The Waste of the World

What is the programme about?

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.

What will the programme do?

The programme has three main aims:

   1. To rethink how waste is thought about in the social sciences
   2. To provide a global analysis of waste, and
   3. 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.

What tools are available?

• the programme will produce a defining social science study of waste
• educational materials - a DVD with material suitable for KS3-5 is available for secondary schools

How will the outputs be used?

Policy makers

The outputs from this study will be used by policy makers in the UK, such as Defra and the Environment Agency and also by governments in Denmark, India and Bangladesh.

Business and society

The outputs will be useful for NGOs and campaign groups working on global environmental issues such as Greenpeace and BAN.

The outputs will also be useful for food processing organisations, steel corporations, the nuclear industry and the waste management industry.

PROGRAMME FACTS AND FIGURES

Total investment: £3 million

Start and end dates: 01/10/2006 to 30/09/2011

Website: http://www.thewasteoftheworld.org

Contact: Professor Nicky Gregson N.Gregson@Sheffield.ac.uk

EXTRA INFORMATION

There is a lack 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) particular policy instruments, and that research is overwhelmingly national-regional-local in its focus.

To counteract this, the Waste of the World programme 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 is 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.