schaffer_emerging_narratives

The contemporary U.S. waste system is undergoing a process of marketization and privatization [1] ; while much of these phenomena encourage continued wasting, there are certain constellations of policies and businesses that facilitate resource recovery through recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion, reuse, e-waste recovery, or waste-to-energy [2]. Weingerg, Pellow and Schnaiberg’s (2000) work on recycling makes the case that capitalist resource recovery systems have the capacity to sacrifice worker safety for resources, and suggests that a similar aspersion might be cast on similar forms of waste reduction [3]. Does resource recovery within capitalist systems tend toward “treadmill of production” situations? Despite this distrust, these changes seem to promise something like improvement to the waste system; will they make good on their word?
 * Emerging narratives**

Waste systems have been a target of environmental social movements for quite some time, particularly in terms of the siting of landfills and transfer stations. In this case study, a waste reform movement in Troy, NY, is working to create new knowledge about the Trojan waste system, forming partnerships with businesses, institutions, and experts, and design an alternative to the current waste system. This movement is essentially a coalition of aging hippies, community garden organizers, and ecological engineers, and each group has a variety of resources at hand, including political, institutional, and business connections. We draw our aims and rhetorical formations from organic farming literature, EPA and DEC-funded research on waste and compost, compost science, available models of community and industrial compost systems, and personal experience.

While this movement is formed in close relationship with the emergent modes of waste management entailed in the marketizing waste regime (Gille 2007), it also presents new imaginaries of waste that come from elsewhere. //Waste stewardship// is a means of relating to waste that is not new in the sense that it has never been done before, but it questions the lines drawn between waste and individuals, waste and cities that have been drawn by the U.S. waste system.

[1] I.e., with the rise of Pay-as-you-throw systems; Strasser has some insight into emergence of waste market: the first landfills were among the first services to charge for disposal; they rendered wastes invisible and inolfactible (1999). [2] WTE is clearly not resource recovery, but it does have a green connotation that makes it relevant here. [3] Further, (Davies 2007) might have insight on the globalization of the recycled materials trade, and certainly there is other literature on the ecological and human impacts of recycling.