Toward an Economic Sociology of Waste

We tend to think of waste as epiphenomenal to the core processes of capitalism: as an outcome of the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities. But what if we were to theorize the generation, movement, and disposal of waste as essential to, and constitutive of, 21st-century capitalism rather than epiphenomenal to it? This paper sketches what an economic sociology of waste could look like.

A useful starting point is to consider two meanings of the word “waste” in English. The material conception of waste refers to products of human activity discarded as useless or worthless (e.g., industrial waste), and often has a technical, morally neutral valence expressed in statistics and chemistry (e.g., metric tons of CO₂ or spent nuclear fuel). Capitalist institutions and processes generate material waste (e.g., factories, power plants), circulate it (sewage systems, transnational e-waste regimes), recycle it, and try to mitigate it (environmental consultancies, regulatory agencies). In contrast, the moral conception of waste refers to things consumed without adequate return (wasted money, time, or energy) or neglect (wasted opportunity) and emerges from discourse, culture, and politics. Debates about climate change and environmental despoliation often counterpose incommensurable dimensions of both definitions, such as the moral cost of laying off oil workers in a proposed nature preserve versus the moral cost of letting endangered species go extinct.

An economic sociology of waste would make its distinctive contribution investigating how the material and moral conceptions of waste intersect: how do they constitute each other in environmental debates? And how do they emerge from, and then shape, the inequalities, institutions, and worldviews characteristic of contemporary global capitalism? The foundational theoretical premise here is that waste is at once materially consequential and socially constructed. Economic interests and logics are central to deciding what counts as waste and what to do about it.