STRAND 1: WASTE ECONOMIES, VALUE & SPATIAL DIVISIONS OF LABOUR
In themselves waste economies are nothing new. The garbage pickers of De Lillo’s America, of the Mexican shanty towns and of the Brazilian favellas are the contemporary counterparts of the C19th London ‘pickers’ and ‘totters’ whose livelihoods were founded on the capital’s rubbish. The salvage and scrap industries have long been constituents of periods of war; and the fabrication of things from used or partially used things was, and in some places still is, intrinsic to the domestic economy. What is new is the size, reach and complexity of contemporary waste economies. No longer national in scope or scale, these are trans-national. Whilst international law struggles to invoke the proximity principle, ‘wastes’ and ‘recyclables’ circle the world and cross borders in what is emerging as an increasingly global marketplace, as globalising capital increasingly sees countries not simply as cheap and pollutable production sites and as major growing markets, but also as a global place market in which sites compete for the privilege of cleansing up the wastes of the world.
Theoretically this should not surprise us. It is no less than an attempt on the part of capital to recover value from the leftovers of production and consumption; to avert the loss of value. What these economies are also about, however, is a set of material transformations that are the counterpart to the manufacturing process; disassembly and breaking, as opposed to assembly and fabricating. The fabrications of the global economy range from at one end the relatively straightforward – food and items of clothing for instance – to complex commodities. In the world of consumer goods, cars, IT and digital equipment, and mobile phones, are just some of the most obvious examples of complex commodities. But this category would also include the workhorses of globalization – shipping, trucks and aeroplanes – and the technologies that provide the energy basis for contemporary life, for example nuclear and coal-fired power stations. To disassemble such goods foregrounds materialities: what complex commodities are made of, what they hold, what they might release in their dis-aggregation all entwine in a dichotomy that divides the hazardous (and therefore inherently ‘risky’) from the non-hazardous, potentially bothersome, but not intrinsically dangerous.
No social science research attends to the emergence of new economies in hazardous waste and its related spatial divisions of labour. This is the focus of our first research strand, comprising two projects. The first is a study of the ship breaking industry which connects North east England with the United States, and with Bangladesh. The second is an examination of the nuclear waste economy and industry, which connects a site in North west England with nuclear power stations in a number of countries, including Japan, Sweden and Switzerland.
© The Waste of the World 2009
