Waste Management and Sustainable Consumption

Reflections on consumer waste

Karin Ekström, Karin M. Ekström

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317632641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The accelerated pace of global consumption over the past decades has meant that governments across the world are now faced with significant challenges in dealing with the dramatically increased volume of waste.

While research on waste management has previously focused on finding technological solutions to the problem, this book uniquely examines the social and cultural views of waste, shedding new light on the topic by emphasising the consumer perspective throughout. Drawing on a wide variety of disciplines including environmental, economic, social and cultural theories, the book presents philosophical reflections, practical examples and potential solutions to the problem of increasing waste. It analyses and compares case studies from countries such as Sweden, Japan, the USA, India, Nigeria and Qatar, bringing out valuable insights for the international community and generating a critical discussion on how we can move towards a more sustainable society.

This book will be of great interest to post-graduate students and researchers in environmental policy, waste management, social marketing and consumer behaviour, as well as policymakers and practitioners in consumer issues and business.

Part I
Consumption and waste

1
Recycling the Home

The constant flow of domestic stuff, emotions and routines

Orvar Löfgren

Dreams of a perfect home

When you got up this morning did you notice the happy people gliding past outside – all dressed in the same practical white overalls and in a relaxed holiday mood, because they don’t have to work more than three days a week now? There are high-rise apartments where helicopters are busy moving transportable apartment units to new locations when the family gets tired of the neighbourhood.

Knock on the door of a typical contemporary home. Look at the minimalist and practical interiors: there is no furniture, but beds and table and chairs emerge from the floor at the touch of a button. Go into the kitchen and see the electronic systems that have made cooking superfluous. Just press the button and your favourite dish is ready. . . This scenario is mainly taken from the book How will we live in 2010, written in the early 1970s (Hoyle 1972). Over the last years I have been interested in this genre of utopias of future domestic life and the forecasts for the new millennium that have been made since the 1950s. Many of these predictions worked out reasonably well for technologies of communication, but went totally wrong when it came to changes in habits, cultural values and emotions in domestic life (see, for example, Ashley 2011, Benford 2010 and Löfgren 2012). What is striking in much of this future gazing is the dreams of a minimalist home life, uncluttered, spotless and oh so practical. No friction. People themselves are unstressed, sophisticated, restrained – very cool. Over many decades there have been constant dreams of the smart home, so popular among future gazers, product developers and high-tech designers.

Now it is 2014 and the future is here. And it looks rather different. Let’s take a glance inside a Swedish kitchen early one morning:

The dried out plants on the windowsill, dead for months, slipping into the room in an unobtrusive way that made nobody think about throwing them away. The table with its glasses and plates, the water jug with the water full of small bubbles of air; the dried crumbs lying around the places where the children have been sitting; the empty bags that the fruit arrived in, now resting like small hangars of plastic in-between stacks of drawings and drawing pads, felt and colour pens; and not to mention the two shelves on the wall next to the window, which were swelling coral reef-like over all the small things the kids had collected over the last years, from sweet dispensers formed like princesses or different Disney-characters, boxes with pearls, pearl boards, glue pens, toy cars, and water colours, to jigsaw pieces, Playmobile parts, letters and bills, dolls and some glass bubbles with dolphins inside which Vanja wanted to have when we were in Venice last summer.¹

(Knausgård 2012: 260)

This is the author Karl Ove Knausgård describing his overflowing home in Malmö, Sweden, in the last of his six volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. He reflects over the constant battle between chaos and order that goes on in Western homes and the ways that the material world is always about to take over.

The overcrowded home

It is this ongoing battle that I will explore here, part of a current project on tensions in contemporary domestic life being carried out with Billy Ehn. One tension has to do with different forms of overcrowding and the ways in which they interact or not. This chapter centres around three slippery verbs, reduce, reuse and recycle – slippery in the way that they are intensely cultural, and also in the ways in which they change meanings and directions in different contexts. They are also married to their counterparts in interesting ways. Reducing may also mean increasing (or vice versa), reusing may mean obliterating or discarding, while recycling is a process that may go in very different (and sometimes surprising) directions. The road towards sustainable living is full of paradoxes and sometimes counter-productive paths.

While many of the other chapters in the book focus on recycling, waste and waste management, I will look mainly at the earlier stages of the journey towards waste in domestic settings, the movements and transformations of stuff and the strategies for handling it. (The latter issue has been central in another project, Managing overflow; see Czarniawska and Löfgren 2012 and 2014.)

