An Introduction to Discard Studies

Intro

Section titled “Intro”
  • BPA Prevalence
    • thermal paper coating is BPA
    • BPA is one of the most-produced synthetic chemicals in the world 475c40
    • thermal paper often recycled, so processing plants leak BPA into the airf98316, in its industrial waste and into recycled paper itselfc85517
    • BPA on all paper currency ever tested as receipts rub on them in wallets
    • Retail workers on registers receive high BPA doses, and this is increased by use of certain hand sanitizersc2ae82
    • BPA also used in plastics both disposable and reusable
    • BPA in epoxy resins/adhesives
    • BPA in windmill blades475c40
    • All human bodies carry BPA or its metabolites in blood or urinea020bd
  • Issue?
    • BPA is an endocrine disruptor - chemical with significant effect at low doses
    • can cause cancer, ADHD, asthma, obesity and diabetesf11bce
  • demand not thought to be slowing475c40
  • crucial waste effects not immediately clear from a tossed receipt
  • many such waste system effects hidden from wider sociopolitical view
  • discard studies looks at the wider system surrounding the trash object. Root issues
  • eg examining the concept and practise of recycling rather than individual recycling habits
  • what allows BPA to be so ubiquitous if it has such harmful potential?
  • how is harm determined and by whomb689bc in space-time61e1a7
  • “This broad and systematic approach to how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued and devalued, become disposable or dominant, is at the heart of discard studies”
  • beyond but necessarily including the material waste
  • “What must be discarded for this or that system to be created and to carry on? To persist, systems must rid themselves of people, places, and things that actually or potentially threaten the continuity of those systems”
  • “Wasting is a technique of power”
  • discard studies and waste studies are not synonymous
  • written just prior to and through the Covid-19 pandemic, this book is well-suited to many of the issues that brought/brings surrounding the complicated interactions of health/care/economic/political systems
  • clear discarding of portions of the population, the more vulnerable being the already disadvantaged
  • can use techniques from discard studies to interpret value/devaluation, hierarchies and dominance
  • the wasting of which lives (necropolitics)
  • “discarded but not necessarily trash”
  • as more attention is paid to waste it becomes more crucial to contextualise waste problems as systems of discard, examine the power dynamics at play
  • stop focus on firefighting shallow symptoms / individual actions 777719
  • this isn’t a full review of the field, (see dee2b2) but presents cases focusing on waste as a technique of power
  • power as some things seeming more true, natural and good
  • how meanings are reproduced to align with particular interests
  • Michel Foucault, “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (1977, 194) which have real material effects.
  • “myriad actors, infrastructures, histories, events, cultural values, and other components of systems interlock to make some things seem more real, more truthy, more likely, and more feasible.”
  • show that myths about waste do not hold up to critical (questioning premises) and empirical (data- and case-study-based) research.
  • arguing that these truisms are created at the expense of others

Myth 1: You Know Waste (Defamiliarization)

Section titled “Myth 1: You Know Waste (Defamiliarization)”
  • aka “Waste means municipal solid waste”
  • MSW includes household waste and recyclables, some commercial waste, construction and demolition waste, medical waste. The kinds you could find in a tip.
  • The vast majority of waste by both weight, volume and toxicity is ISW, industrial solid waste.
  • Self-report by industry with slightly questionable stats still sits it at 97% of solid waste.
  • significant amount of e-waste is waste acid from industrial smelters producing copper elements2dc1e9
    • example of why part of our practise in engaging with these technologies needs to be radically reimagining and reducing the use of less-sustainable and less-abundant and power-hungry materials like copper
  • good example of misfocus on consumer
  • “Defamiliarization” (coined by Viktor Shklovsky 1917), literary devices that interrupt the reader from normalized modes of perception. Make the familiar strange, alternative conceptual routes
  • “This methodology is based on the idea that what is normal is a cultural process, not a natural given state”
  • a technique of defamiliarization: to question the premises upon which arguments are based
    • eg recycling does not necessarily conserve resources or preserve nature and produces pollution0dbf5f
  • “Of the 15–30 percent of recyclables that are retrieved from the waste stream, ‘almost half’ are buried or burned due to contamination or market fluctuations that devalue recyclables over virgin materials”6f510d
    • why not recycling might be justified, as perfect decontamination at source is impossible, industrial cleaning requirements may outweigh benefits and market has significant sway
    • not that individuals recycling is ever foolish! some circularity probably still better than none, and cultural mindset is impactful. just more work needed on the underlying systems
  • recycling socially supported over more impactful methods such as waste redesign, reduction and elimination
  • often recycling can’t support itself without landfilling and similar more profitable waste management systems1e31af
  • powerful industries create a “diversion” from alternatives, keeping civic society working at “small-scale, consumer-focused change that does not threaten the status quo”05f745
  • defamiliarization through examining the origins of a norm
  • eg from frugality to disposability in post-war US649530
    • ‘Americans actually resisted disposability, sometimes violently’
    • ‘coordinated education, advertising, and gender- and class-based coaching were required to normalize disposable culture’
  • Defamiliarization as a necessary continual process, for wider understanding, question all premises, as student or expert

