From waste to resource

What is it about?

The paper reviews the literatures on waste across the social sciences and shows how these literatures frame waste in ways that either overlook or hinder analysis at the global scale. Much of the literature sees waste as municipal waste. Correspondingly, and depending on whether research is in rich countries or poor, its focus is on domestic consumers or waste-pickers, it is mostly about cities and their systems of managing waste, and it is located within national contexts. Where research has taken a global perspective it has framed international waste flows through global environmental justice, with wastes from rich countries being dumped on poor. The paper shows that new research challenges accounts of dumping and inverts understandings of the relationship between the Global North and South. Wastes are secondary resources for many low income countries; used goods and materials are harvested by buyers and traders from the South in the North; and examining resource recovery and recycling at the global scale shows waste to be a resource that holds the global economy together.

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