The Waste of the World

This programme of six linked projects aims to produce a defining social science study of waste, for academics, policy makers and stakeholders. Its overarching aims are to reconceptualise the place of waste and how we think about waste within social science.
The programme has three objectives.

1. First, it will provide the first investigation of newly emerging global waste economies, focusing particularly on hazardous waste, its trade, management and disposal.
2. Secondly, it offers a radical reconceptualisation of waste within productive activities. Rather than locate waste as the end point of production-consumption, we argue that surplus and loss (and therefore waste) is fundamental to all economic activity.
3. Thirdly, it will provide the first empirical examination of the disposal rituals surrounding the excess of economies in key parts of the world, within the EU and in India.

More detail
Our point of departure is the poverty of existing social science research on waste. In contrast to research in the physical sciences, notably engineering, and also the arts and humanities, where waste has been a core concern, waste has been for the most part ignored by the social sciences. Where it has been considered, it has largely been from within a sustainability perspective. This means that research has been defined by (rather than shaping of) particular policy instruments, and that research is overwhelmingly national-regional-local in its focus.

In contrast, the programme of research proposed takes a global approach, examining how places, people and materials are bound together through the movement, management and trade in wastes.  Such an approach is critical if UK social science is to attend to one of the most pressing economic, political and environmental issues of our time.

• Theme 1 addresses the global waste economy, focusing on hazardous waste.
• Theme 2 focuses on the generation of waste in production (i.e. in manufacturing activities).
• Theme 3 spotlights the technologies of waste management, taking a cultural approach to these issues.

The first two projects focus on ship breaking and nuclear waste respectively. Alongside a global economy that sees wastes moving from core to peripheral countries, more complex patterns are emerging. Peripheral regions in core countries are also becoming recipients of other peoples' waste, and waste dumps of the world, particularly with respect to hazardous waste.

Project 1 provides a comparative study of ship breaking in the EU and Bangladesh (Chittagong).

Project 2 examines the global trade in nuclear waste, nuclear decommissioning, and examines the siting controversies around nuclear waste, with a particular focus on host communities. 

Projects 3 and 4 examine how material wastes are produced and managed within various production processes; how production processes have been changed to minimise waste generation; strategies for waste revaluation; and the limits to waste elimination in production. The focus is on two sectors, steel manufacture and the food industry, broadly conceived.

Project 5 addresses the technologies of landfill, incineration and anaerobic digestion in the UK, examining how materials are moved into and through these technologies and the meanings they elicit. It also provides a comparison with Scandinavia, where the historic reliance on incineration is in sharp contradistinction to the UK's traditional reliance on landfill.

In Project 6 the focus on India. One of the fastest growing consumer economies in the world, India is one country where the global politics of waste generation will be at their most acute in the future, but growth raises key questions too for India's traditional capacity for recycling. This project examines these transformations, their effect and the implications and contradictions of these transformations, with a particular focus on textiles.