In this chapter, the focus shifts from recognizing that discard is foundational to being human, and thus unavoidable, to seeing how consumer discard, and acts of discarding, are baked in to many economies.

In this regard, I want to go beyond the largely theoretical accounts in the social sciences that see discard as an inevitable aspect of economic organization, particularly under capitalism. To be clear, I am not dismissing the power of these arguments. There is much that is of merit in them. Not least is that they establish key general principles that help explain why waste is an endemic part of capitalist economic activity. I begin the chapter, therefore, by outlining these approaches and how they see waste, before going on to show why these accounts are less helpful to understanding consumer discard.

Marxist and neo-Marxist readings of economy recognize that all primary and manufacturing processes involve transformations of the material world brought about by (human) labour, and that they also entail material transformations. But, just like the firms they analyze, mostly these accounts focus on the end point of the production process: the commodity. This is because here, labour (and the commodity that is the result of production) is seen to be the means to value creation for capitalist firms. Yet, in highlighting the overarching significance of commodities, these accounts also flag the relative insignificance to many capitalist firms of the inevitable material leftovers and residues of production processes – or the stuff that, while integral to production processes, never realizes the commodity form. They also flag that residues have mostly been seen as waste, that is, as stuff of zero value. This helps to explain why the history of how firms have dealt with residues is characterized by ‘dump and disperse’, and never mind the consequences. When stuff is seen to be of zero value, it is but a short step to that stuff being discarded, and discarded as waste. Examples of the residues of economic activity that over time have been dumped in this way include the tailings that come from mining operations and ore preparation; the husks, shells, skins, stones and pips that are stripped from agricultural crops prior to their becoming an agricultural commodity; and an array of remainders from the various chemical and industrial processes that produce basic feedstocks for core areas of manufacturing.

In this chapter, I examine what happens when discard becomes waste. My argument here is that while there is no inevitability that discard will become waste, there are strong pressures that it does. More than this, I argue that there are drivers that work to ensure that the proportion of discard that is captured as waste actually increases. Rather than this being a period characterized by waste reduction, the world is currently in a situation that demands the converse: that more waste is generated.

To make this argument is to go against an industry and regulatory narrative that presents the current situation as one in which business and regulators are increasingly aligned in their pursuit of Zero Waste. That, I maintain, is ‘greenwash’, for – leaving aside the impossibility of that goal – what the Zero Waste narrative does is to mask that the waste management business (or, as it increasingly casts itself, the waste-to-resource business) is very much a waste business. In other words, it makes (very large amounts of) money by attending to materials classified as waste. So, at a fundamental level there is every incentive for the waste business to want more waste. But just what kind of ‘more waste’ does it want?

Of critical importance here is the category of waste that the industry labels as ‘residual’ – or that which is not suitable for recovery for recycling, or reuse. Taking the materials that can be recovered for recycling, sorting and separating them, and then selling them into the commodity markets is one means by which the waste industry makes money from the waste stream. That was the focus of Chapter 5. But the other – and much bigger – source of revenue, at least according to company accounts, comes from the management of the residual waste stream. To understand why residual waste generates the most revenue for waste businesses, we need to understand the technologies that are used to attend to it, but not just as technologies, which is how the waste business presents the management of waste to outsiders. Here, emphasis is placed on the technical processes that enable the safe treatment of material declared to be waste.

This book is a synthesis of 30 years’ research. It's taken a while to write, not just because of the years involved but also because of what's at its core. Perhaps I was being a bit ‘slow’ but it took me a long time to realize that what I was working on was waste. Seemingly, I’m not alone. In 2020, I was interviewed by the editors of a handbook on waste scholarship in the social sciences, to help frame one of their introductory chapters.1 One of their questions was, ‘tell us how you got into researching waste’. Like the others they asked that same question to, my answers turned out to be very much of the type, ‘I never really set out to look at waste’. I find that fascinating and instructive. It points to the elusive qualities of certain types of waste research. It also forewarns that interesting things start to happen to understandings of waste when the starting point isn't waste.

It is, of course, important to recognize that a great deal of academic research starts from waste. There is a huge body of scientific and technical work focusing on what is – or, I would argue, appears to be – self-evidently waste – material, physical stuff that needs to be either managed as waste or manipulated to become something that is not waste. Then there is the social scientific work that starts with waste. Although nothing like the size of the scientific-technical field, this is now a substantial literature. Mostly, it has looked at people in proximity to waste and the effects of that proximity. They are typically injustices and inequalities, be they the health inequalities that come from living and/or working alongside certain wastes or the socioeconomic causes and consequences of working with it. Another strand of social scientific research starts from waste as an environmental concern and addresses the governance and governing of waste. What unites these two strands of social scientific work is their passive positioning of waste.

