Waste as a Critique
* Book: Hervé Corvellec. Waste as a Critique. 2025 (open-access publication)
URL = https://academic.oup.com/book/59620?
Description
Publisher:
"This volume shows how waste in its manifold variety provides an innovative starting point for interrogating twenty-first-century society. Waste in and of itself, along with those who work with it, may suffer from social stigma. As an epistemological point of departure however, waste offers an advantageous platform for social inquiry. Drawing on the contributions from an international team of interdisciplinary authors from discard and waste studies, this volume showcases the potential for waste as a revelatory lens through which the social world may be critically re-examined and assessed. Among the topics subjected to this critical analysis are anthropocentrism, disposability, economic growth, efficacy, environmental justice, matters of concern, racism, ownership, stigma, social innovation, and techno-utopianism. The contents of this volume elaborate a novel, critical waste-based epistemology that addresses four broad thematic concerns: materiality, society, economy, and temporality. Departing from the ubiquity of what is discarded, rejected, and abandoned, the authors demonstrate how this wide-ranging critical approach challenges ingrained assumptions, categorical inconsistencies, and unconsidered outcomes in social practice and theory. Waste is notoriously unruly. So the critiques that depart from it may be equally inconvenient."
Summary
From a review by Willy De Backer:
"Four uncomfortable truths from the book
- First truth: The waste-resource paradox is real.
When we turn waste into resources, we often increase waste production rather than eliminate it. As Corvellec notes: "Circular transformations of waste into a value proposition rest on a paradox, however, as they may increase the demand for waste. Circular practices can also trigger a rebound effect that increases rather than decreases material uses. Again, failure lurks behind success."
- Second truth: We are playing Hercules in the Anthropocene.
The waste hierarchy, lean production, and circular economy all promise heroic solutions whilst ignoring human limitations. Corvellec explains: "Heroes such as the waste hierarchy, lean production, and the circular economy make it possible to elude questions about the rationale of an anthropocentric exploitation of human and natural resources for the benefit of the most affluent."
- Third truth: Waste leaks.
Despite all our management efforts, waste refuses to stay contained. "The idea of maintaining immaculate cleanliness within the realm of consumption by constantly dispensing waste is a fallacy. Waste leaks. Given that emissions alter the climate and plastic waste infiltrates soil, water, and organisms, waste overflows its management, making it impossible for humans to separate themselves from their waste."
- Fourth truth: Physics constrains circularity.
The laws of thermodynamics impose absolute limits on circular processes that policy often ignores. As research in the book notes: "Fully closing resource loops is simply not possible due to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), as there will always be resource losses involved in circular economy practices like reusing, refurbishing, and recycling." Real economies are open systems that require continuous material and energy flows from their environment."
Review
Willy De Backer:
"Consider these questions the book raises:
- Are we seeking circular solutions because they preserve existing economic structures?
- Do our proposals acknowledge both the material limits of recycling and the fundamental thermodynamic constraints on circular processes?
The book does not argue against waste management or recycling. Instead, it calls for humility about what circular approaches can achieve and recognition that waste reflects deeper issues with how we organise production, consumption, and economic growth.
Corvellec offers tools for writing consultation responses that go beyond techno-fixes. His analysis helps distinguish between circular economy policies that might work and those that simply perpetuate "heroic efficacy", our overconfidence in human ability to control complex systems."