PROJECT 5: European technologies of waste management: a material culture approach
‘Following the thing’ has become a standard methodology within social science research on the commodity, particularly in human geography and anthropology; it is the normative way of tackling the problem of commodity fetishism. Here we extend this methodology for the first time into a consideration of destruction, examining how – once constituted as excess – things return to their material state; how matter is then moved socially and culturally through the primary technologies of waste management (landfill, incineration and the more experimental anaerobic digestion); at the rituals that constitute these passages and the cultural meanings they invoke.
Ethnographic work in the UK will focus on the sites associated with the collection and sorting of excess materials (household waste recycling centres, local authority refuse collection sites, and the waste collection and storage sites connected with the firms investigated in Project 3 and Project 4) and on the sites of their symbolic death (landfill sites, incinerators and anaerobic digestion facilities).
In contrast to the UK where > 80% of excess goes to landfill, in Denmark > 50% is incinerated. The purpose of the research in Denmark is to answer three questions:
* Why has incineration been the technological fix to Denmark’s economic
excess?
* How is it that this technology has not been the source of intense opposition
and NIMBY politics, as it has in the UK?
* What lessons can be drawn from this success story for the UK government?
© The Waste of the World 2009