I will look here at three aspects of domestic life. First of all: the stuff. Although consumer studies have been influenced by both the material and the affective turns that have swept over social and cultural research during the last decades, it seems to me that there is still too little blood, sweat and tears in the ethnographies of domestic lives. Homes may be overflowing with semiotic signs, symbolic messages, dreams and longings, but they are, above all, full of objects, objects that constantly need to be handled.

Domestic life in the twenty-first century was supposed to be cyber-light and friction-free, thanks to all the new technologies that would simplify people’s lives. Most Western homes are, however, still veritable jungles of clumsy objects and gadgets, utensils and tools crammed into every available space. Cupboards and wardrobes may be bursting, cellars and attics cluttered. Little gadgets let out green or angry red blips in the kitchen, electric cords create jungles under the tables. People devote a large amount of energy and resources to handling this abundance. Things are shuffled back and forth, rearranged, recycled. Every day, new objects enter Western homes and old ones are lost, forgotten or leave by the back door.

The second aspect has to do with the habits and routines of organizing and coping with domestic life that make things, activities and interests work together. ‘What defines a home?’ the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) once asked. Her answer is, not just a building with four walls, but also an internal order with rules, rhythms and morals. The home is a web of routines, silent agreements and ingrained reflexes about ‘the way we do things here’. Words like ‘routines’ and ‘habits’ capture this in different ways. Routine is French for small road, paths carved in everyday home life, and habits make a home a habitat or at least habitable (see the discussion in Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 83–93 and Winther 2009).

Homes can be seen as laboratories for developing new routines as well as safe havens for clinging to old ones. There are techniques of synchronizing, multi-tasking and sequencing, as well as constant whole- or half-hearted attempts to gain control and install some kind of order.

The third aspect is about affects and emotions. The home is not only crammed with stuff, it is also overflowing with feelings. Passion, boredom, guilt, longing, nagging irritation, explosions of home rage, moments of bliss – all try to co-exist with and also charge material objects (like that ugly sideboard we inherited from your father) as well as the normal everyday activities. (Who turned down the thermostat again? Where is my cell phone charger? And what are these towels doing on the bathroom floor!)

It is the constant cohabitation, clashes and recycling of these three aspects that I will explore. In many ways the home is a good example of what Doreen Massey (2005) has called the throwntogetherness of everyday life. Affects, activities and materialities work together, reinforcing or transforming each other. Such recyclings can take many forms: the physical movement of transporting stuff elsewhere into new contexts – be it the short journey on to the next shelf or down into the basement. In a similar manner, it affects the search for material outlets and points of anchoring. In such domestic entanglements, stuff, feelings and routines are transformed into new uses or functions. Just think about the ways in which waste, junk and dirt are, in cultural terms, produced by processes such as displacement, sorting out and recategorization, as in Mary Douglas’s classic credo: ‘Dirt is matter out of place’ (see the discussions in Douglas 1966 and Thompson 1979).

My material is a bricolage, based on ongoing fieldwork, interviews and observations, as well as a wide range of sources, from academic research to popular culture and fiction, as well as several surveys of contemporary homemaking.²

Stuff on the move

Looking around my own home, I am struck by how many of my possessions I fail to note, although some of them are right in front of me. They have been transformed into the driftwood of the consumer society, left stranded on the drawer, the top shelves in the kitchen or in wardrobe corners. How did this happen?

Someone puts a white ceramic bowl on the sideboard as a nice design accent. There it is, simple, beautiful and above all seductively empty. All of a sudden there is an empty matchbox in it, next to a couple of coins. The ice is broken and through a magic power new objects are attracted. A pair of sunglasses, an old lottery ticket, an unpaid electricity bill and some used batteries. Step by step a mountain is growing on top of the sideboard, until one day someone gives the living room a searching look: ‘We can’t have all this mess!’ All bowls, tables and windowsills are de-cluttered. But, the objects silently bide their time; as soon as the back is turned they will take over again.

A tour of the basement and attic reminds me of all the half-finished projects stranded in there. In the kitchen cupboards I find relics of earlier campaigns of domestic moral rearmament: interesting spices and torn-out recipes that have never been tried, healthy ingredients never used and strange kitchen utensils which never worked. In a sense, all these ambitions that have been put on hold may keep a check on consumption. As unrealized daydreams or plans, they take up less space and costs than if turned into another resource-demanding project.

