CityReads│Thinking Globalization through Recycling

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Thinking Globalization through Recycling

Economics of Recycling examines how we've changed waste and how waste has reshaped us. 

Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno, 2012. Economics of Recycling: The global transformation of materials, values and social relations, Zed Books.

Lawhon, M. (2013). Book review of Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations. Economic Geography, 89(4), 435–436.

Source:https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/E/bo20842339.html

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecge.12023

https://www.ft.com/content/360e2524-d71a-11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8

Recycling is the process by which previously used objects and materials

are converted into something else, rather than discarded; since the 1970s, it has been a keystone of environmental reform. What is new in the contemporary story of recycling is the sheer scale of global trades in used materials. In the first decade of the twenty first century, the largest export from the world's biggest economy (the United States) to the next-biggest economy (China), was scrap.

China used to be the dumping ground of plastic waste of the world

Familiar economic geographies and understandings of how the global economy works are upturned as the developed North becomes a source for scrap/raw materials; marginal regions add value before (re)finished goods are sold, sometimes back to where the scrap came from. This is sharply different from the old imperial geography where colonial margins were often first plundered for raw materials and then forced to buy back finished, value-added goods.

Recycling has become one of the core issues of today's global agenda. It is considered that recycling offers two benefits: economic thrift and environmental care. But claims of resource efficiency or sustainability through material recycling often omit accounts of what happens to the places and people where recycling occurs. All kinds of relevant  policies hype the win-win environmental and economic benefits, which aim at exhorting households and industries to participate. However, what Economics of Recycling: The global transformation of materials, values and social relations want to discuss is the win-win concept's essence, which means to the ambiguous zone of the diverse and unstable social material transformation and multiple values.

The book is edited by Catherine Alexander of Durham university and Joshua Reno of Binghamton university, while in fact, it's also a work of a dozen scholars from all over the world. They come from different disciplines, such as human geography, urban environment and economy, anthropology, social culture, political economy, energy and consumption, etc., but all choose “recycling” as the topic. The central theme of this book is the transformation and revaluation, in the broadest sense, of materials, objects, spaces and the people who carry out this work. One of the book's key points is that the shaping of many social relations, labor differentiation and political economy can be embodied through the global and local practices of recycling.

This volume contains some more conventional stories, such as the flows of e-waste and community waste collections and the negative association between waste and waste workers. However, even these pieces draw us into underexplored frames. Tong and Wang relate e-waste flows to the shortage of materials generated by poor state planning, expanding their explanation beyond the typical questions of justice and economics. Fredericks similarly uses waste as a way to explore municipal politics and challenge the role of development nongovernmental organizations. Other chapters push the boundaries of the notion of waste and recycling into important new arenas. Household recycling—the topic that dominates public and academic discourse—is contextualized in the introduction: if all household waste were to disappear, it would account for but a small fraction of waste. In this context, broadening our gaze becomes essential for understanding waste and its social, economic and environmental role.

Eleven ethnographic chapters related to recycling themes are included in the three sub-themes of Global waste flows, The ethics of waste labour and Traces of former lives.

Section 1, on global waste flows, may be of the greatest use for economic geographers who are interested in commodity chains or global production networks. Pieces on fabric, old ships, nuclear fuel, and e-waste  show how waste flows internationally, often in complex and unexpected patterns.

The chapters in Section 2 (The Ethics of Waste Labour) provide ethnographic studies of particular waste and recycling sites, emphasizing the strong sense of connection identified among individuals, their work, and the objects with which they work. Faulk's respondents frame work as a right; Fredericks shows the desire of informal collectors to be seen as legitimate workers. Chapter 7 on urban politics fits less neatly into this section, but it contributes to the book's broader theme by demonstrating that waste is not always marginal but can be used to bring the concerns of peripheral areas to the core. Chapter 8 in particular contrasts abstract notions of capital, labor, and economic value with the framings used by her respondents. For some, “their own vitality was inextricably linked to that of the objects in their care”, while for others, labor merely “releases the fluid potential of capital that essentially inheres in objects”.

Section 3 links waste and recycling to the former lives of particular objects. Chapter 9 is the only one that focuses explicitly on “redemptive economies” of Northern donations of unwanted materials to the global South; it examines the flow of medical aid from the United States to Madagascar. Chapter 10 reflects on the boundaries between home and public and how they play out in legal contexts through an examination of how waste is used by the police, including the well-explored discussion of using household waste as police evidence, as well as a discussion of a new area—so-called sewer forensic epidemiology. The latter technique measures the levels of narcotics in the sewers, enabling the production of population data on drug use. Finally, chapter 11 discusses pre- and post-Soviet ideas of domestic repair. While there is no clear binary between these two periods in terms of understandings of waste, changes in need and ethics over time are seen to shape how and why repair is undertaken.

From the perspective of international political economy, environmentalism and economic policies around recycling have derived unequal relationships among nations and the global recycling transactions also complicate geopolitical separations. Rich countries colonize the poor ones again with the operable space of policy. They can still carve out a vast hidden market and turn low-wage countries into destinations for toxic waste without violating national environmental conventions (Environmental justice movement opposes the dumping of toxic waste in poor countries). What's surprising is that their success is also driven by the poor countries. For example, end-of-life ships are sent for disassembly to Bangladesh where environmental and Labour regulations are more flexible. After the 1980s, neoliberalism spread around the world. Post-colonial and post-socialist countries, such as India and China, could also benefit from it. They import a lot of waste, causing serious environmental pollution in rural areas, and face moral condemnation from international NGOs and the medias, which means that they must deal with these problems while obtaining economic benefits. A common way is to keep pollution out of the public eye.

From the perspective of the relationship between labor and recycling, it also puts forward a new interpretation of center and margin. Alienated and marginalized rag-pickers in the third world do exist. Ngos and Dakar local government turns women into unpaid volunteers in the waste cleanup and recycling, which further devalues them already at the bottom, and weaken their ability to act. On the other side, the rise of recycling also creates new opportunities. The scavengers of Rio DE Janeiro or the citizens who lost their public welfare are active in empowering the value of their labor to Resist marginalization. In the author's analysis, the garbage dump, cemetery and marginal workers may serve the glamorous market and prosperous city. Power center and margins interdependent. Margins operate on multiple levels and actually have disruptive power. But the margins are also diverse, those at the very end have little chance to share the fruits.

From the perspective of the relationship between property right and obligation, recycling poses a great challenge to the traditional moral economy. Classical conception of right and obligation originating from the idea that free individual owns their body requires clear limits before property rights can be asserted in them. Pollution that can diffuse in water, air and soil does not belong to this category, therefore the obligation is left hanging. Dispersed waste and their recycled products also face the challenge of unclear property rights.

Finally return to the core of recycling: re-creation or revaluation. Materials achieve multiple faces of value at different times and on different occasions. Labor life of its practitioners often occur at the same time. But for them, it could be value added or devalued. And this is the most important proposition the book tries to present. This book shows the value of examining waste economies not just for the study of waste, but because our relationship with waste reshapes ourselves. And understanding our relationship with waste helps us to understand ourselves.

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