Although waste is often described as that which is discarded, the relationship between discard and waste is complex and incommensurate. What is discarded does not inexorably become waste. Conversely, much of what is discarded does become waste, if not directly then certainly indirectly. Yet discard is prior to waste – for something, anything, to become waste it must first be discarded. So, to understand waste, we first need to understand discard, not simply as the stuff that is discarded but, more importantly, as an act of discarding. The act of discarding is psychological, social, cultural, economic and material, and always spatial and geographical. But before we can explore these dimensions and their relationship to discard and discarding, there is a need to step back further.

I want to begin this chapter with what might seem at first sight a provocative statement, especially for a book that is about waste. This is that discarding is hard-wired into us humans, just as it is for many species. Discarding is what we do; it's part of what makes us human and what it is to be human. This needs to be recognized and acknowledged, especially when devising interventions that seek to minimize or reduce waste. But unlike other species – think of birds separating husks from seed as they eat and dropping them to the ground, or cleaning up their nests by picking out their guano and dropping it overboard – human discard is qualitatively different from that of other species. It is more than organic. So, it transcends the discards of those material fundamentals of life: food, edibility, eating and its material consequence, shit. Indeed, human discard can comprise literally anything that humans live with and around. In the academic field of discard studies, discard even encompasses humans themselves, in the form of discarded places and discarded people, or those places and people abandoned and/or left behind, sometimes as a result of political unrest, conflict and turmoil, but often as a result of transformations in economies. Indeed, the field of discard studies is so all-encompassing that its orbit includes not only this but also much of archaeology, in the form of abandoned settlements and buildings, as in ruins.

Chapters 2 and 3 have shown that discarding and consumer discard are inevitable facets of social life and the organization of contemporary capitalist economies. They have also established the insights that come from thinking about consumption not simply as the stuff that we buy, or even dispose of, but as stuff we do things with, for it is this that connects acquisition with divestment. One of the many advantages of this perspective is that it emphasizes that consumption – as this is lived by people in an everyday sense – involves multiple, synchronous but, for individuals, mostly sequential practices. If I am cooking the dinner, for example, I’m in the kitchen, working with organic stuff, turning food into a meal. Doing that also involves pots and pans, cooking implements, a hob and/or oven, maybe a recipe. I may also be listening to the radio or to a podcast, but while I’m doing this I most certainly am not driving the car, reading a book, playing my fiddle or out on my bike. The things that I need to do those practices, then, lie idle while I’m doing the cooking – and for much of the time, what we can think of as the social lives of things are like this. We actually use our possessions for quite limited amounts of time. The idleness of many consumer things has been one of the primary motivations behind efforts to grow what is termed the ‘sharing economy’, grounded in access to goods, through renting and leasing. The way I prefer to think about idleness, however, starts from the reality that consumption for the majority of people is mostly still grounded in the ownership of many things. This means that our things continually move in and out of the category that is the surplus.

The surplus as this relates to consumer goods works on a spectrum of intermittency, with different things spending more or less time in this category. At one end lie the things that we utilize on a daily basis, or multiple times a day – clothes (but not all clothes), personal hygiene products like toothbrushes and razors, food stocks, cutlery, plates and bowls, mugs, cooking implements, mobile phones and computers, often cars.

Having begun this book with my motivations for writing it, I end it by underlining its messages or implications for policymakers and for each and every one of us as consumers. At one level they can be stated simply and starkly: we cannot solve what is called the ‘global waste problem’ by seeking to eliminate or get rid of waste. Neither will we make significant inroads into the problem by focusing on the stuff of waste, or discrete categories of waste: food waste, packaging waste, e-waste and the like. This is because waste is not just material, physical stuff. It is more fundamental than that. It is a category of value and a way of ordering lives. We will never, therefore, get rid of waste; rather, it's a category that will continue to be made and remade in the course of everyday life.

It is also important to acknowledge that the category of waste also includes stuff of negative value – the kind of stuff that is harmful to living organisms. I have said less about this kind of stuff in this book, but the examples are legion: radioactive waste, asbestos, PCBs, clinical waste, for example. This is important to acknowledge because these wastes require specific technical waste management solutions to deal with them safely, and at least one of those wastes currently does not have such a solution. However much it might wish otherwise, humanity cannot do away with these types of wastes. Some, like radioactive waste and asbestos, are in the ‘forever’ category; they are a legacy of previous generations’ approach to the material world and a potent reminder that what is made never goes away but only transforms state, that is, it continues to exist in material form in some way or other. Others, notably clinical waste, are an inevitable effect of the ongoing need to care safely for life, but the same laws apply.

