The Waste of the World

Homepage -- Programme Organisation -- Strand 2

STRAND 2: MATERIALISING THE COMMODITY CHAIN: THE SURPLUS & LOSS IN PRODUCTION

Notwithstanding the depth of attention that has been turned to analysing the commodity chain in recent years, the emphasis of economic geographers, sociologists and anthropologists has remained defined by the imperatives of capital, labour and markets, however conceived. Be conceptualisation grounded in the metaphor of the network, the flow or the chain, the effect has been to obscure that economic activity is not only about transactions, investment (or its lack), labour markets and the labour process, but that it is simultaneously a question of materiality. C19th industrial capitalism is still the most telling case that makes the point, highlighting the significance of material transformations to commodity production, but C21st manufacturing continues to make the point. Be it the automobile industry, textiles, clothing, food processing, pharmaceuticals or biotechnology, transactions entail transformations that are in some way/s always material and materialising. In emphasing this, our point is to reiterate one of engineering science’s fundamentals, but one which the social sciences have neglected for too long: that all material transformations have the potential to generate both a surplus and a loss in materials (and in the case of energy, this is not simply potential but unavoidable). As a consequence, the potential for matter to become waste is not (as so much of social science continues to assume) about a linear trajectory that sees waste as the end-point in a chain that links production to consumption and disposal, but rather is continually present and ever possible. Waste, therefore, is a fundamental part of all economic activity, present from the outset of such activity and not merely as the matter of the disposal business. 

Production processes that generate a loss of materials or a surplus are not in capital’s interests, and it is a task of engineering science to try to minimize such losses. Nonetheless, loss happens. Sometimes materials can be recovered: clays can be returned to the kiln, steels to the furnace. But equally cutting rooms generate an excess in cloth; switches and circuit boards can fail in their assembly; products can fail quality control inspection checks; and stringent health and safety regulations surrounding the storage and ‘life’ of particular foods in preparation turn food to waste at the turn of a date. Even beyond the point of sale, there is the potential for product recall and/or return to cast goods as waste: contaminated foodstuffs and defective or faulty component parts all require both retailers and manufacturers to attend to defective materialities; and increasingly the response is to discard and replace rather than to repair, although with many large and complex commodities repair remains the primary option.

Our intent in this second strand is to address what is a huge lacuna in contemporary social science, which goes to the heart of conceptualisations of economies and of all economic activities. Yet, what also needs acknowledging is that the potential for loss and the surplus to become waste is inherently contingent, framed by highly variable regulatory regimes globally and by the potential afforded by proximate markets in recyclables. As a consequence, different places in the world turn more matter to waste in the course of production than others. We examine this issue through two projects. The first focuses on the steel industry; the second, the food processing industry.

Return to Home Page