‘The biggest challenge is that we have to tell people how to sort.’ Waste management and the processes of negotiation of environmental citizenship in Slovenia

ABSTRACT

This article departs from the concept of environmental citizenship. Focus is on the experiences of representatives for Slovenian municipal waste management companies and business sector service companies engaged in the collection and recycling of electronic waste, and their attempts to increase the amount of separately collected municipal waste. They do so by engaging the Slovenian citizens to undertake separate sorting. Theoretically, the focus is on the processes of negotiating citizen engagement and, more specifically, attempts to incentivise the separate sorting of municipal waste which, it is argued, also helps foster the image of a particular kind of citizen. This article understands the informants’ experiences as being intimately linked to, and constitutive of, contemporary waste management discourses where attention is increasingly paid to the activities and behaviours of individual citizens. Noteworthy, while the concept of environmental citizenship can be said to allow citizens to practise sustainability (a concept that is otherwise seemingly quite abstract), the waste management policies of today seem to be increasingly relying on this active citizenship. It is at the intersection of these phenomenon that the negotiation practices of Slovenian waste management authorities happen.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen engagement
• Slovenia
• waste
• waste management
• separate sorting

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, Seal of Excellence [grant number N5-0073]. My sincere gratitude to the informants who were willing to share their experiences of waste management in Slovenia as well as to the anonymous reviewers who helped to significantly improve this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Jennie Olofsson (PhD) works as a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her current research interest concerns management of electronic waste as well as the regulatory frameworks that steer these practices. Jennie holds a PhD in Gender and Technology (Luleå University of Technology, Sweden). Her dual affiliation with gender studies and waste studies is complemented with longstanding experiences of ethnographic fieldworks, for example within car mechanics, the welding industry, the fire service and the waste recycling industry.

Notes

1 E-waste management in Slovenia adheres to the Waste Electrical and Electronic (WEEE) directive, which was incepted among EU members in 2002. The Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) forms a central part of the WEEE directive and ensures that the producers of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) cover the costs of managing the material residues of these products.

2 In Slovenia, graveside candles are subjected to the EPR, unlike in other EU members (European Commission, 2014).

3 For a critical reading of the assumed wastefulness of state socialism, and in turn the assumed cleanliness, efficiency, and thriftiness of Western capitalism, see the work of Gille (2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, Seal of Excellence [grant number N5-0073].