“Garbage is Gold”: Waste-based Commodity Frontiers, Modes of Valorization and Ecological Distribution Conflicts

ABSTRACT

Waste is increasingly viewed as a resource rather than an externality. However, new waste management regimes must be introduced in order for value to be created, enhanced and captured. We refer to these regimes as modes of valorization, and they establish the conditions that allow waste to become a commodity frontier. The production of waste-based commodity frontiers is often accompanied by dispossession, and this explains why conflicts surrounding the ownership over and control of waste have proliferated worldwide. This article introduces a special issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism that includes papers focused on the establishment of new modes of valorization and concomitant impacts in India, South Africa, Turkey and the U.S.

KEYWORDS:

• World ecology
• environmental justice
• discard studies
• political ecology
• social metabolism
• environmental conflicts

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the contributors to this special issue, the editors at CNS Marco Armiero and saed, the reviewers and the participants of the sessions held at the Conference of the American Association of Geographers in 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas) is a unique global inventory of cases of socio-environmental conflicts built through a collaborative process between academics and activist groups which includes both qualitative and quantitative data on thousands of conflictive projects as well as on the social response (Temper et al. 2018). See https://ejatlas.org/.

2 The term refers to conflicts over access to natural resources and services and the burdens of pollution or other environmental impacts that arise because of unequal property rights and inequalities of power and income among humans (both international and internal to each state). For an elaboration of the concept see Martínez-Alier 2002 and Armiero 2008.

Additional information

Funding

Federico Demaria acknowledges the support of the European Research Council for the EnvJustice project (GA 695446) and the Spanish Government for the project COSMOS (CSO2017-88212-R).