Hazardous Travels. Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Simone Müller
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290156503

Ghost acres, waste disposal sites beyond national jurisdiction, and mobility of hazardous waste provide the two key elements of todays global waste economy, and help sustain an economic system built on economic expansion, profit maximization, and environmental sustainability characteristic of post-1970s Western industrial capitalism.In theory, a material can be considered hazardous waste if discarded and able to cause substantial harm to humans or the environment. In practice there is no globally binding definition of what materials and thresholds make waste hazardous. This definitional and regulatory deficiency makes hazardous material highly mobile, both conceptually and spatially. Various actors, national governments, international institutions, businesses, NGOs, environmental activists, ascribe different political or economic values to hazardous waste. Based on these, they import or export hazardous material and so create toxic ghost acres globally. Toxic waste ghost acres are the other fundamental condition of the global waste economy. Following the environmental turn of the 1970s, industrial countries in particular started relocating their toxic industries and waste for disposal or recycling, primarily to the Global South. Conceptually, ghost acres originated within nineteenth-century British industrialization, predicated on resources from distant ghost acres of land in and beyond the British Empire (Pomeranz, 2000). These still exist, but have moved to the end of the global commodity chain. They epitomize the externalizing society of industrial capitalism, where people do not necessarily live beyond their means but beyond someone elses (Lessenich, 2015). The research group Hazardous Travels: Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy seeks to explore the dynamics of the global waste economy from the 1960s to present through the political, cultural, and socioeconomic structures that allowed its participants to give different value to hazardous waste and so enabled toxic material relocation. The project contains one overarching study (OS) on the structures and dynamics shaping the global waste economy over time, and three individual case studies of hazardous waste relocation types: (A) waste disposal between the two Germanies, (B) waste recycling in India, and (C) export of dirty industries in Ecuador. The projects goal is to (1) identify the political, cultural, and socioeconomic actors and structures that forged discourses on and practices of hazardous waste management, (2) analyze the translation processes between contesting constructions of hazardous waste, from garbage imperialism to voluntary exchange, and (3) contrast and compare these findings in global perspective. Using hazardous waste as a lens, this research group seeks to expand understanding of the myriad relationships of ecology and economy, incorporating insights of globalization theory, postcolonialism, economic intellectual thinking, and the material turn.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups