Since the last economic recession in the mid 2000s, there has been a surge in scholarly conversations around fundamentally changing how economies work and what they value. For example, Figure 1 charts the number of English-language articles using the keyword “degrowth,” one of the most radical positions to the current economic imperative that producing increasing amounts of money and products is the hallmark of healthy economic systems. is not a new idea to suggest that reimagining political economies is crucial to dealing with ecological, social, and economic crises in the 21st (Hawken, 1994; O’Connor, 1994). However, in keeping with our broad claim in this special collection for the Society & Space Open site, there is value in treating waste and pollution as core concerns, rather than as aftereffects, of imagining and enacting new economic politics.
Fig.1 Degrowth—Whole Network
Waste is an economic concept that signifies value or valueless (Gidwani, 2012) and has acute material agency. Our contention is that accounting for and with waste and pollution helps ground-truth new economic imaginaries: how do or will they deal with left overs, excess, externalities, and by-products? How do they manage toxicity that is already permanently on the planet, and how do they avoid creating new toxicants? At the same time, discussions of new systems of value and circulation can vitalize discussions already underway in discard studies around surplus, valuation, reuse, scale, and the social side of technical systems.
Yet to date, such discussions between the fields of discard studies, diverse economies, and degrowth remain inchoate. One simple illustration of this is through citation analysis of published peer review literature. Using Scopus, an online repository of English-language research across disciplines, we created a corpus of over 7,000 peer-reviewed citations in which the words "waste(s)," "economic(s)," "econom(y)(ies)," or "degrowth" appear in their title, abstract, or author-generated keywords. We then generated a network of linked authors and keywords to visualize patterns in how these terms do or do not intersect with one another. Overall, we find that discussions of waste are lacking in literature about degrowth and diverse economies, and that discussions about the economics of waste leave out degrowth (see Figure 2).
Our introduction to this special collection for the Society & Space Open site offers a brief introduction to the key terms of this collection, starting with diverse economies. We then offer a synopsis of how these keywords are (or are not) related to one another in the literature and the reasons discards should play a central role in emerging economic imaginaries.
Fig. 2 Number of Articles
Diverse economies
Diverse economies is a term developed in the pioneering work of JK Gibson-Graham (e.g., 2006a, 2006b) to destabilize the axiomatic conflation of "the economy" with "capitalism." Their works, and that of many others in a similar vein (see North, 2015 for an excellent review), documents the massive variety of non-capitalist economic relations that exist within capitalism itself as well as outside of it—and even in spite of it. A key lesson of diverse economies research includes that there is far more going on within capitalism than just wage labor in the service of commodity production for exchange; another key lesson is that other ways of organizing economic action that support the flourishing of people and other earthbeings are not only possible, but already exist.
Degrowth
Degrowth is both a critique of productivist economies where producing more is the main goal, whether those economies be capitalist, socialist or otherwise, as well as a desire toward other ways of organizing social life (D’Alisa et al., 2014). The term is the not-quite perfect Anglophone translation of the French décroissance, the Spanish decrecimiento, and the Italian decrescita. It does not refer to a prefigured plan or mode of operationalization. Instead, it is an orientation toward inchoate, but desired pathways to other ways of organizing production, exchange, and consumption (Latouche, 2010). Its broad orientations are toward sufficiency, conviviality, and support of the commons. Degrowth might be thought of as a politics of economic diversity (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013), an attempt to open up a space of ethical negotiation over what counts as needs, what surplus is to be created, and how it is to be distributed and used.
Literature on degrowth is heavily associated with key terms such as "economic growth," "voluntary simplicity," "growth," "democracy," "ecological economics," and "crisis." These and other keywords just outside the top five ranking of our corpus of literature (e.g., "green new deal," "well-being," "working hours") point to degrowth as a field in which political, social and economic realms cavort. However, the literature exhibits notable clustering that stems from the prominent themes, but which carry on as more-or-less independent islands of conversation unlinked to one another, except through the notion of degrowth (see Figure 2). Moreover, neither "waste," "discard," nor any of their iterations appear as author-generated keywords in the degrowth literature. The closest we come are "externalities," which may have something to do with waste, discards, or pollution, but do not do so explicitly.
