There are a series of assumptions that seem to have arisen behind the familiarities of discard. I tend to think of rubbish as a familiar thing, I deal with it every day after all. However in Reassembling Rubbish & Worlding Electronic Waste, Joseph Lepawsky describes how most of the greater part of trash exists beyond our view. This text aims to defamiliarise ourselves with the wider social, economical, political, cultural and material systems that shape waste and wasting. [1]
“As more attention is being focused on waste, it becomes crucial for the humanities and social sciences to contextualise the problems, materialities, and systems that are not readily apparent to the invested but casual observer. Otherwise, waste seems like a technical problem rather than a social, cultural, economic, and political problem.”
- Max Liboiron [2]
Defamiliarisation
The text frames its argument around the disproportionate amount of rubbish per weight that passes through a person at a domestic level. Lepawsky denounces that the vast majority of waste, some 97% is industrial waste making the domestic experience a limited one. [1]
He examines the global trade of electronic waste and begins the unframing of what we know of the global waste assumptions. To begin a reframing of the problem the first concept that he introduces is ‘Defamiliarisation’ where he describes civilisations' very intimate domestic relationship to waste.
“Our households usually have a few [rubbish bins] and we are probably never too far away from one [...] When we think of waste that's usually what we think of.” - Josh Lepawsky [1]
The vast majority of waste occurs in industrial processes, with mining, agriculture and manufacturing being some of the key players. When we talk about recycling in a domestic environment we are consenting to a discussion that is only able to affect a small percentage of the waste problem. We must acknowledge waste more broadly.
Material and Ontological Indeterminacy
Indeterminacy of hazard in waste also plays a big role in framing the problem. In Risk Management and Hazardous Waste, Brian Wynne suggests that a waste free universe is unattainable, not because it is unreachable representation, but because of its uncountability. Hazard and waste, he goes on to add, are:
“ fundamentally ambiguous. Their intrinsic physical meaning is not given and objectively predetermined in nature.” - Brian Wynne [3]
There is nothing in material that makes them either ‘hazardous’ or ‘waste’, it's a tangle of human ideas and the material consequences it has to humans, animals and landscape. There is nothing in nature that is defining ‘hazardousness’. What many countries called ‘electronic scrap’ in 1970 and where seen as a recoverable resource are now [2002] deemed ‘electronic scrap’ and are classified as a hazardous substance. [3] The same underlying things have two different ‘wordings’ or groups treating them in different ways at different times. [1]
To the same flavour, value much like toxicity is a fundamentally indeterminate phenomena, there is nothing in a material that is defining its value. There is a Non-Coherence when it comes to valuing discard. The proverb: ‘One person's trash is another person's treasure’ hints at this dislocation and lack of coherence. There is nothing in discard or rubbish that makes it valuable or not. If we assign the pronoun ‘It’ to discard, how would we group it into ‘It’, into a singularity with a single value or toxicity for that matter?
Against recycling
Colloquially recycling is understood to be a ‘social good’, ‘doing your part’ for the ‘environment’. Yet in Reading Ads Socially, Robert Goldman illustrates the high energy and environmental demands it creates. [6] Virgin material, pollutants and greenhouse gasses are all part of the process and often creating products that are non-recyclable. [4] The meaning of the word recycling has been neutralised or Recuperated in the words of Guy Debord [5] and functions as a Commodity-sign not a social good. It Has been decontextualised from its original assumption or in Goldmans words:
recycling has been “abstracted from [its] context and then reframed in terms of the assumptions and interpretive rules of the advertising framework” through which it is promoted. - Robert Goldman [6]
Recycling perpetuates the inherent need for the disposability of objects to even exist. It is trying to sell the idea of resolving the problem by giving a social licence to waste. Wish-Cycling is the act of disposing of a material that has little to no chance of being recovered, into a recycling bin. In many ways the whole recycling system is trying to sell that idea with little to no chance of actually tackling the waste problem and furthermore justifying the waste. We must think upstream, as much as mopping up the problem is necessary, we must close the metaphorical tap to the problem. Manufacturing of goods, mining etc. must be rethought for the problem to be tackled. I believe recycling is a social good and necessity but not the resolution to the problem.
Municipal versus Industrial Waste: Questioning the 3-97 ratio.
This often quoted ratio (that we also began with) has been the basis of a lot of readings around this topic but we must be cautious. The questionable 3-97 ratio refers to the three percent municipal hard waste recorded in the United states of America, prosecuting the remainder to industrial hard waste. Liboiron points out the age of the often quoted study, being written in 1988 it feels dated. Besides the ripe age of (1988) the research, all the data utilises the invisibilising forces of self reporting, private placement and time. [7] Furthermore these numbers include farming, mining waste that is wet and heavy which add another layer of complexity [8]. In short the numbers are not clear, there is a severe lack of quantification around industrial waste. This means it is hard to take action and/or what to take action upon.
The 97-3 ratio might be ok to use as an illustrative point of relative scale, but since modern waste is characterised by extreme tonnage, toxicity, and heterogeneity, then we have no reliable data on any of the three things that characterise most waste produced in North America.
-Max Liboiron [7]
What i'm suggesting is that waste is an infrastructure rather than a behaviour. Home recycling and general disposing in a domestic context is a small moment in a large system. Discarding practices are about keeping certain players in power, who is benefitting? What are “the uneven relations and infrastructures that shape what forms of life are supported to persist, thrive and alter, and what forms of life are destroyed, injured and constrained” ? [7]
Works Cited:
Lepawsky Josh, Reassembling Rubbish & Worlding Electronic Waste. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.[1]
Liboiron, Max. “The what and the why of Discard Studies.” Discard Studies (01/09/2018) https://discardstudies.com/2018/09/01/the-what-and-the-why-of-discard-studies/. [2]
Wynne, Brian. Risk Management and Hazardous Waste. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1987. [3]
Liboiron, Max. “Recycling Has a Crisis of Meaning.” Discard Studies (20/09/2012) https://discardstudies.com/2012/09/20/recycling-as-a-crisis-of-meaning/. [4]
Debord, Guy. “Society of the Spectacle”. London, England: Rebel Press, London. 1992. [5]
Goldman, Robert. Reading Ads Socially. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. [6]
Liboiron, Max. “Municipal versus Industrial Waste: Questioning the 3-97ratio.” Discard Studies (02/03/2016) https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/02/municipal-versus-industrial-waste-a-3-97-ratio-or-something-else-entirely/. [7]
Kelly, E. N., Schindler, D. W., Hodson, P. V., Short, J. W., Radmanovich, R., & Nielsen, C. C. (2010). Oil sands development contributes elements toxic at low concentrations to the Athabasca River and its tributaries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(37), 16178-16183. [8]
Buried, Bundled, and Behind Closed Doors (2010, Dir. Ben Mendelsohn) https://vimeo.com/30642376
Leonard, Annie. The story of stuff: How our obsession with stuff is trashing the planet, our communities, and our health-and a vision for change. London: Constable and Robinson, 2010.
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