Waste

In its broadest sense, waste refers to the residues, leftovers, and discards of commodity production, consumption, and disposal. Where there are consumer goods and consumer practices, there will always be wastes, be these the materials expended and cast out by the extractive industries or by manufacturing [Page 1519]processes, the residues of global transportation and distribution networks, the leftovers of an activity as mundane as the preparation and eating of a family meal, or the immaterial wastes of accounting. Wastes are as much part of consumer culture as the more familiar TVs and fridges, PCs and PlayStations, and iPods and mobile phones. Moreover, consumer goods themselves become waste. Outmoded, broken-down, irreparable, used-up, and expended, discarded consumer goods are the relics or fossils of consumption. Labeled as “recyclables,” these fossils journey to countries in Africa and South Asia, as well as to China, to be dismantled, shredded, mangled, and processed for use as secondary materials, in conditions that frequently contravene Western labor and environmental regulatory frameworks. Waste, however, is not just the materials expended by consumption. It also relates to the temporalities and spatialities of consumer culture; that is, it is generated by and within consumer culture. Faster lives, more mobile lives, more distant lives, and more tightly synchronized lives are enabled by convenience and disposability. Yet convenience and disposability go hand in hand with heightened waste generation, a relationship encapsulated in the now iconic disposable nappy, or diaper, as well as the paper tissue, plastic bag, and the plastic bottle. Disposability, though, is simultaneously about hygiene and risk cultures. The advent of sell-by and use-by dates on foods, for example, has resulted in up to one-third of food being thrown away in Western countries, whereas—aided by discourses of health and personal hygiene—a myriad of paper-based personal care products has supplanted reusable goods.

Underpinning contemporary consumer culture, then, is its shadow: a largely invisible (to consumers) waste management business that moves residue, discards, and leftovers out of our homes and our lives and that, in so doing, enables us to keep on buying and consuming. The scale of this business is vast. In Britain, for example, in 2008, over fifty thousand collection vehicles moved over eighty-five thousand tons of municipal waste to collection centers and transfer stations on a daily basis and thence to treatment centers and disposal sites, such as landfills and incinerators. More than 100 square miles of the country are given over to landfill sites, and the country's 60 million inhabitants generate an estimated 16 million tons of waste per year. Notwithstanding this, it is only recently that waste has begun to attract the attention of consumer researchers across the social sciences and the humanities. From being the concern primarily of environmental policy researchers and planners, where it was conceived as the end point of consumption, waste research is now to be found in human geography, sociology, anthropology, social history, cultural studies, and philosophy and aesthetics.