Discards
We use the term “discard” rather than waste as a tool to defamiliarize and destabilize the usually negative associations of waste. Discard, like waste, is a noun and a verb. It is just unfamiliar enough to hold in abeyance the nearly automatic association of waste with a host of negative connotations and “common sense” around everyday experiences of domestic trash. Discard is a term with sufficient flexibility to encompass all material externalities of economic and technical systems, including pollution, trash, “disposable people,” and more (Liboiron, 2014). In all cases, discards are a fundamental problem of economic production and systems of valuation. Considerations of economic systems and value are a mainstay of discard studies across disciplines, from Vance Packard’s classic The Waste Makers (1960) to the more recent The Business of Waste(Stokes et al., 2013). Both historically and in the present day, much time, money, and ink has been spent on how to value the detritus of production and consumption. By-products, pollution, scraps, and waste all cost money, use resources, and can even be dangerous to human and ecological health (thereby warranting the growing business of mitigation and remediation). The materialities of discards are insistent: they are heavy, massive, smelly, heterogeneous, and often toxic. Not all of them can simply be reused or absorbed back into systems, such as nuclear waste, excess carbon dioxide, or even plastics (MacBride, 2011). As such, discards are a keystone for grounding reimaginings of economies.
Other ways of organizing economic life not premised on profit or increasing production, such as degrowth, or even steady-states, would fundamentally challenge the conditions of modern discards. In many ways, this is the ideal Grand Experiment in discard studies: what would waste in a degrowth economy look like? What would happen to tonnage, toxicity, disposability, externalization, NIMBY politics, and the banishing of waste to sacrifice zones? Questions like these point to why discard studies needs degrowth and diverse economies; they have the potential to radically reimagine the systems that undergird the production and circulation of waste, and thus waste itself.
At the same time, diverse economies and degrowth need discard studies. Discard studies, for example, has strong empirical critiques of the “circularity” of recycling (e.g., Ackerman, 1997; Graeber, 2012; Lepawsky and Mather, 2011), which is usually seen as the material savior of many local or steady state economies. Yet, recycling captures a fraction of waste, uses virgin materials in its processes, creates pollution, and naturalizes disposables and other forms of harmful waste under the guise that recycling “takes care” of things. In short, recycling as it is currently structured perpetuates growth and dominant economies rather than providing a social or technical avenue for change.
Moreover, discard studies remind us that the insistent materialities of modern waste―particularly industrial waste that makes up at least 97 percent of waste arising in North America—will not "go away" even if radically revamped economic systems are eventually achieved. Modern wastes are toxic and effectively permanent. Even if we could stop producing modern wastes tomorrow, including plastics, nuclear wastes, CO2, arsenic, endocrine disruptors, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs), among many others, their consequences will remain in play effectively forever, affecting different parts of the globe in uneven and often unknown ways. How will degrowth and diverse economies deal with these insistent legacies, even if they manage to steady, reduce, or even stop their production?
One of the keywords in Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (D’Alisa et al., 2014, pages 86–89) isdépense, the act of using excess to support social values. The text suggests ways of wasting surplus that are celebratory, autonomous, and virtuous (86-89). A fundamental transformation of economy would entail a fundamental transformation in the meanings and practices of waste and wasting. In this spirit, we we offer this collection on discards, diverse economies, and degrowth for the Society & Space Open site in the hope of kickstarting these discussions.
References
Ackerman F (1997) Why Do We Recycle? Markets, values, and public policy. Washington DC: Island Press.
D’Alisa G, Demaria F, and Kallis G (2014) Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York and London: Routledge.
Gibson-Graham JK (2006a) Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham JK (2006b) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham JK, Cameron J, and Healy S (2013) Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Liboiron M (2014) Why Discard Studies? Discard Studies.
MacBride S (2011) Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States. Cambridge: MIT Press.
North P (2015) The business of the Anthropocene? Substantivist and diverse economies perspectives on SME engagement in local low carbon transitions. Progress in Human Geography 0309132515585049.
O’Connor M (1994) Is Capitalism Sustainable? New York: The Guilford Press.
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Stokes RG, Köster R, and Sambrook SC (2013) The Business of Waste: Great Britain and Germany, 1945 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
