A defense of waste: the case of municipal food recycling in Sweden

ABSTRACT

This article is an empirical analysis of food waste management and food recycling in Sweden. Currently, across Sweden, attempts are being made to achieve a circular economy whereby food wastes are transformed into resources. Food waste is used to produce biogas and bio fertilizer, and the enactment of food waste as a resource turns the waste into a raw material over which waste management organizations compete. Against this backdrop, the article interferes with research in ‘waste studies’ that highlight transformation of waste into something valuable, and proposes instead to ‘defend’ waste against the CE. The paper contributes to ‘waste studies’ and research on the circular economy by cautioning about the risks involved both in the establishment of a circular economy, and the treatment of waste as valuable. The empirical material used draws on a research project in which interviews were carried out with ‘waste workers’ in Swedish waste management organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Circular economy
• waste
• food waste
• valuation

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Tora Holmberg, Malin Ideland and Björn Wallsten for generously thinking along through the concerns addressed here. Thanks also to Katja de Vries for commenting on the numerous iterations of the text. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the informants who shared their stories about their work, and to the three anonymous reviewers and their generous feedback on previous versions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The research team included four other researchers – Tora Holmberg, Malin Ideland, Björn Wallsten and CF Helgesson.

2. No ethics review was deemed necessary by the ethics board. All informants have given their informed consent to participate in the study. They have also been anonymized using pseudonyms, and the three cities have been given the names X, Y and Z.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [DNR 2017-02142].

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Abrahamsson

Sebastian Abrahamsson is Docent in Sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden. His current work analyses tensions and clashes in enactments of circular economies.