Letting Waste Get Stuck in Our Throats: From a circular to a digestive logic

As the dominant ideology of Zero-Waste-Circular-Economy (ZWCE) would have it, there will be no such thing as waste in the future. ZWCE relies on technology to “design out waste” and frames it as an object of “manageable sustainability” (Valenzuela & Bohm, 2017) that can be transformed, exchanged and circulated again and again. However, this idealized techno-control driven discourse on the becoming-resource of waste cannot account for the ways in which these remainders defy a circular logic. Waste gets stuck, it accumulates and forces us to ponder its (in)digestibility.

Although ZWCE is concerned with the digestive – e.g. (global) metabolism of flows of materials and the anaerobic digestion of waste – it takes metabolism to be stable, closed and quantifiable. However, a genuine digestive logic requires the re-evaluation of metabolism as an “in-between concept” (Landecker, 2013), concerning the interplay between individuation and environment, that is concerned with life. Drawing on philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thought on (bio)degradation and things living on (after we are done with them), I will argue for a “revised metabolic imagery” (Gabrys, 2013) that steers clear of closing the loop.

Finally, I will argue that this shift from a circular to a digestive logic requires an ethic of “eating [and execrating] well” (Derrida, 1991), that concerns learning to live with (unwelcome) remainders. What do we eat and what do we give to eat, both metaphorically and literally? What lives on – and how? Instead of trying to smooth things over, we should let waste get stuck in our throats.