Wasting Generously. 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 indigestibility.

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) that concerns the interplay between individuation and environment. Metabolic processes such as eating and execrating point to our being enmeshed, permeable, ecological beings – we feed on each other’s remnants. Moreover, metabolic processes point to digestion being a social thing, a joint event, e.g. without the bacteria in my microbiome I would not be able to digest a thing.

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s ethical command to “eat well” (Derrida, 1991) in this paper I will suggest we shift from a circular logic to a digestive logic and will argue for an ethics of eating and wasting well. This ethics requires we ask: what do we eat and what do we give to eat, both metaphorically and literally? What lives on and how, i.e. what do we give to eat to future generations? It appears we are offering them a lot of things that are not easily digestible, like plastics, CO2 and nuclear waste. Following a digestive logic, therefore, we don’t ask how we can take control of our waste and “close the loop” but instead how we can once again understand ourselves in edible terms (Plumwood, 1993) and learn to give to eat and waste generously.