The US is often placed within a liberal-utilitarian model and the EU is often positioned within a social model. In corporate law theory, this distinction is presented as contractarianism versus communitarianism. The latter has traditionally represented the EU’s approach to corporate regulation, while the former represents the US approach. Rather than adhere to such neat divisions and other binary choices such as regulatory models versus voluntarist models such as the corporate social responsibility model, this chapter argues that the true resolution of difficulties associated with capitalism lies in the development of a new theoretical framework driven by an ethical challenge to those acting behind the corporate veil or under its shadow. This chapter exhorts that if we move on from binary divisions and present a meaningful ethical challenge to corporate actors such as shareholders and management, we can ensure better outcomes.

In this chapter we provide an overview of the development of green criminology and focus specifically on a political economic perspective within green criminology that builds on the treadmill of production tradition in environmental sociology and ecological Marxism. This perspective calls for a scientifically grounded harms-based approach that studies green crimes, which are defined as unnecessary ecological disorganization. The treadmill of production framework organizes environmental destruction (or, ecological disorganization) into ecological withdrawals (i.e. the removal of resources from nature) and ecological additions (i.e. pollution). We review green criminological work in these two areas. We next provide an overview of research that links the traditional criminological perspective, social disorganization, to green crimes. We then turn to a discussion of how the treadmill of production impacts nonhuman species. We finish our review of political economic green criminology with some thoughts on the role of non-state actors in the treadmill of production, environmental enforcement and what we call the treadmill of law.

The standing of the Scottish Reformation has undergone considerable change in the course of the past generation. As late as its quatercentenary in 1960, the professor of Church History in the University of Glasgow was still able to claim with confidence that the Reformation had produced a church which was a ‘national symbol’ and that ‘one may doubt whether there could be a Scotland without it’. In the Scottish diaspora, in places such as small-town Canada or New Zealand, where John Knox and Andrew Melville churches, replicating faithfully stages of the schisms and reunions within the nineteenth-century church, this is probably still the prevailing view. One of the most influential works ever to come out of that diaspora claimed that:

Within Scotland itself, however, such moral certainties now seem outdated. An article by a conservative columnist in The Scotsman, during the meeting of the General Assembly in May 1999, argued that the ‘Church of Scotland may still be the established national church but it is no longer the church of the nation.’ The fact that the General Assembly then met in another place, supplanted by the new Scottish parliament, which is what now represents the Scottish nation, exaggerated still further the dislocation of the two of the key elements of Scottish identity - a Protestant church for a Protestant people. The same piece pointed to a severe drop in attendance over the past generation: the Church of Scotland had been losing members ‘almost as fast as the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party has lost voters’. Although it had 680,000 communicant members, ‘only 17 per cent of Scotland's adult population are now members of the Kirk’.

Introduction

Food waste is ubiquitous. With a world population of over 6 million people that needs to be fed, waste from the production, transport and consumption of food is inevitable. However, the current scale of food waste is so large that it appears unsustainable. According to one of the more conservative estimates, almost 30 per cent of food is wasted throughout the supply chain (REFRESH, 2017). Others have suggested that up to half of all food grown is wasted (Lundqvist et al, 2008; Parfitt et al, 2010). This is an incredible amount of waste, at least some of which could go to the millions of people in the world who go hungry every day. To put the level of food loss into perspective, roughly 100 million tons of food is wasted annually in the European Union (EU), which is enough food to feed the hungry people throughout the world – twice (European Commission, 2017).

There are differing opinions regarding what qualifies as food waste, and therefore there are numerous definitions of food waste. For example, in an overview of food waste definitions, Parfitt and colleagues (2010, p 3065) focus on a definition provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 1981), which suggests that food waste includes, ‘[w]holesome edible material intended for human consumption, arising at any point in the food supply chain that is instead discarded, lost, degraded or consumed by pests.’ This definition has been broadened by Stuart (2009) who argues that in addition to what the FAO classifies as food waste, it should also include, ‘edible material that is intentionally fed to animals or is a by-product of food processing diverted away from the human food’ (Parfitt et al, 2010, p 3065). This chapter adopts this more inclusive definition of food waste.

All conceptualisations of food waste stress that it occurs throughout the food supply chain. Interestingly, however, food waste occurs more often during the earlier stages of the supply chain in low-income countries. The most common reasons for this include: poor storage facilities that cause spoilage and give rodents, other pests and fungus access to the food; poor infrastructure and transportation; lack of refrigeration; unsanitary market facilities; and poor packaging (Gustavsson, 2011).