Waste is the immanent outcome of any social metabolism. Metabolic processes of cities, nations and regions continuously produce wastes in the form of discarded materials, heat and pollution that accumulate in the environment, inevitably and heavily impacting the natural ecosystem (Richardson et al., 2023). The promises of the mainstream circular economy, hijacked by the technocratic eco-modernist agenda (Genovese and Pansera, 2021) are inevitably clashing with the biophysical reality: no complete circularity is possible in a growing, entropic economy (Martinez Alier, 2022). Neither the claim of a possible dematerialisation of the economic production holds: material decoupling in absolute terms is not happening fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement (Vogel and Hickel, 2023). On the contrary, the industrial systems, confronted with the imminent exhaustion of several strategic resources, are turning to waste as a source of valuable materials, as testified for example by the role given to recycling in the Critical Raw Materials Act approved by the European Parliament in September 2023 (European Parliament, 2023). This entails a change in the value of waste, becoming a frontier of capital accumulation, with profound implications for environmental justice and ecological distribution conflicts (Schindler and Demaria, 2019).
Recently, Savini (2023) has shown how mainstream circularity scholarship cannot offer an effective solution to the mounting waste production as it does not challenge the fundamental values of the Wasteocene (Armiero 2022) and the cost-shifting driver of capital forces (D’Alisa and Demaria 2013). For this reason, he proposes a future scenario of degrowth circularity.
We maintain that degrowth - with its ambition to transition towards more socio-ecologically sustainable, smaller, non-growth-dependent metabolisms - can offer substantial solutions to the waste crisis. Yet, degrowth scholarship, with very few exceptions (as for Savini, 2023), has overlooked the waste issue insofar as it has mainly focused on intervening at the production stage of our socio-economic systems. Focusing on reducing and changing production systems is certainly essential in tackling the waste issue, as indicated by all the widely shared versions of the waste hierarchy: the best waste is that which is not even produced. However, degrowth’s major focus on production fails to address another compelling question: what do we do with the wastes already in the ecosystem and those that will inevitably be produced even in a shrinking social metabolism?
The goal of this special session is to address this question from a degrowth perspective. This will allow us to expand and connect degrowth scholarship in the direction of waste and waste studies, to connect degrowth-oriented scholars already working on the issue, and to identify degrowth-aligned perspectives and solutions to address the waste crisis. We particularly invite the submission of contributions that tackle the following issues:
- The meaning of waste in a degrowth society
- The value of waste in a degrowth society.
- Degrowth circularity
- Waste and the cost-shifting strategies of capital accumulation
- Waste production and management in shrinking social metabolism
- Degrowth-aligned waste management practices
- Degrowth and the Industrial Waste production
- Waste & and degrowth urban planning
- Degrowth and low-tech strategies for waste management
- Degrowth, waste and the commons
- Degrowth, waste and care
- Zero waste innovations and degrowth
- Degrowth and the worldwide practices of formal and informal recycling,
- Waste-related environmental conflicts and environmental injustice
We envision an open special session structured as one or more conventional parallel sessions, tentatively structured around the tracks proposed above. The sessions will develop over 90 minutes. Each session will host a maximum of 4 presenters or groups of presenters, which will have 20 minutes each to present their work and to engage with the audience and with other presenters. Each session will be chaired by one of the organisers, or by a person indicated by the organisers.
References
- D’Alisa G., Demaria F. (2013) Dispossession and contamination. Strategies for capital
- accumulation in the waste market. LoSquaderno. Explorations in Space and Society No.29 - September
- European Parliament. (2023) Critical raw materials: Securing the EU’s supply and sovereignty. (2023, September 14). Retrieved from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230911IPR04927/critical-raw-materials-securing-the-eu-s-supply-and-sovereignty on October 16th, 2023.
- Genovese, A. and Pansera, M. (2021) ‘The Circular Economy at a Crossroads: Technocratic Eco-Modernism or Convivial Technology for Social Revolution?’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 32(2), pp. 95–113. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2020.1763414
- Martinez-Alier, J. (2022). Circularity, entropy, ecological conflicts and LFFU. Local Environment, 27(10-11), pp. 1182-1207.
- Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S. E., Donges, J. F., ... & Rockström, J. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), doi:10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
- Savini F. (2023) Futures of the social metabolism: Degrowth, circular economy and the value of waste. Futures 150 (2023) 103180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103180
- Schindler, S., & Demaria, F. (2019). “Garbage is Gold”: waste-based commodity frontiers, modes of valorization and ecological distribution conflicts. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 31(4), 52-59.
- Vogel J. and Hickel J. (2023) Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries.Planetary Health. The Lancet Vol. 7, pp 759-769. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00174-2.