From Waste to Resource: The Trade in Wastes and Global Recycling Economies (original) (raw)
Related papers
What goes around, comes around? Access and allocation problems in Global North–South waste trade
International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 2020
Infamous cases of toxic waste trade and research on its health and environmental implications have made the global waste trade a prominent environmental and social justice issue. Recently, such trade has shifted towards extracting resources from waste as recyclable components and used goods which could create income-generating opportunities and reduce the environmental burdens of waste trade from Global North to Global South countries. Nevertheless, studies highlight persistent problems in the access to these resources and allocation of responsibilities, risks and burdens from processing and disposal of traded waste in Global South countries. This article aims to contribute to the lessons learnt on access and allocation with respect to waste trade by focusing on issues of equity, fairness and distributive justice. Two cases are analysed: trade in discarded electronic and electric equipment (EEE) between the EU and Africa and trade in plastic materials between the UK and China. This ...
Geographies of waste: Conceptual vectors from the global south.
Progress in Human Geography
Geographies of waste, which include examination of its flows and politics, have demonstrated empirical differences and contrasting approaches to researching waste in the global north and south. Southern waste geographies have largely focused on case studies of informality and (neoliberal) governance. We draw on southern theory to argue that this focus can be productively extended through greater consideration of the production of value and the role of materiality and technology in the wastescape. We argue that a relational understanding of multiscalar wastescapes contributes insights into the distribution of costs and benefits as well as what enables and constrains the extraction of value for different actors.
Economies of Recycling: Global Transformations of Materials, Values and Social Relations
For some, recycling is a big business; for others a moralised way of engaging with the world. But, for many, this is a dangerous way of earning a living. With scrap now being the largest export category from the US to China, the sheer scale of this global trade has not yet been clearly identified or analysed. Combining fine-grained ethnographic analysis with overviews of international material flows, Recycling Economies radically changes the way we understand global and local economies as well as the new social relations and identities created by recycling processes. ----- Following global material chains, this groundbreaking book reveals astonishing connections between persons, households, cities and global regions as objects are reworked, taken to pieces and traded. With case studies from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, China, the former Soviet Union, North America and Europe, Recycling Economies shows how marginal economies are producing new social collectives and projects around local and global decay, often with waste labour bringing high monetary reward as well as danger. ----- Replacing the persistent notion of globally peripheral countries being ransacked for raw materials, which are then transformed into valuable commodities in the North, this timely collection debunks common linear understandings of production, exchange and consumption and argues for a complete re-evaluation of north-south economic relationships.
Academia Letters, 2021
According to recent statistics, waste generation in developed countries (2.1 kg per capita per day on average) far exceeds that in developing countries (1.0 kg per capita per day on average). The expectation is that each country should deal with their generated waste regardless (I). Western countries have benefited from globalization. Various outside mechanisms (externalities) were discovered, including environmental, diplomatic, and back-door mechanisms. Solid waste was traded, transferred, or disposed of via funds, grants, military power, and international politics. These mechanisms have contributed to the inability of developing countries to provide social services like environmental services as a public good to their citizens. The increase in cities and population in the Indo-Pacific puts developing nations under pressure to withdraw from transboundary waste transfers. The backtracking is because of the illegal waste that accompanies transboundary waste trading and transfer. Often this illicit waste ends up in these developing countries as they are the destination of such waste transfer. In response to such backtracking and calls to hold developed countries accountable for illegal waste transfers into their countries, developing countries have focused on strengthening their domestic waste regulations on transboundary waste trading and transfer. Currently, there are little or no well-defined regulations on foreign transboundary waste trading or transfer agreements. This paper argues that with this backtracking, developing countries in the Indo-pacific region seem to be winning the narrative but losing out on the policy outcomes.
Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2020
In line with rising public and policy concern about wastes, there has been a distinct rise in scholarly analyses of these and other developments associated with economies of recycling, focusing especially on people’s material and moral encounters with reuse. These range from nuanced investigations into how lives and materials can both be re-crafted by recovering value from discards; following an object through its many social lives; or focusing on a material such as plastic or e-waste and tracking how waste is co-produced at each stage of creation and (re)use. Examining contested property rights in wastes, together with the infrastructures and ethics of engagements with wastes and their recovery or otherwise, reveal how global economies intersect with a rapidly shifting policy environment and systems of waste management. The global entanglement of policies and practices not only shapes what becomes of waste but also how it is variously imagined as pollutant or resource.
Global Waste Trade: Its Impact on the Economy, Environment, and Health of the Global South
Developed countries generate more waste as a result of globalization. Due to the increasing volume of wastes in the Global North, health and environmental hazards are already imminent. These prompted the start of the transboundary movements of the hazardous wastes to the developing countries or the Global South. Although there is a positive impact on the economy of the importing Global South, the negative externalities on health and environment outweighs the economic gains of the trade.
Through a discussion of Egypt–China trade in PET plastic, this paper seeks to show how contemporary recycling economies do not all conform to North–South directionalities, nor to the other assumptions about agency, vulnerability and environmental damage that inhere in the ‘neo-colonial geographies of inequality’ paradigm. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to developing more optimistic and nuanced alternative framings of global waste flows. The paper follows a two-part structure. The first half provides background on the author’s research methods, the recycling business in Egypt and its ties to China before further outlining the paradigm the paper seeks to nuance, particularly as it has been developed through and applied to e-waste case studies and entrenched in the principal legal instrument governing transboundary waste flows, the Basel Convention. The second half of the paper, after some conceptual notes outlining and locating the author’s approach to the market in the literature, attempts to provide a few details of the Egypt–China PET market from fieldwork, focusing on two price-shaping/making processes: market fluctuations during the global economic crisis in 2008/09 and the quality standards criteria applied by Chinese buyers.