51. European Environment Agency, Managing Municipal Solid Waste – A Review of Achievements in 32 European Countries (Copenhagen, 2013).
52. Quoted in Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History, 71, on which I have also drawn below.
53. Susanne Hartard & Michael Huhn, ‘Das SERO System’, in: Umweltschutz in der DDR: Analysen und Zeitzeugenberichte, eds. Hermann Behrens & Jens Hoffmann (Munich, 2007); and Jakob Calice, ‘ “Sekundärrohstoffe – eine Quelle, die nie versiegt”: Konzeption und Argumentation des Abfallverwertungssystems in der DDR aus umwelthistorischer Perspektive’ (M A thesis, Vienna, 2005).
54. DHV CR Ltd, ‘Waste Management Policies in Central and Eastern European Countries: Current Policies and Trends’, in: Final Report (Prague, 2001). See also the country reports by the European Environment Agency at http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/managing-municipal-solid-waste.
55. Allen Hershkowitz & Eugene Salerni, Garbage Management in Japan: Leading the Way (New York, 1987).
56. http://www.city.nagoya.jp/en/cmsfies/contents/0000022/22536/guide_e.pdf; http://www.japanfs.org/en/public/gov_01.html.
57. H. Itoh, Waste Management in Japan (Southampton, 2004); and Fumikazu Yoshida, The Economics of Waste and Pollution Management in Japan (Tokyo, 2002).
58. Yoshida, The Economics of Waste and Pollution Management in Japan.
59. Dahlén Lisa & Anders Lagerkvist, ‘Pay as You Throw: Strengths and Weaknesses of Weight-based Billing in Household Waste-collection systems in Sweden’, in: Waste Management 30, no. 1, 2010: 23–31. On Sweden, see now also: K. Wheeler & M. Glucksmann, Household Recycling and Consumption Work (London, in press).
60. WasteWise, Annual Report 2007.
61. Resource Futures WR0121 – Understanding Waste Growth at Local Authority Level, Final Report to Defra (2009), http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=WR0121_8316_FRP.pdf.
62. Eurostat figures for 2004–8: paper waste rose by 7%; plastic by 20%. In the USA, newspapers’ contribution to MSW rose from 7 million tons in 1960 to 15 million in 2000. By 2009 it had fallen to 8 million. Office-type paper meanwhile jumped from 1.5 million in 1960 to 5.4 million in 2009: see US Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/waste/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/msw2009rpt.pdf, table 15.
63. Julian Parfitt, Mark Barthel & Sarah Macnaughton, ‘Food Waste within Food Supply Chains: Quantification and Potential for Change to 2050’, in: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365, no. 1554, 2010: 3065–81. See also: Tristram Stuart, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (London, 2009).
64. David Evans, ‘Beyond the Throwaway Society: Ordinary Domestic Practice and a Sociological Approach to Household Food Waste’, in: Sociology 46, no. 1, 2012: 41–56; and David Evans, ‘Binning, Gifting and Recovery: The Conduits of Disposal in Household Food Consumption’, in: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, no. 6, 2012: 1123–37.
65. In Britain in 2006/7, fresh vegetables and salads amounted to 811,358 tons of ‘possibly avoidable’ food waste, more than twice that of all other food combined; WRAP, Household Food and Drink Waste in the UK (2009). WRAP, New Estimates (2012), table 4.
66. Terje Finstad, ‘Familiarizing Food: Frozen Food Chains, Technology and Consumer Trust, Norway 1940–1970’, Food and Foodways 21, no. 1, 2013: 22–45.
67. WRAP, Household Food and Drink Waste in the UK, 5.
68. Rathje, ‘The Garbage Decade’.
69. WRAP, ‘New Estimates for Household Food and Drink Waste in the UK’ (2011), 15–16.
70. http://globalrec.org/2013/11/11/report-national-green-assembly-on-waste-legislation-and-waste-pickers/. See also: Martin Medina, ‘Scavenger Co-operatives in Asia and Latin America’, in: Resources, Conservation and Recycling 31, no. 1, 2000: 51–69; and Kaveri Gill, Of Poverty and Plastic: Scavenging and Scrap-trading Entrepreneurs in India’s Urban Informal Economy (Oxford, 2009).
71. European Environment Agency, Movements of Waste across the EU’s Internal and External Borders (Copenhagen: 2012), section 4.2.