Myth 2: Humans Are Inherently Wasteful (Denaturalization)

Section titled “Myth 2: Humans Are Inherently Wasteful (Denaturalization)”
  • aka just by being here we are destroying the planet, waste is in our nature
  • things aren’t inherently disposable, its about meaning we attach to objects through material properties or our personal experiences with the objects
  • disposing has to be taught and the infrastructure provided5f92ae
  • how did forms of discard become so common as to seem natural
  • how did discarding work before then
  • what histories and efforts do we take for granted
  • planned obsolescence First began to circulate in 1932 by(?) New York real estate develops Bernard London, who advocated for it as a means to solve The Great Depressionb54dd7 to “assign a lease of life” after which “these things would be legally ‘dead’ [and] destroyed”
  • the ‘essential’ quality of toilet paper is not a natural quality, cultural differences in ways of maintaining hygiene around bodily excretion
  • fear-based ads by Scott Paper company in the the 1850s convinced many it was a medical necessity756af0
  • discard practices depend on certain infrastructure such as packaging cheap enough to throw away, public containers emptied by municipal workers and indoor toilets plumbed to sewers and septic tanks that can handle paper.
  • other kinds of infrastructure are sometimes removed or replaced eg bidets or metal cutlery003ced
  • “When contextual, place-based, situated, and historically specific moments become naturalized and are assumed to be so normal that they are not thought about, denaturalization unearths how they initially became normal and thus can be changed”
  • Under what conditions does disposability make sense35a381
  • “Who is the “we” of ‘human nature,’ who does it exclude, and who does it make normal?“8f8186
  • and how do theses answers change the ‘solutions’ to waste

Myth 3

Section titled “Myth 3”
  • aka “Waste and pollution are externalities of economic systems”
  • China banned a bunch of imported solid wastes in 2017 and many nations scrambled to redirect, resorting to stockpiling, landfill and incineration whilst they searched for alternate buyers. Much was redirected within East and Southeast Asiab7d077
  • the coherence of the industrial waste systems depends on peripheral factors
  • “In short, most solid waste systems rely on an ‘away’ to keep the center clean—that ‘away’ is what creates peripheries and the center. Yet there are always people who live and work in those peripheries. They, and their regions, become disposable, also called ‘sacrifice zones‘“1848a8
  • without ‘environmental sinks’ these are no longer coherent systems
  • a main concept of discard studies is ‘externaliexternality’, a term Myth 3: Waste and Pollution Are Externalities

(Methods of Decentering)

  • continued

  • externalities are costs and benefits put on external actors not participating in the transaction

  • eg a vaccination offering some wider immunity

  • waste and pollution always treated as negative externalities

  • in economics both positive and negative externalities are treated as examples of market failure

  • a result of pricing mechanisms that do not properly capture value, as some value or cost is transferred elsewhere

  • for waste and pollution this means non-consensual cost due to not accounting for them in original calculations

  • externalities create a center that accounts for value and a periphery where externalities occur

  • the insides and outsides do not pre-exist the accounting

  • externalities treat these market failures as anomalies or outliers in a well-ordered world, but waste is not an unfortunate by-product of industrial systems but central to production under any economic system (Gille 2007; Ofrias

2017; Kao 2013)

  • waste production is the norm of industrial system, yet unaccounted for

  • siting polluting infrastructure in low-income neighbourhoods and indigenous land is a deliberate strategy (Bullard 2000; Thornbeke 2016)

  • ‘acceptable losses’ eg disabled people in the pandemic (Ashkenazi and Rapaport 2020; Chait 2020; Pesce 2020;

Shammas and Kornfield 2020)

  • ‘sacrifice zones’ — peripheries for a more powerful center (Davies 2019; Hoover

2017; Lerner 2012; Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2020)

  • “externalities and their peripheries are normal and needed because they are what let the centers hold”

  • so we should look to decenter systems that rely on externalisation

  • what kind of centers are we holding up through waste and pollution specifically

  • discard studies intrinsically brings questions of power, inequality, equity, and justice, and so it is ‘inherently normative - concerned with doing good by explaining and intervening into questions of justice’

  • (O’Brien, 1993), research is inherently normative, asks particular questions and not others, in certain ways and not others, aligns the research with some values, norms, and parties over others

