Post-Consumer Waste

What is Post-Consumer Waste?

The common forms of post-consumer waste characteristic of consumer societies include those items designed to be disposed of, such as packaging, disposable diapers, and razors; food trimmings and other excess materials; used-up items, such as tea bags; uninvited detritus, such as junk mail; objects beyond repair; and worn-out clothes. Such a list can be extended to include post-cleaning slurries, pet waste, food past its best-by date, and objects for which productive recycling is beyond the means, imagination, or capacities of those doing the disposing.

The crucial point is that what counts as waste is historically and culturally variable precisely because waste making is a profoundly social, changeable, and contestable process. Few, if any, materials or discrete objects have been trans-historically or universally regarded as valueless waste. This is true even for material such as human excrement, which has been used as fertilizer in Eastern cultures where vegetables traditionally form a large proportion of the human diet. The 21st century is a period in which not only are more things in greater variety produced than ever before but also in which the range and proportion of things that become designated as post-consumer waste is unprecedented. In addition, there is a wide range of post-consumer goods that have taken on ambiguous definitions, which draw them closer to the category of waste, rather than that of useful but unwanted goods.

All cultures rid themselves of “stuff,” though within wide cultural parameters and with much variation. Gift giving, funeral rites, and the distribution of harvest surpluses have been well documented by anthropologists. Nonetheless, all cultures feature an irreducible core of matter that is simply discarded or destroyed. This category is elastic as, for example, what counts as “inedible” or “impure” as well as attitudes toward the definition of “worn out,” “irreparable,” and “reusable.” Despite such variability, processes whereby disposal has been avoided are marked, including giving away, mending, recycling, reusing, and selling of surpluses. Post-consumer waste is a more fecund category as it considers both that which is unwanted in its original form but is reused in some way and the irreducible remainder that is disposed of. It is the culturally variable balance of these two components that generates much of the interesting analysis of the category.

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