We have to proceed, therefore, by recognizing that there will always be waste and that certain wastes will always need to be managed appropriately.

That the world has a waste problem is incontrovertible. Equally obvious is that this problem connects to global levels of consumption. What is debatable, however, is how those connections are drawn and understood. The arguments that are made and then developed in this book are born of the contention that the ways these connections have been drawn are fundamentally flawed. More than that, because they are flawed, the interventions that they suggest are awry. While they may be motivated by the very best of intentions, many of the interventions designed to address the problem of too much waste actually have the opposite effect: they work as incentives to generate more of the stuff. Even worse, many of the solutions put in place to manage waste demand that more waste be produced. This, I would argue, is down to how we understand and think about waste, its relation to consumption, and the relation of both to economic activity.

Before I begin to open this up, let's take a look at the scale of the waste problem. Some of the numbers here are mind-boggling. They evidence that the world most definitely has a waste problem. Take construction and demolition wastes, for example. These wastes are closely related to rates of economic growth. Booming economies are characterized by a huge expansion in construction activity, not just in relation to residential uses but also industrial premises and corporate facilities. Construction and demolition wastes are sizeable contributors to the total wastes in every country. An estimated 3 billion-plus tonnes of construction and demolition wastes are generated annually globally, much of it concrete, which ends up mostly landfilled. China alone accounts for over 1 billion tonnes of these wastes. Undoubtedly, construction and demolition wastes are a huge part of the global waste problem, but, like many of the wastes that result from industry, they are niche; they only trouble those who work in the construction and demolition industries and regulators.

It is a similar story with a very different type of waste: radioactive wastes. These wastes are an unavoidable effect of nuclear power generation and are an inevitable part of a future powered by non-fossil fuel-derived energy.

Since the beginnings of capitalism, discard has been recommodified. There is nothing new about this. Scratching around in municipal dumps, searching amid the mountains of abandoned detritus for materials of value – stuff that can be salvaged, accumulated and sold – is an activity that has been found the world over for centuries. It is a tactic for ‘getting by’; an age-old indicator of livelihoods marked and defined by living in conditions of extreme poverty. Scavenging provides the defining contemporary image of the landfills and dumps of the global South: one of women and children sifting carefully, methodically through mountains of rubbish while living in its immediate proximity, surrounded by societies’ detritus. Harrowing as such images are to western eyes, it is important to recognize that scavenging and salvage activity was as much a feature of the dumps that littered the landscape of 19th-century England as it is of today's cities of the South. One only has to turn to some of the novels of Charles Dickens to find precisely the same close association of extreme poverty and rubbish-dependent livelihoods. The more unequal societies, the more significant discard is for livelihood strategies, with large numbers dependent on rubbish livelihoods.

The recommodification of discard, however, is not just about scavenging and salvage, notwithstanding that this is the focus for most of the academic literature in the social sciences. It also encompasses the trade in used goods and the transformation of discard by varying combinations of labour and capital, such that discarded things, or their constituent components and materials, are opened up to be bought and sold. In such a way, scavenging and salvage activities connect to the intricacies of the value chain in scrap. Typically, all this economic activity is now lumped together under the catch-all umbrella term of ‘recycling’, but that term includes a range of activities that, in actuality, are distinct. Not only do they operate in distinctive markets, they also have widely differing implications for debates about sustainability. At one end of the range, and without doubt the most sustainable of these activities, is reuse, where discarded used goods are resold to fulfil the same function that they were originally designed for.

Introduction

In recent years one of the most hotly debated issues in social science, particularly in human geography, has been the nature of the relationship between theory and empirical work. In human geography at least two views have prevailed. Thus, for those who see theory as an ordering framework, theory acts as a type of ‘filing system’ for classifying empirical events, whilst for those who see theory as a way of conceptualizing something, theory provides an explanation for empirical events, but is also itself interrogated in terms of its practical adequacy by these events. It is within this second strand of thinking that interest has grown in human geography in the relationship of social theory first to empirical research, and secondly to human geography more generally. Here various arguments have been put forward, but it is primarily the latter to which most attention has been directed. Thus, some individuals have provided straightforward outlines of ideas current in social theory and made suggestions as to what these entail for human geography, whilst others have argued strongly for the importance of space to social theory.

However, thus far in this debate there has been a marked reluctance on the part of human geographers to address one key issue head-on; namely, whether the work of social theorists is critical to the conceptualization of empirical research projects and the explanation of the empirical events with which they are concerned.