72. European Environmental Agency, ‘Movements of Waste’; and Josh Lepawsky & Chris McNabb, ‘Mapping International Flows of Electronic Waste’, in: Canadian Geographer 54, no. 2, 2010: 177–95.
73. Takayoshi Shinkuma & Nguyen Thi Minh Huong, ‘The Flow of E-waste material in the Asia Region’, in: Environmental Impact Assessment Review 29, 2009: 25–31. International Labour Office, ‘The Global Impact of E-waste’ (Geneva: 2012).
74. European Environmental Agency, ‘Movement of Waste’, sections 5 and 6.
75. Sally Hibbert, Suzanne Horne & Stephen Tagg, ‘Charity Retailers in Competition for Merchandise: Examining How Consumers Dispose of Used Goods’, in: Journal of Business Research 58, no. 6, 2005: 819–28.
76. Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (London, 2012). In Britain in 2013, 7.7 million households, or 29%, had single dwellers (up from 6.6 million in 1996): see Office of National Statistics, Families and Households, 2013, table 5.
77. See United Nations, Economic Commission for Europe, Economic and Social Council, ECE/CES/GE.20/2015: ‘Vacation Home Ownership in a Globalized World’, and see the UNECE’s http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/groups/wggna/GuideByChapters/Chapter_12.pdf.
78. A study of Austin, with data from 2008 to 2014, estimated that each 10% increase in airbnb supply resulted in a 0.35% decrease in monthly hotel-room revenue; for this and further references: see Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio & John W. Byers. ‘The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry’ (Boston, 2014).
79. Sean O’Connell, The Car and British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester, 1998), 34–6.
80. Alison Clarke, ‘Mother Swapping: The Trafficking of Nearly-new Children’s Wear’, in: Commercial Cultures: Economics, Practices, Spaces, eds. Peter Jackson et al. (Oxford, 2000), ch. 4.
81. Ilja van Damme, ‘Changing Consumer Preferences and Evolutions in Retailing. Buying and Selling Consumer Durables in Antwerp, c.1648–c.1748’, in: Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. P. Stabel et al. (Turnhout, 2006), 199–224; and Ilja Van Damme & Reinoud Vermoesen, ‘Second-hand Consumption as a Way of Life: Public Auctions in the Surroundings of Alost in the Late-eighteenth Century’, in: Continuity and Change 24, 2009: 275–305; see also 190, 227 above.
82. In the United Kingdom, some 300,000 tons of garments are collected each year. Only half is of sufficiently high grade to be sold on. 10% ends up recycled in industrial products such as as rags or filler for car seats.
83. Karen Tranberg Hansen, Salaula: The World of Second-hand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago, 2000), 226.
84. E. D. Larson, M. Ross & R. H. Williams, ‘Beyond the Era of Materials’, in: Scientific American 254, no. 6, 1986: 34–41; Robert H. Williams, Eric D. Larson & Marc H. Ross, ‘Materials, Affluence and Industrial Energy Use’, in: Annual Review of Energy 12, no. 1, 1987: 99–144.
85. Nicky Gregson, Alan Metcalfe & Louise Crewe, ‘Identity, Mobility and the Throwaway Society’, in: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2006, 682–700, quoted at 688. See further: Nicky Gregson & Louise Crewe, Second-hand Cultures (Oxford, 2003); and Nicky Gregson, Living with Things: Ridding, Accommodation, Dwelling (Oxford, 2006).
86. Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge, MA, 2006).
87. Tim Cooper, ‘Inadequate Life? Evidence of Consumer Attitudes to Product Obsolescence’, in: Journal of Consumer Policy 27, 2004: 421–49.
88. Rober Entner, ‘2014 Mobile Phone sales fall by 15%’, Recon Analytics: http://reconanalytics.com/2015/02/2014-us-mobile-phone-sales-fall-by-15-and-handsetreplacement-cycle-lengthens-to-historic-high/; and David Pogue, ‘Should You Upgrade Your Phone Every Year?’, in: Scientific American, 20 Aug. 2013.
89. For these opposite dynamics, see Valerie M. Thomas, ‘Demand and Demateriali
zation Impacts of Second-hand Markets’, Journal of Industrial Ecology 7, no. 2, 2003: 65–76.
