Turning Waste into Wants
Since the early 2000s, the term “upcycling” has become established for these and similar products. Historically, waste practices such as reuse, repair, and recycling stem from an “economy of makeshifts” (Hufton) born out of poverty and associated with dirt and shame. Over the last 20 years, their cultural meaning has fundamentally shifted. They are now being appropriated by a startup culture of change makers. Especially upcycling has become one of the emblems of a Green Economy of consumer products.
From a sociological point of view, however, upcycling is a highly complex process of a material, symbolic and economic transformations of values that I empirically reconstruct in my follow-the-waste-approach. In my ethnographic field research I accompanied upcycling startups as they tracked down, collected, sorted and cleaned waste materials. I visited urban mines, places of value transformation and spoke to the actors who turn waste into wants, i.e. specific commodities with culturally and economically distinctive values.
In my contribution, I develop a sociological typology for the transformation of values. I show how upcycling-start-ups not only create a whole new category of consumer products, but also deploy new regimes of value—to counteract material loss and to address ’overproduction’ and allegedly excessive forms of consumption. Valuation practices, however, always entail respective forms of devaluation, as well as new categories of social classification and distinction. Studying upcycling provides sociological insights on how these value regimes shape the moral economies and organizational structures of sustainability today.