Overview

The Waste of the World is a five year research programme funded under ESRC’s Large Grant Scheme. It brings together researchers in geography, anthropology and materials science from the University of Sheffield, Durham University, University College London and Goldsmiths College London, and connects the UK with South Asia (particularly India and Bangladesh), as well as the US, Europe and Kazakhstan. The over-arching aims of the programme are:

To rethink how waste is thought about in the social sciences
To provide a global analysis of waste, and
To examine how rethinking waste impinges on some of the core concerns of contemporary social science, notably: economies, researching globalisation, hazards and risk, and materiality.

Social science understandings of waste position waste as the end-point, or leftovers, of production and consumption, and therefore see waste as a question of disposal. In this programme we see waste as an ever-present potential; as an intrinsic part of all economic activity. Thinking about waste in this way leads to thinking about economies in terms of materials transformations and flows of materials. Rather than focus on the production (and consumption) of pre-determined commodities, our emphasis is on the materialisation of commodities, that is, the processes of their coming together and dissolution in materials.

Social science understandings of waste are also typically national-specific as well as ‘end-of-pipe’. In a world in which the movement of waste as well as global markets in wastes are becoming increasingly apparent, not to mention controversial, this will no longer suffice. The programme focuses on newly emerging global economies in hazardous and non-hazardous wastes, examining both flows and trades in such wastes and their emerging spatial divisions of labour. The programme also addresses contrasting technologies of waste management in different parts of the world, examining the cultural distinctions between practices of burial and burning as forms of materials transformation.