What’s particularly exciting about this process of innovation
is that it requires a constant negotiation between different
imaginaries of waste problems, the nature of disposal (and
the disposability of nature), and the roles of business,
communities and government in managing the environment.
In the construction of a neighborhood-scale composting
system, these negotiations are being handled through
adaptive management of multiple independent sites: a
handful of compost bins are tended by one or two people;
some bins are open for anybody to add to; others are
restricted to a handful of neighbors; others pick up from
households, all in an effort to work effectively within their
communities. The people in charge of these sites then
discuss what works and what doesn’t in order to aggregate
local composting knowledge into effective, local, composting
management.
Research Significance
This project builds on work in social movement studies, particularly that on
science, technology and social movements, which seeks to characterize the role
of social movements in challenging/creating scientific knowledge and new
technologies. This is also situated within discard studies, a nascent
interdisciplinary subfield that examines waste, its separation from/incorporation
into societies, and the social, cultural, and technological structures that
undergird and emerge from these complex relationships.
Moreover, this work seeks to elucidate an emergent cultural innovation around
waste: an ethics of wasting that might be understood as waste stewardship. This
is a relationship toward waste that is characterized by care, rather than disgust,
by responsibility rather than abjection. It is a tactical jettisoning of the concept of
“away”; it recognizes that away does not exist and trash has an eminent and
occasionally vindictive materiality, and that the status quo of disposal,
destruction and marketization will only serve to worsen waste problems.
Further Reading
Brown, Phil & Edwin Mikkelsen. 1990. No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Lublin, Abby, Anasha Cummings, Lucy Greetham, Mary Alice Pasanen, and Guy Schaffer. 2013. “Municipal Composting in Troy: Report
of the Citizen’s Working Group on Composting.” Retrieved April 16, 2013 from troycompost.wikispaces.com.
Corburn, Jason. 2005. Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gille, Zsuzsa. 2007. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary.
Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York, NY: North Point Press,
2002.
"2010 Solid Waste Capacity Chart," New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, accessed January 12,
2013,http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/47984.html.
Susan Strasser. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Walsh, Edward, Rex Warland, and D. Clayton Smith. "Backyards, NIMBYs, and incinerator sitings: Implications for social movement
theory." Social problems (1993): 25-38.