Suspending Discarding

Waste is a matter of care. In contrast to what the German term Entsorgung suggests – a term which means disposal, but which could also be literally translated as “disengagement from care” – waste does remain and it does require an ongoing labour of care. For instance, centuries of aftercare are required for the countless landfills of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which some scholars have estimated to be the largest remains created by humans on planet Earth ( Trumpeter, 2012 : 279; Weber, 2014 : 12). This waste labour often remains invisible, relegated to elsewhere and to “ elsetime ”, 1 to specialists, and mostly to marginalised peripheries and communities, to future generations, as well as to more-than-human actors. Jason Moore (2015) has conceptualised this operation as central to capitalism&s;s ongoing exploitation of “cheap nature” as a tap (as a source for the extraction of resources) and a sink (for depositing waste and toxins), alluding with his terminology to the invisible and unpaid care work in the domestic sphere. In his rendering, capitalism does not only exploit the power of people&s;s labour but also makes nature work for free as a resource tap and a waste sink, the latter including not only landfills and dumps “but bodily, subterranean, and atmospheric spaces” ( Moore, 2015 : 280). However, Moore also detects a tendency of what he calls “waste frontiers” 2 to “enclose and fill up faster […] than […] new ones (can be located)”, which aggravates capitalism&s;s inherent contradictions and “is throwing up limits of an entirely new character” ( 2015 : 280). The sheer volume and pace of coverage regarding the spread and the effects of pollution globally, of waste streams, such as (micro)plastics, spreading to the furthest reaches of the planet and coming dangerously close by entering food chains and bodies, or the decisions of some major global waste importers to ban or send back Western waste imports, 3 are underpinning Moore&s;s argument. Waste does not disappear, it turns up, constantly and everywhere (while of course not being evenly distributed). As a consequence, the issue of waste-care-work is coming to the fore with greater urgency.