Academics and activists have consistently drawn links between waste and consumption under capitalism which have culminated in some significant books (Dini, 2016; Falasca-Zamponi, 2011; Redclift, 2020; Rizzo, 2020; Tammemagi, 1999). Myra J. Hird’s A Public Sociology of Waste (published by Bristol University Press) in 2023 is an attempt to frame the problem of waste within the notion of public sociology. The book has six chapters and opens with a discussion of the various kinds of waste issues, one of which is the growing concern of Nuclear Waste which is stored temporarily by all nations, barring Finland which claims to have discovered a permanent nuclear storage system, which is a concern as nuclear toxicity remains for over 100,000 years. The first-world nations, such as Canada, France, Germany, the US, and Spain tend to export their waste problems to developing nations leading to waste piling up in the Global South, which the respective governments have trouble dealing with since the rate at which is growing far exceeds the diversion programmes at hand. However, this is only a simplistic view as waste does not always flow from a rich nation to a poor one, but it cannot be denied that the “complex and evolving set of international and national regulations and policies and a heterogenous mix of hazardous and non-hazardous materials means that we are, literally and figuratively, in a mess” (p. 6). While the term public sociology was coined by Herbert Gans in 1988 at the American Sociological Association’s Presidential Address, it is associated with Michael Buroway in contemporary times, who in his 2004 Presidential Address, noted how the “world needs public sociology – a sociology that transcends the academy – more than ever” (p. 7).

Hird uses the idea of public sociology to study waste not as a behavioural, consumer, scientific or technological issue, but rather as a socio-ethical issue, drawing from John D. Brewer who had noted how C. Wright Mills sought to construct a sociological imagination that “helped ordinary men and women grasp the intricate patterns of their own lives and see how these connected with wider structural forces and processes about which they had no understanding and over which they had no control” (Brewer, 2013, as cited in Hird, 2023, p. 7). While framing waste as a socio-ethical issue through the lens of public sociology, the book argues that issues can be solved through public dialogue to look at how waste affects the marginalised and strange others. These notions have been explored by books in the Global South in the context of caste-class dichotomies, as waste workers in South Asia are primarily from caste minorities and bear the brunt of disproportionate waste generation by privileged caste groups. In Life Beyond Waste Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan (2023), Waqas H. Butt looks at how lives in Lahore are organised on caste relations, and how waste work has been central to organising and transforming the city, tracing it from historical to contemporary times. On the other hand, there has been research undertaken on the political ecology of informal waste recyclers (Demaria, 2023), the rising consumerist waste in India (Doron & Jeffrey, 2018), and the technologies and infrastructures undertaken to modernise a non-Western superpower’s waste management system and the grassroots ecological politics which emerged (Zhang, 2024).

The book is an important addition to the existing academic literature on consumption under neoliberal capitalism and waste management, while also leaving scope for further research in particular contexts across the world, particularly in the Global South. In the Indian situation, for example, there is scope for detailed work which can look at the roles played by the dynamics of caste and gender, while also considering ethnicity, given that a significant number of waste workers in Delhi-NCR are from the Eastern states of Bihar and West Bengal. A rather refreshing account is how the book emphasises how a generation of waste is not an individual or a household problem, but rather large corporations which is a result of the capitalist mode of development, and how their suggestion for reducing waste does not bring down the waste for it does not disrupt the mode of production, implying that only an alternative of capitalism can reduce the waste crisis. Lastly, she also summarises how one of the most spoken about solutions, i.e. recycling, is not as helpful as it is made out to be. Materials which are collected in recycling units go through recycling only if there is profit. Further, the consumption of energy goes into the process and releases hazardous waste during the process. The book ends by suggesting that public sociologists of waste must take an approach distinctively from the mainstream liberal environmentalist approach, where waste management is largely structured in neoliberal capitalist terms.

References:

Brewer, J. D. (2013). The Public Value of the Social Sciences: An Interpretive Essay. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Demaria, F. (2023). The Political Ecology of Informal Waste Recyclers in India: Circular Economy, Green Jobs, and Poverty. Oxford University Press.

Dini, R. (2016). Consumerism, Waste, and Re-Use in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde. Palgrave Macmillan US.

Doron, A., & Jeffrey, R. (2018). Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India. Harvard University Press.

Falasca-Zamponi, S. (2011). Waste and Consumption: Capitalism, the Environment, and the Life of Things. Routledge.

Hird, M. J. (2023). A Public Sociology of Waste. Bristol University Press.

Redclift, M. R. (2020). Wasted: Counting the Costs of Global Consumption. Taylor & Francis Group.

Rizzo, J. (2020). Waste: Capitalism and the Dissolution of the Human in Twentieth-Century Theater. Punctum Books.

Tammemagi, H. (1999). The Waste Crisis: Landfills, Incinerators, and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Oxford University Press.

Zhang, A. (2024). Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China. Stanford University Press.

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Ankush Pal is a graduate from the Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.