In domestic settings, things acquire a seductive peacefulness, as if they were just innocent stationary objects, but, as Jojada Verrips (1994) points out, they tend to have a life of their own. They decide to break down, move out of sight, hide or get lost. This mass of domestic objects creates friction, takes up space, gets in the way and is constantly on the move. How are these mental and physical micro-movements organized into trajectories and stations?

Knausgård continues to reflect over the mysterious ways in which stuff takes over:

The shelf was a station; when the objects landed there, they were out of circulation, and stayed put. We had several similar stations where the life of things suddenly ended, especially the long bench in the passage. . . both under and over the bench there were cupboards where all kinds of stuff and rubbish were lying next to things we needed, but no longer remembered we had.

(Knausgård 2012: 261)

He continues to list all these stacks of stuff gathering in the nooks and crannies of the apartment. His description can be compared to the anthropological study of thirty-two Californian homes, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century, in which a team of researchers make detailed ethnographies of domestic life and domestic stuff (Arnold et al. 2012). The first household assemblage they analysed had 2,260 visible possessions in the first three rooms that were documented (two bedrooms and the living room), not counting all the stuff out of sight in lockers, closets and drawers. The people interviewed often complained about their homes ‘being a mess’. Just as in Knausgård’s home, there were stations in which stuff piled up, or ‘dumping grounds’ as someone called them. Storage spaces developed everywhere, often quite unplanned, like the garage, where there was no longer room for a car, the bedroom corners and especially unused in-between spaces. Other home surveys show other storage inventions, such as the unused bidet that had become home to a crowd of shampoo bottles and cosmetics.

Just like the white bowl, tables are inviting empty spaces waiting to be filled up. In the Californian study, kitchen tables emerged as surfaces on which stuff flowed in and out during the day, reflecting the fact that this was the most used domestic space of all, home for a wide range of activities.

Domestic stuff often is described in terms of overflowing fluids: stuff ‘spills out’, creates ‘waves’ and ‘driftwood’, or builds up ‘coral reefs’. A uniting theme in many of these surveys is that toys have emerged as the strongest kind of driftwood. Of all the domestic overflows talked about in families with small children, toys often stand out (see, for example, Brembeck 2014 and Plowman and Stevenson 2013). A new child in an American family may result in a 30 per cent increase of stuff at home (Arnold et al. 2012). ‘Stuff – more than anything else meant toys’, writes Nikolaj Zeuthen in his ethnographic novel about a young Danish family. Like Knausgård, he goes on to list the children’s belongings, from dispersed Lego sets and Barbie dolls to toy animals and plastic trumpets. Once they were distinct objects, bought on special occasions, but now, he writes, they had turned into a shapeless mass, ‘flowing like the waves against the beach, moving in and out of cabinets, in and out of boxes and baskets, down and up again on the walls, always with Rune and Anna as those who had to restore order, stooping with stiff backs’ (Zeuthen 2012: 113).

In families with small kids there are complaints of toys drifting all over the place, helped by the fact that the children do not want to play in their room but drag all kinds of stuff into every space, wanting to be where the action is. The whole home is turned into a playpen, leaving the play-room unused.

Toys and other stuff adrift also highlight another form of recycling: the coming and going of objects. Things disappear easily; they move out of sight, hide in the clutter of Knausgård’s cupboard or get lost in the garage. What kind of recycling is found in the processes of loss, disappearance and retrieval?

Moving out of sight

An exhibition of lost and found things, ‘This could be yours’ in Copenhagen 2006, illustrates this by using lost objects that had been gathering in storage at the Copenhagen Transport Authority. In the catalogue, the Danish poet Mårten Søndergaard addresses the mysteries of disappearing objects:

The things. I can’t find them. They are gone. They could be there or there. . . But they aren’t. They are somewhere else. The world has moved four millimetres and a crack has emerged. The crack is widening and more stuff falls through it. Now they are in a different place. Unreachable, invisible and bordering on the insane. As I find them again, at the last moment, I wonder: where have they been? Maybe they have been to God f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Consumption and waste
• Part II Managing waste
• Part III Socio-cultural views on waste
• Part IV Preventing waste
• Index