[PL] Toward Circular Economies ? The Political Economy of Closing Loops of Production, Waste, and Recovery
Le 29 août 2023
Dr. Nelly Leblond, research fellow at Ben Gurion University of the Negev
« Toward Circular Economies ?
The Political Economy of Closing Loops of Production, Waste, and Recovery »
Séminaire mardi 29 août 2023 de 13h30 à 15h - Salle Chadefaud, bâtiment ICL, UPPA de Pau.
Summary and short bios
A coalition has emerged under the banner promoting a “circular economy” yielding zero waste. It seems simple: our material use loops are leaky, we will stop this, feed the end back to the start, voila! The resultant continuous circulation of materials will lessen dependence on new inputs on the front end. And it will reduce waste on the exit end, feeding materials back to new production, like the alchemical snake eating its own tail. Thus, technical innovation and economic efficiency will decouple production and consumption from their apparent structural limitations of resource use and environmental impact, opening new vistas of economic growth.
In this talk we will offer some observations that disrupt the simplifications of circularity discourse. These draw on our work on e-waste flows over the last years, ranging across bibliometric discourse analysis, policy advocacy, and field work within and on the social and chemical circuits of informal and formal e-waste economies. In particular, we will present and attempt to bring into dialog observations from two bodies of effort: (1) our systematic analysis of e-waste scientific publications since the 1990s, and (2) a decade of field engagement with a Israeli-Palestinian e-waste hub that demonstrates the local inflections of “circularity” politics as well as being emblematic of dynamics occurring in similar informal waste processing hubs globally.
This work offers many detailed indications that despite decades of policies and declared intentions, the non-circular “openness” of material flows is built into production and policy processes and solidified within and through professional discourses. What does and does not get captured and fed back from the end-of-life is shaped not simply by lapses in technical or economic instruments, but by the deeply stratified social locations and capacities of the places and actors involved. Thus, “capture” (or invisible release) of waste flows is not an abstraction, nor localized to the apparent sites and moments of the value chain, but enmeshed in broader circuits of power, and driven by agendas that can be quite far removed from merely environmental or even economic impulses.
Biographies
Prof. Yaakov Garb
Yaakov Garb is Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He draws on a training in environmental studies and science and technology studies (STS) in his research, teaching, and consulting on environmental and urban issues. Prof. Garb specializes in projects demanding interdisciplinary perspectives, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and a merging of analysis with advocacy for change.
Dr. Nelly Leblond
Nelly Leblond is a research fellow at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. With a background in geography and a mixed method approach combining ethnography, remote sensing, and quantitative analysis, she has been working on human waste and electronic waste, exploring the interactions between uneven socio-spatial relations and the politics of knowledge production.
