It’s a strange thing, waste. The more you look at what the word means, the vaguer the whole idea gets.
English and Welsh law describes it as: “any substance or object which the holder discards or intends or is required to discard.” The whole idea of waste moves around the actual things discarded – but it can be anything: gas (CO2 – difficult to discard), complex manufactures (cars, computers, ships), extra-terrestrial (space junk) or food, which we waste in enormous quantities.
We look at waste as something shameful and disgraceful, which can be ‘cured’ by the right application of technology, finance and human actions. We also focus massively on the physical aspects we can see – plastic bags, smog, litter, sewage. We’re sensory beasts and we like our home environment clean…
But we don’t see the importance of waste, the systems that rely increasingly on and profit from waste, up and down the scale.
The Chinese real estate sector is described as the most important part of the Chinese economy, but 50 million of the new apartments built will never be occupied – wasted housing. Empty homes bought and sold in “ghost neighbourhoods” across China would house 13.6 million people[1] but these will only be bought, sold and destroyed without occupants. Researcher Max Woodworth[2] describes this as ruination – Chinese cities build their economy and profit from a process dependent on ruins, and the climate effects of the resources wasted in this ruination are overwhelming.
(Source: Stephen Tafra)
Amazon has 175 ‘Fulfilment Centres’ globally. In the UK, just one of the 24 centres reported destroying up to 200,000 items a week; the producers of these articles pay Amazon to store them but the longer they’re unsold the less likely they are to be sold and they cost Amazon money. TVs, tablets, vacuum cleaners and an enormous selection of new goods are disposed of without being used.
The advocacy organization Oceana reported that Amazon generated 465 million pounds of plastic packaging waste alone in 2020, which increased to 709 million pounds of plastic in 2021. Amazon’s global through-flow profit model depends on enormous, incalculable waste on goods that will never be used. For the massive global transnational corporations (TNCs) that serve consumer economies in rich countries, massive profits are built on the ability to waste without cost.
According to the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., about $161 billion of food is wasted annually; best-by, sell-by and expiration dates cause about 20% of household food waste. The EU wastes more food than it imports – in 2021 ‘No Time To Waste’ reported that the EU imported 138 million tons and wasted 153.5 million[3]. Global supply chains controlled by food giants such as Bayer and Monsanto mean that food is grown, harvested, processed, transported, distributed and sold as cheaply as possible, at unit costs and through global production chains that guarantee extensive, very low-cost waste.
The elimination of waste as a cost through domination of the food chain allows food to be sold at a price the TNC determines, nothing to do with the cost of production, labour or transport costs.
(Source: Antonello Marangi)
When the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the OECD, one of the most important global organisations intended to stimulate economic progress and world trade) describes waste as “materials that are not prime products (that is, products produced for the market)”[4] this is untrue – waste is as likely to be a brand-new TV perfectly fit for use as spoiled food.
When Eurostat, the EU’s statistical directorate, describes waste as something the holder disposes of or is required to dispose of by law[5] it focuses on the disposal, not systems of over-production, minimal cost contracts, bargain-basement labour and government-sponsored subsidy and tax support that create that build profits driving that disposal.
Because the truth is, in a global economy where labour, production, transport, distribution and sale have been reduced to tiny costs in vast TNCs, waste becomes the basis for profitability – and as each sector of the global economy comes to be dominated by fewer, larger companies, waste growth is accelerating. We need to do what the researcher Szuzsa Gille has done and turn the idea of waste on its head. She points out that there is an “assumption that the economy is constituted by the production and exchange of intended things”[6], but from the sheer variety of waste types we can see that the global economy is actually about accelerating uses of productive and non-productive material, whatever actually happens to them. Waste is both an intended and a necessary thing.
Mass consumption draws in waste, and TNCs speed up consumption as they lower costs. Global zones of mass production are linked to zones of mass consumption and waste becomes a mechanism for accelerating consumption and material through-flow. Best-before dates create a continuing demand for new food, whether older food is usable or not; fashion accelerates demand for new clothes, TVs, tablets, cars, whether older models are working or not – and new demand ensures waste.
Empires of Waste has been set up to examine the systems that produce waste, why it’s produced, how it gets used inside the system and what happens to it once it appears as waste. Plastic, clothing, IT, white goods, food, waste gas, it all serves a purpose in accelerating consumption inside global capitalism.
The purpose of this blog is to look at these systems of waste, from space-debris to micro-plastic, and try to see these systems clearly. We do this because without understanding systems of waste then there can be no real effort made to stop it. Without understanding the culture and politics of waste and the power of the corporations that produce it, clearing up waste becomes a symbolic and futile effort. Ultimately, the climate change threatening to destroy humanity is powered by intensifying systems of waste that may overpower the delicate biochemical balances that keep us alive.
[1] Lifeng Shi, Michael Wurm, Xianjin Huang, Taiyang Zhong, Tobias Leichtle, Hannes Taubenböck, Urbanization that hides in the dark – Spotting China’s “ghost neighborhoods” from space, Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 200, 2020
[2] Max D. Woodworth (2020) Picturing Urban China in Ruin: “Ghost City” Photography and Speculative Urbanization, GeoHumanities, 6:2, 233-251
[3] https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2022/09/28/eu-wastes-more-food-than-it-imports-claims-new-report
[4] OECD, https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=2896
[5] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Glossary:Waste
[6] Gille, Z. (2010) Actor networks, modes of production, and waste regimes: reassembling the macro-social, Environment and Planning A 2010, volume 42, pages 1049-1064.