Sociology of Waste

Social Construction of Waste

Waste is usually identified with one side of the following pairs of opposition: efficiency/inefficiency, usefulness/uselessness, order/disorder, gain/loss, clean/dirty, alive/dead, or fertile/sterile. The social construction of waste—which constitutes the foundation of all social science studies of waste—argues that there are social and cultural reasons for this variety in definitions. In capitalist countries, on the whole, waste was historically defined as useless and harmful, and this led to a mentality that prefers discarding waste to saving, reusing, or recycling it. In the developing world and in former socialist countries, in contrast, waste has been seen as valuable and fertile, which results in greater thriftiness and efforts to recover value from discarded materials. Some attribute this difference in attitude to higher average living standards and the abundance of commodities in capitalist countries, though some humanities approaches see this inscribed negativity of waste as a general feature of modernity.

Beyond pointing out this identification with one or another side of dichotomies, much of the waste scholarship has also invoked Mary Douglas's famous conceptualization of dirt as “matter out of place.” Objects are labeled as waste or dirt not because of their objective physical composition but rather because they are in a place where they do not belong according to prevailing notions of order and rules that govern everyday life.

Others have argued, however, that applying Douglas's definition of dirt to waste is faulty for two reasons. One argument, advanced by Martin O'Brien, is that modern societies do not exhibit the kind of uniformity and homogeneity with regard to concepts of order as the traditional cultures from whose study Douglas derived her famous notion of dirt. The other reason for questioning the usefulness of Douglas's formulation is that by equating waste with dirt, one is immediately delegating waste to the negative side of the previously mentioned pairs of opposition, thereby not only contradicting the experience of many non-Western cultures but also ethnographic findings in the West. In the latter, wasting practices have been described not as simple transformation of objects of value into rubbish, but rather as a nonlinear and often reversible movement of objects through various stages of disuse, divestment, and disposal. Waste, therefore, is best seen as a liminal or border concept, one that can be valuable or valueless depending on various social and physical factors.

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