Recycling Reconsidered: A must-read text for discard studies

If I could only recommend one text in discard studies, it would be Recycling Reconsidered by Samantha MacBride (2011, MIT Press).

“Viewed as a concept by some, a framework by others, the CE is an alternative to a traditional take-make-dispose linear economy. A CE aims to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times. The value is maintained or extracted though extension of product lifetimes by reuse, refurbishment, and remanufacturing as well as closing of resource cycles—through recycling and related strategies.”

Powerful supermarkets push the cost of food waste onto suppliers, charities

Our research into the issue of corporate social responsibility and wastage of fresh fruit and vegetables has identified a number of tensions and contradictions, despite leading Australian supermarkets’ zero food waste targets.

Electronics Reuse and Recycling in Peru: A Photographic exploration

A walk down this little street in Peru’s capital provides a glimpse into an understated network that quietly plays a critical role in reducing the environmental impacts of our global production and consumption patterns of electronic devices.

Victory at Standing Rock reflects a failure of US energy and climate policy

Stopping the pipeline in one spot, after all, won’t stop oil altogether. Climate change, however, is a threat most of all to Indigenous peoples around the world.

Dumping Milk from the Treadmill of Production

Over 43 million gallons of milk has been dumped into manure pits and fields the first eight months of 2016. There is too much of it. Yet milk is only the most recent commodity to become waste in an economic system that depends on waste. The Treadmill of Production refers to the processes by which industrial systems achieve consistent growth, and waste plays a central role.

CFP: Changing Secondhand Economies

This special issue aims to present the best of ongoing interdisciplinary scholarship on historical and contemporary processes involved in the flow of secondhand objects and materials, their transformations and revaluations, and the persons, policies, and markets involved with them.

A Brief History of Anti-Capitalism, Pulled from a Dumpster

By Alex V. Barnard “Seeing all the waste exposes very clearly the priorities in our society, that making a profit is more important than feeding people, than preserving the environment, than making use of resources, than honoring peoples’ time, labor, love, and effort. What we see with waste is that once something cannot make money, it […]
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Film Screening: The Swap

El Cambalache, a moneyless economy project in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, is screening a documentary we created!

CFP: Circles, flows and dead ends: re-calibrating socio-material relations and the rise of the ‘circular economy’ (3/11/16)

This session invites contributions that explore themes related to ideas of recalibrated material flows and their socio-political and geographical implications.