  • The ‘center’ is not monolithic but ‘the sum effect of the diversity of interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it’ (Coulthard 2014, 15)

Myth 4: Purity Isn’t Cleanup, Dirt Isn’t Waste

(Depurifying)

  • ‘dirt’ as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966 p36)

  • understanding discard as ‘removing that which disgusts us’, re-establishing what we see as order, material expression of good and valuable/wrong and worthless (e.g., Hawkins 2006; Shotwell 2016; Thompson 2017)

  • Douglas’ work depends upon particular concepts of purity and universalism

  • theories that treat particular wastes similarly regardless of their material or social origins, argue that objects

move between categories of worth/worthlessness, durability and consumption, whenever waste is shifted/discarded (Thompson 2017, 123)

  • some include both recycling and genocide as discards that differ only in detail, “as manifestations of morality expressed through the material logistics of segregation, discreteness, categorization, and ‘getting rid’ of undesirables”, ‘wasting-as-social-phenomena’, but this author argues against this, emphasises the distinction between the similar concepts of sorting and purifying — the details are fundamental rather than incidental (Furniss 2017)
  • ‘undesirable’ groups are seen as killable, not just peripheral (Mbembe 2003; Bauman 2004; Butler 2011; Raffles 2017)
  • genocide and recycling are different in not only social/political/spiritual/economic means but crucially in terms of power, oppression, justice
  • despite similar material and logistical practices of categorization, sorting and discarding, Nazism isn’t ecologically sound — that’s just eco-fascism.
  • “it is crucial to differentiate between the ethics of cleanup, which are based in separation, and those of purity, which are based in annihilation”
  • The people left to die in favour of helping others are consistently the same ones who are externalized in multiple systems: Black people, people with disabilities, people who lack economic advantages, and older people (Hauen 2020; Kam 2020; Mykitiuk and Lemmens 2020; Rosenbaum 2020; Wikler 2020). Achille calls this “necropolitics,” “the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die” (Mbembe 2019; Verghese 2021).

Conclusions and Points of Departure

  • Discard studies “stays with the trouble” of difficult questions and situations not only because solutionism tends to address symptoms of systems rather than the systems themselves but also because the trouble is already here (Haraway 2016)

  • small efficiency gains in use of energy can’t mitigate the system of harm that is contemporary waste (MacBride 2012) and this often enhances demand due to cheapened end commodity (what ecological economists

call the ‘rebound effect’ or the ‘Jevons’ Paradox’(Alcott 2005; MacBride 2019; Shove 2018, 2020)).

  • efficiency does not lead to justice, simply discards labour at grander scales (Marx 2004; Alcott 2005)

  • so many actors in any incident of becoming-waste or noticing-waste that there is no one correct nexus of blame

  • “If discards are necessary for systems to hold together, then differently organized systems are needed that fundamentally alter discards rather than eliminate them.”

  • altering discarding means asking ‘how do we discard /well/’ in specific contexts, materialities, and power

relations - no one universal answer

Myth 4

Section titled “Myth 4”
  • aka “Purity can be achieved through cleanup.”

References

Section titled “References”
  • (Research and Markets 2016)
  • (Fu and Kawamura 2010; Bienkowski 2014)
  • (McMaster 2004)
  • (Hormann et al. 2014)
  • (Bushnik et al. 2010)
  • (Bergman et al. 2013)
  • (Moore 2012; Moore et al. 2018)
  • (Ackerman 1997; Alexander and Reno 2012; Altman 2021; Leonard 2010; Liboiron 2009; MacBride 2012)
  • (Murphy 2017a, 2017b; Vogel 2012)
  • (Furniss 2017; Strasser 1999)
  • Liboiron 2014a, 2014b; Rittel and Weber 1973)
  • (Reno 2016)
  • (Lepawsky 2018)
  • (MacBride 2012, 2019; Ackerman 1997; Leonard 2010; Rogers 2005)
  • (Rogers 2005, 176–179).
  • (MacBride 2012, 16)
  • (MacBride 2012; Altman 2021)
  • (Strasser 1999)
  • (Liboiron 2013; Reno 2015; Strasser 1999)
  • (London 1932; Packard 1960; Slade 2006)
  • (Blumer 2013, 99; 99% Invisible 2020)
  • (Liboiron 2014a)
  • (Hawkins 2011)
  • (Chakrabarty 2009; Hecht 2018)
  • (Gregson and Crang 2018; Reed, Hook, and Blood 2018; Pyzyk 2018)
  • (Akese 2019; Davies 2019; Hoover 2017; Reno 2016; Voyles 2015, Lerner 2012)