Intimate Mediations of For‐Profit Conservation Finance: Waste,Improvement, and Accumulation

How to understand the marriage between accumulation and conservation? The paper draws from extensive research into one value chain, from the advisor in New York City to a wildlife‐friendly cattle business in Kenya. Making this enterprise return in money requires intimate and relentless efforts to transform wasteful conduct across a range of institutions and people; we focus on the attempted production of NGO economicus, homo economicus plus, and bos Taurus economicus. Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorists of capitalism, we emphasise how green capitalist value production does not always hinge on extinguishing other‐than‐capitalist‐social relations but rather attempts to mobilise and harness such differences, including non‐profit‐seeking values, logics and relations. The paper concludes by reflecting on the temporal challenges facing for‐profit conservation finance, including those posed by previous regimes of accumulation that it relies on but also wants to overcome.     

Matter in or out of place? Bicycle parking strategies and their effects on people,practices and places

This study explores what bicycle parking strategies tell us about the place of mobility objects in contemporary urban streetscapes. It examines the bicycle's liminality by combining approaches from practice theory with Mary Douglas' concept of ‘matter out of place’. Much research on cycling has concentrated on the bicycle in movement, yet in our research, based in four relatively high-cycling English urban areas, a common theme was concern about the bicycle when not in use. Bicycles at rest were perceived as threatened or threatening, risky or at-risk; affected by theft, vandalism, the weather, official and familial disapproval. In the study, we link this to the tenuous place of urban cycling in England; while bicycle ownership is widespread, everyday cycling remains marginalised and this shapes the place of the bicycle resting on city streets, in homes and in workplaces. Bicycles waiting for their owners are often ‘matter out of place’. This is seen within the context of broader motorised landscapes which have made driving easier through locating driving competences in the car itself, while comparable cycling competences remain on the outside—with the cyclist.     

Nuclear dreams and realities in contemporary Russia and Ukraine

This article examines the evolution of the nuclear enterprises in Russia and Ukraine after the break-up of the USSR in 1991 to the present and contributes to better understanding of interrelation between large-scale technologies and politics. It compares how economic crises and recovery, political considerations, and nuclear imaginaries – visions of the role that nuclear power will play in conceptions of a national future – have determined the direction of nuclear energy policy. It explores institutional, legal, and other developments surrounding the 34 operating power reactors in Russia and 15 in Ukraine including promotion and regulation; operation; license life extension; decommissioning and spent fuel and waste handling. Russia and Ukraine are connected by history, Soviet reactor technology, and nuclear fuel and waste disposal agreements that shape and constrain the countries’ behavior, and leave great uncertainty for the future given the ongoing conflict between the two nations. Yet both nations hope for some grand nuclear ‘renaissance.’     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.     

Faecal Coliform Levels in Mountain Streams of Winter Recreation Zones in the Cairngorms National Park,Scotland

This study aims to establish the spatial distribution of stream water faecal coliform (FC) concentrations in specific winter recreation areas in the Northern Corries of the Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland. A total of 207 water samples were collected from 10 sites during two winter seasons (2007–2008 and 2008–2009) and analysed by Colilert^® 24 for the presence of FC, specifically Escherichia coli (E. coli). E. coli was not detected at Sites 1–7, above 635?m. Sites 8, 9 and 10 (below 635?m) had positive detection rates for E. coli, these being 32%, 35% and 31%, respectively. Results provide important data on the level of faecal bacteria in selected Scottish mountain streams, whilst also providing comparative benchmark data for similar studies proposed in other UK upland recreational hotspots.     

Shoddy heap: a material history between waste and manufacture

This essay uses a present-day mountain of textile waste known as ‘shoddy’ as an entry point into the history and ramifications of the development of wool recycling technology in West Yorkshire, England. It is argued that this entity, produced since the early nineteenth century by means of the collection, shredding, and re-spinning of old and discarded wool rags, emerged as both technological innovation and raw material. Its history, defined in part by its precarious position at the nexus of waste and manufacture, is that of a reconfiguration of technology with simultaneously ethical, political, and environmental dimensions.     

Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature

Abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the “dirty” history and geography of enclosure, as both an instance of primitive accumulation and a production of nature. Specifically, I reconsider the English enclosures as a struggle over the land‐use designation of “waste”. Whereas both open fields and common waste lands were an essential and valuable part of the common right economy, advocates of enclosure came to see these same lands as wasted commons; lands that were potentially, but not yet, improved. This dialectic of waste and potential permeates the fabric of the nature produced through enclosure, which I name terra economica. Typically, this terrain has been understood as a passive repository of free resources, extending across absolute space. While such accounts consider the making of nature into a universal means of production, it is equally important to consider the ways in which nature is produced as a universal condition of production.     

MAKING CHAINS THAT (UN)MAKE THINGS: WASTE–VALUE RELATIONS AND THE BANGLADESHI RUBBISH ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY

There is growing empirical and theoretical interest in post‐consumption activity that results in the capture and creation of value from waste in the global economy. This article engages with two dominant approaches to tracing the capture and creation of value, global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs), and their shared call to examine waste disposal and recycling. Using non‐participant observation, semi‐structured interviews, and a survey we examine what happens to the products of one of GVCs ‘and GPNs’ paradigmatic industries, electronics, when they are labelled e‐waste and are imported into Dhaka, Bangladesh, as rubbish electronics. Rather than wasting and final disposal predominating, our research documents a substantial rubbish recovery economy that captures and creates value anew. Consequently, we argue that both GVC and GPN approaches must rethink how they theorize the capture and creation of value.     

What is Waste that We Should Account for it? A Look Inside Queensland's Ecological Rucksack

While most Australians are conscious of the amount of waste that they place in garbage bins, relatively few would be aware of the waste that is generated in the course of producing the goods and services that they consume. This ‘embodied waste’ makes up a large part of the ‘ecological rucksack’ of those goods and services. This study develops a waste account for Queensland, using the ecological rucksack framework to illustrate patterns of waste production in the Australian economy. It classifies wastes both by type and broad sector of production. The study finds that the Queensland economy generated more than four billion tonnes of waste during the 2006–2007 financial year. The largest waste streams are produced at the resource extraction and distribution stages, and are predominantly materials that are disposed of without being used or are lost through inefficient use. The majority of the waste is produced upstream of the point of consumption and a large part is associated with materials produced for export.