Waste

Kate O'Neill

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780745687407, 9780745687391
• eBook ISBN: 9780745687438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Waste is one of the planet's last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are finding ways to profit from waste while diverting materials from overcrowded landfills. Yet beyond these benefits, this "new" resource still poses serious risks to human health and the environment.

In this unique book, Kate O'Neill traces the emergence of the global political economy of wastes over the past two decades. She explains how the emergence of waste governance initiatives and mechanisms can help us deal with both the risks and the opportunities associated with the hundreds of millions – possibly billions – of tons of waste we generate each year. Drawing on a range of fascinating case studies to develop her arguments, including China's role as the primary recipient of recyclable plastics and scrap paper from the Western world, "Zero-Waste" initiatives, the emergence of transnational waste-pickers' alliances, and alternatives for managing growing volumes of electronic and food wastes, O'Neill shows how waste can be a risk, a resource, and even a livelihood, with implications for governance at local, national, and global levels.

CHAPTER ONE
The Global Political Economy of Waste

This book is about waste – “what we do not want or fail to use” (Gourlay 1992) – as a global resource, a livelihood, and a source of risk. While other resources – timber, minerals, fish stocks – are coming under tremendous strain, wastes produced across all sectors of economic activity are growing in volume and in their potential for profit. A study published in The Anthropocene Review in 2017 estimated the cumulative total of the material output of collective human enterprise since the Industrial Revolution at 30 trillion tons (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). Much of this accumulated stuff is still with us and creating a new geological stratum, of trash. This study, while speculative, makes two things clear: wastes do not disappear, and they are a potential reservoir of extractable resources.

Wastes are highly differentiated. Sewage, batteries, construction waste, discarded clothes, scrap paper and plastic, and nuclear waste all belong in this same broad category, but have very different origins, lifecycles, impacts, and values. They exist in households, in landfills, in factories, in the oceans, and in outer space. Satellite debris clogs the outer atmosphere, while old electronics pile up in peoples’ attics and basements. Wastes flow into the global commons: plastics flood the oceans and landfill gas emissions exacerbate climate change. Some wastes – particularly organic wastes such as sewage – biodegrade quickly; others have a far longer half-life. Newspaper, banana peels, or orange peels can decompose in a matter of weeks under the right conditions. However, this process takes hundreds of years for some of the most common non-organic wastes, including plastics, ceramic, and glass. Nuclear waste (and some chemical wastes) stays toxic for tens of thousands of years, to the point where government authorities have considered creating symbols for “hazard” or “danger” that will be decipherable to humans once our own civilization has crumbled. One of the symbols considered by a US Department of Energy working group was a facsimile of Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream.¹

Wastes are not just thrown away. They are reused, recycled, or reprocessed for the valuable elements they contain, and to protect our overburdened environment. Discarded electronics contain copper, gold, and other metals. Iron and steel pipes and girders can be extracted from the rubble of demolished buildings. Nutrients and energy can be obtained from discarded food. Creating a global circular economy, which in its ideal form would see nothing discarded and everything reused, could allow us to live within planetary limits.

Evaluating something as a waste or a resource, even in everyday transactions, is, however, highly subjective. It depends on context and perceptions. As an illustration, some years ago a friend of mine moved with her family to Zambia. After they had unpacked their cardboard moving boxes, someone came to their door and asked to collect them. They negotiated a price. It turned out that while my friend thought the price was what they would pay to get rid of the boxes, it was in fact what the collector wanted to pay them to take and reuse the boxes. This example, at a small scale, illustrates how one person’s waste is, to another, a valuable resource or commodity, creating complications for transactions, markets, and governance. This book is, therefore, also about how complicated a resource waste is. It also poses risks to those who deal with it: to workers, local communities, those who produce it, and those who ship it. Its value varies with even slight fluctuations in market conditions. These factors create the need for governance that can take these complexities into account. Such governance is still under-developed.

The Rise of the Global Waste Economy

Economic growth and industrialization, especially in the twentieth century, transformed the relationship between wastes and resources in the industrialized world. With the expansion of the global economy after World War Two, people in wealthy nations could, for the first time, experience disposable consumption on a mass scale, generating what is now known as municipal solid waste (MSW). MSW includes plastic, paper, metal, and other non-organic wastes generated by households and businesses. Large-scale industrial production generated its own waste, including metal, concrete, and glass. In addition, the era was marked by massive increases in the production of chemical wastes, many of them toxic and highly persistent (lasting for a very long time) in the environment.

Waste became a problem to be dealt with, rather than something to be collected and reused. Landfills and waste incineration facilities expanded in size and number. Large-scale municipal and industrial waste collection, removal, and disposal services meant that for most middle-class and upper-middle-class communities, wastes were to be taken out of sight and out of mind. As a result, the problem of waste followed the same pattern as other types of environmental risk, where the costs moved away from people with socioeconomic power and towards people with less power and money. With the rise of free trade and economic globalization came opportunities to ship wastes, especially hazardous wastes, overseas to poorer countries or indeed among richer ones (Vallette and Spalding 1990). In the 1990s up to 90 percent of the hazardous waste trade was legal and carried out between member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but still imposed risks on recipient communities (O’Neill 2000). Resistance to waste facilities helped spark the environmental justice movement in the US (Bullard 1991), and movements and campaigns across Europe and around the world. International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) including Greenpeace International and the Third World Network combatted the “toxic trade” – waste dumping from rich to poor countries.²

Campaigns against the hazardous waste trade revealed wastes’ global reach, and the extent to which people in the wealthy North were outsourcing their risk and the costs of waste disposal. Subsequently, literal mountains of solid waste in mega-landfills around the world, piles of old electronics and computers and, most recently, devastating pictures of discarded plastics clogging the world’s oceans have brought home the extent of this crisis. The impacts on communities living on and around these sites fueled global activism.

