Working on waste: beyond ahistorical chronicles and false dichotomies in circular economy narratives

ABSTRACT

In this article we look at waste and working on waste. In particular, we set out a case against analyses that see working on waste as somehow outside of capitalism, an informal system quite separate from, and other to, formal work. To do so, we first outline the nature of contemporary waste production. We then put forward three caveats to the emerging orthodoxy on waste and waste work, doing so through presenting a brief history of waste work in Victorian Britain, through an exploration of how tracing the movement of value (in the Marxian sense of congealed labour) from waste to new commodities (and, often, back again) problematises views that see waste work as detached from capitalist labour processes, and through a questioning of what waste work means for the oft-made ‘formal/informal’ division of work. Specifically, we argue that working on waste is complex and even at its most basic it remains part of a continuum of working practices, regulations, and relations, rather than being hermetically sealed off from ‘formal’ employment.

KEYWORDS:

• Global production networks
• global destruction networks
• workers
• waste

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Based upon an estimated 2013 total weight of humanity of roughly 290 million tonnes (Rettner 2013).

2. In one infamous memo, Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist at the World Bank, once argued that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage countries [is] impeccable’ and that ‘under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted’ (quoted in Gilroy 2004, 11).

3. As far as we are aware, the term ‘Circular Economy’ first appeared in print in Pearce and Turner (1990), although the idea of a circular economy, in form if not name, had been touched upon in US economist Kenneth Boulding’s (1966) article ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’, whilst a 1976 report to the European Commission – later published as the book Jobs for Tomorrow: The Potential for Substituting Manpower for Energy – envisioned an economy of closed loops and considered the economic and environmental implications of this (see Stahel and Reday 1981). In 1993 British ecological economist and professor of sustainable development Tim Jackson edited the book Clean Production Strategies, whose publisher suggests that it is ‘a cross-disciplinary book that presents a comprehensive examination of a new ethic emphasizing the appropriate design of products, processes, and economic activities to reduce the generation of waste into the environment’ (www.routledge.com/Clean-Production-Strategies-Developing-Preventive-Environmental-Management/Jackson/p/book/9780873718844, emphasis added).

4. There are parallels here with Marx’s 1967/1867 critique in Volume 1 of Capital of Nassau William Senior’s efforts to distinguish in what part of the working day workers labour to cover their wages and in what part they labour to produce profit for their employer, with Senior suggesting that a sharp line could be drawn between these two portions – his famous ‘Last hour’, a concept that Marx ridiculed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Al Rainnie

Al Rainnie is Research Professor at UniSA, currently working on an ARC-funded project on Troubled Regions (with Sally Weller). Al has researched in the area of labour process analysis, spatiality, work and employment. Al’s most recent work has been, firstly, on spatiality, Global Production Networks, Global Destruction Networks, waste and labour; and secondly on regions and regional development in Australia.

Andrew Herod

Andrew Herod is a Distinguished Research Professor. He writes frequently on matters of labour and globalization. He is presently editing a handbook on labour geography for Edward Elgar and writing, along with Al Rainnie, Susan McGrath-Champ, and Graham Pickren, a book that explores the nature of work and waste in the so-called Circular Economy, also for Edward Elgar.