A Public Sociology of Waste, by Myra Hird

Sociology is the study of society and its behaviour. It’s a hybrid discipline that cross-pollinates discussions about politics, economics and culture. The addition of the word ‘public’ in the title here indicates a specific approach. As the name suggests, public sociology aims to speak to the general public rather than an academic audience.

Sociology has often been used for the public good, looking for insights into behaviour in order to improve lives. Myra Hird’s book is in that tradition, bringing a sociological point of view to the issue of global waste to see if it illuminates any new solutions.

As I mentioned last week, one of her main themes is the way that waste has been framed as a matter of personal responsibility. Good citizens don’t litter, and they recycle. This is reinforced from an early age, and is almost unquestioned. Like carbon footprints being popularised by BP, the plastics industry was responsible for some of the early campaigns on recycling. A focus on consumer action keeps the attention away from those who produce the packaging in the first place, and the much larger amount of waste that’s created by industry.

There’s another reason why industry promotes recycling. Besides keeping attention on households, it also maintains consumption patterns in ways that the other two of the ‘Three Rs’ don’t. Reduce and Reuse both lower consumption – they represent less packaging, less purchasing. Recycling, on the other hand, “does not disturb ever-increasing circuits of masss production and consumption (and therefore industry profit).”

Expressing a scepticism of recycling is a great way to undermine your moral standing amongst your friends, but there’s a reason why it has been popularised and championed as the beginning and end of responsible waste management. It’s the waste solution that’s most palatable to consumer capitalism. Reuse would challenge profits, and reduce sounds suspiciously like degrowth. The idea of recycling allows the fossil fuel companies to keep profitting from plastic, and makes it our fault if waste ends up in hedgerows or the ocean.

It’s important to note that it’s the idea of recycling that’s powerful here. Recycling itself is dubious as a waste solution, because it has a high environmental cost of its own. That may be the chemicals involved in recycling paper, or the energy use in recycling metals. Most recycling is technically down-cycling, making products of lower value. There’s a considerable transport footprint to recycling, with a global waste trade that ships trash all over the world for processing, often in poorer countries.

The book looks at this global trade and suggests that waste should be seen as a justice issue. That’s the counter-story to the industry narrative of endless production and consumer recycling. Rich countries are depending on other parts of the world to take out their trash. Marginalised communities within nations are often more exposed to pollution and toxins. As a writer based in Canada, Hird has seen this unfold in the context of settler colonialism, with the country’s indigenous people often at the sharp end of environmental injustices.

One hesitation I had with the book is that it was written during the Covid pandemic and is quite specifically located in that time. That yields a chapter on waste PPE, and some interesting observations on how prepping and survivalism can be another expression of consumerism. In also gives us some passages that read rather awkwardly three years on. “The world’s most privileged economies, health care systems and, indeed, governments, are on the verge of collapse”, it says at one point. That sounds out of date now, UK politics notwithstanding.

Still, A Public Sociology of Waste usefully sets out the way that waste has been framed, and how it could be otherwise. It invites us to question green consumerism and who benefits from things presented as common sense solutions. It highlights the power structures behind waste policy, and prompts us to ask better questions than what goes in which bin. If you like its approach, check out the rest of the Public Sociology Series from Bristol University Press.