These revelations forced new thinking about extracting and recycling items of value from waste streams at a far larger scale than in previous times, from goods to metals to energy. Informal workers and large multinational corporations look to “urban mines” to extract resources and make a living. They also propelled thinking about how to reduce this waste stream, reducing its flow, and diverting its contents away from final disposal and back into productive use.

Several factors have driven this new global waste economy. First, we can now estimate how much value is trapped in waste. For instance, the total value of all raw materials present in discarded electronics was estimated at approximately €55 billion in 2016 (see chapter 4; Baldé et al. 2017). Large multinational corporations as well as local trash pickers have direct economic interests, driven by the need for recycled raw materials, new energy sources, and the prospect of extracting gold, copper, and other valuable metals, or simply for a living pulling out useful parts and objects from others’ discarded goods.

Second, human production and consumption generate too much waste, to the extent that (despite our inventiveness), we are running out of space to put it. Higher levels of wealth, consumption, production, and population growth rates help explain the rise of waste generation, as do faster rates of urbanization, particularly in developing countries.

Two recent studies attempt to quantify global wastes and the challenges they pose. The Global Waste Management Outlook (Wilson et al. 2015), was produced by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Solid Wastes Association (ISWA), an industry association and a leading authority in this area. It estimates total global production of municipal, commercial, and industrial wastes and waste from construction and demolition at around 7–10 billion tons per year.

What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management in its first and second editions (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata 2012; Kaza et al. 2018) was produced by the World Bank. It estimated that MSW production has risen ten-fold in the past century. In 2010 the world produced 3.5 million tons per day; by 2025 that total could reach six million tons per day. Rates of waste generation will rise most steeply in Africa and South Asia, overall and per capita. China produced 520,550 tons per day in 2005 but could produce 1.4 million tons daily by 2025. Under business-as-usual scenarios, we will not reach a point of global “peak waste,” when urban populations stabilize and waste generation levels off, until the next century (Hoornweg et al. 2013). In the second edition of this report (Kaza et al. 2018), the authors predict that waste generation will outpace population growth by more than double by 2050 (p. xi), reaching a total of 3.4 billion tons annually.

Increased use of disposable products, such as singleserving plastic drink bottles or packaging waste, has added to the world’s trash heaps. In 2017, The Guardian reported that a million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and barely 10 percent of those are recycled back into bottles. Such wastes are dumped into “monster” landfills in and around growing mega-cities such as Mexico City, Beijing, and Lagos. The world’s 50 largest open landfills directly affect the daily lives of 64 million people who live nearby (ISWA 2016, p. 16). Millions of tons of plastics have spilled into the oceans, where they persist for hundreds of years, spinning in massive gyres. A 2018 study estimated that at least 79,000 tons of ocean plastic are floating inside an area of 1.6 million square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France, depending on one’s point of view (Lebreton et al. 2018).

Third, changing pressures and patterns of globalization have expanded the reach of the global waste economy. The volume of the global waste trade has significantly increased, and the types of wastes shipped have diversified. Waste supply chains are lengthening, spanning thousands of miles across continents rather than hundreds of miles across a neighboring border.

Traditional perceptions of the waste trade as a North-to-South problem have broken down as it has become apparent that waste supply chains are now more complex than 20 years ago. These trends have been driven by open global trade rules, greater movement of goods, cheaper shipping, and the outsourcing of cheap labor needed for basic recycling and disposal processes to countries in the global South. They have also galvanized activism around the world, as waste pickers (informal waste workers) and other global activist groups mobilize against the trade. For example, the South–South trade in e-waste is overtaking the North–South trade, overturning popular perceptions of perpetrators and victims.

In 2018, a single seismic event reshaped the global politics of waste and made many aware of how much waste recycling and disposal has become a global business. Until early 2018, China took in close to half of the plastics thrown into recycling bins in the US and other wealthy nations (along with many other, higher quality types of scrap), to feed its growing manufacturing centers. In 2017, it announced it would effectively halt this practice. It had received too much plastic, paper, and other low-quality scrap, often too contaminated to easily reprocess, and was tired of being seen as the “world’s garbage dump.” Chapter 6 goes into this case in depth, but “Operation National Sword,” as this policy is called, sent shockwaves through recycling and waste management industries, and demonstrated how vulnerable the global waste economy, the subject of this book, is.

Themes of the Book

This book has three overarching themes: the emergence of wastes as a global resource frontier, the magnified risks that attend this process, and the governance challenges (and innovations) these two together have generated. These trends are often exemplified in the global trade in different sorts of waste, and in shifting patterns of foreign direct investment in waste management and resource extraction around the world.

The Global Resource Frontier

Wastes, on a large scale, have become one of the planet’s newest global resource frontiers. As early as 1969, an undersecretary of the US Department of the Interior told a waste management seminar in Houston that “trash is our only growing resource” (Crooks 1993, p. 22). In 2011, the Bureau of International Recycling, the global scrap industry association, proclaimed “the end of the waste era,” a statement echoed by environmentalists, industry leaders, and politicians – that wastes are no longer “unwanted or surplus to requirements.” Instead, past – and present – wastes will help fuel a richer and more sustainable future.

Demand for extracted materials to be reprocessed or recycled into new products or inputs for industrial and consumer use is rising in the world’s fastest growing economies. The rise of the e-waste trade and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 The Global Political Economy of Waste
• 2 Understanding Wastes
• 3 Waste Work
• 4 Discarded Electronics
• 5 Food Waste
• 6 Plastic Scrap
• Conclusion: A World without Waste?
• Selected Readings: Making Wastes Visible
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement