Writing almost 20 years ago, Nicky Gregson and her research partners claimed that “…(W)aste’s capacity as a theoretical vehicle is immense; like food it is good to think with and through” (Gregson et al., 2005, page 2). In her new book, The Waste of the World, Gregson’s starting point has shifted. Waste remains central, but […]
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In 2015, tractor manufacturer John Deere made waves for sending its dealers a letter asserting that when farmers repaired their own John Deere equipment, what they were really doing was violating US copyright law. At the time, this came as news to a lot of farmers: as a characteristically self-sufficient community, they’d always repaired their equipment on their own. How did putting a computer on a tractor change this?
This short study analyzes the professional and political discussions of post-industrial and post-consumer waste, discards and recycling in state-socialist Hungary and connects these discourses with the changing cultures of waste, discards, and recycling around the globe.
Agbogbloshie is a part of an emergent globalised scrap economy that links peripheral markets to global metal flows. In this post, Dagna Rams argues for the need to pay closer attention to the flow of recuperated metals out of Agbogbloshie.
Discard studies spoke with three leading waste researchers about the biggest myths of the circular economy.
Discard Studies interviews writer Adam Minter, author of ‘Junkyard Planet’ and journalist for Bloomberg about his next book, ‘Secondhand’
The US ‘tech sector’ has been a major source of toxicant releases. These interactive maps show the chemical legacy of electronic manufacturing in the US.
This review of a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology titled, “Exploring the Circular Economy” is a virtual tour of circular economy definitions and current directions. The authors discuss and derive new definitions of “circularity.” They cover fundamental determinants of material lifespan, such as economic demand, thermodynamics, product design, and durability.
In an economic sense, it is usually municipal and state governments that account for the cost of damage waste causes to local environments when deciding how to deal with waste, but this cost is not already part of the price of goods or services that produce waste. Economists define this problem as a negative externality.
Why is recycling low on the waste hierarchy?
Discard Studies 