90. The data from the German 2001–2 time budget study can be viewed at https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/EinkommenKonsumLebensbedingungen/Zeitbudgeterhebung/ZeitbudgetsTabellenband1_5639102029005.xls?__blob=publicationFile. For Austria, see the research by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Freizeit in 2002: http://www.freizeitforschung.at/data/forschungsarchiv/2002/ft_07_2002.pdf.
91. US Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1971 (Washington, DC, 1971) 200, 722, 741–3.
92. Aya Yoshida & Tomohiro Tasaki, ‘Materialflow Analysis of Used Personal Computers in Japan’, in: Waste Management 29, no. 5, 2009: 1602–14.
93. Of the 400,000 used computers that reach Lagos every month, only a quarter are functional, according to Oladele Osibanjo, ‘The Waste Challenge in Urban Development’ (University of Ibadan, Nigeria, 2006). For electronic waste, see the briefing papers available from the Basel Action Network at: http://www.ban.org/library-page/#briefing.
94. According to the Self Storage Association, 2.3 billion square feet: http://www.selfstorage.org/ssa/content/navigationmenu/aboutssa/factsheet/.
95. D. S and I. W. Yoon Oh, ‘A Study on the State of Balcony Usage and the User’s Attitude with Relation to Balcony Layout’, in: Housing Studies, Journal of Korean Association for Housing Policy Studies 7, no. 2, 1999: 125–32.
96. http://ronalford.theplan.com/; the National Association of Professional Organizers currently has 4,000 members: http://www.napo.net/who/.
97. See http://www.collectoronline.com; http://www.vacuumland.org; and Russell Belk, Magnus Morck & Karin M. Ekstrom, ‘Collecting of Glass: A Multi-sited Ethnography’, in: European Advances in Consumer Research 7, 2005: 404–8.
98. Don Jefferys, ‘Pathological Hoarding’, in: Australian Family Physician 37, no. 4, 2008.
99. J. E. Arnold and U. A. Lang, ‘Changing American Home Life: Trends in Domestic Leisure and Storage among Middle-class Families’, in: Journal of Family and Economic Issues 28, no. 1, 2007: 23–48, quoted at 36, 43.
100. Richard A. Gould & Michael B. Schiffer, Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us (New York, 1981).
101. EPA, Electronics Waste Management in the United States through 2009 (May 2011), table 4, 16.
102. Barely one in ten old mobile phones is recycled in the USA today; EPA, Electronics Waste Management in the United States through 2009 (May 2011), table 13, 27. For British figures, see Market Transformation Programme, 2005/6, 10. For France: Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie, Déchets d’Équipements Électriques et Électroniques (DEEE) (2010).
103. See esp. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, 1971); John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York, 1999); Albert Adriaanse et al., Resource Flows: The Material Basis of Industrial Economics (Washington, DC, 1997); Marina Fischer-Kowalski et al., Gesellschaftlicher Stoffwechsel und Kolonisierung von Natur (Amsterdam, 1997); and R. P. Sieferle et al., Das Ende der Fläche: Zum gesellschaftlichen Stoffwechsel der Industrialisierung (Cologne, 2006).
104. Adriaanse et al., Resource Flows.
105. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, Wie viel Umwelt braucht der Mensch? (Berlin, 1994).
106. M. Dittrich et al., ‘Green Economies around the World: Implications of Resource Use for Development and the Environment’ (Vienna: SERI, 2012), 12, 57–8. The Food and Agriculture Organization and the European Union include the water content (up to 15%) of grasses: Eurostat, ‘Material Use in the European Union, 1980–2000: Indicators and analysis’ (Luxemburg, 2002).
107. B. Girod & P. De Haan, ‘More or Better? A Model for Changes in Household Greenhouse-gas Emissions due to Higher Income’, in: Journal of Industrial Ecology 14, no. 1: 31–49.
108. William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate (Princeton, NJ, 2005); for land use, I draw on the new historical database of the environment (HYDE) developed by Kees Klein Goldewijk, see http://www.mnp.nl/en/themasites/hyde/index.html.
109. F. Krausmann et al., ‘Growth in Global Materials Use, GDP and Population during the Twentieth Century’, in: Ecological Economics 68, no. 10, 2009: 2696–705, with thanks to Fridolin Krausmann for allowing me to reproduce these figures. DMC equals the total amount of resources extracted (DE), plus imports minus exports. Since one country’s exports are another’s imports, DMC is the same as DE for the world.
110. Dittrich et al., ‘Green Economies’, 60.
111. Eurostat, ‘Economy-wide Material-flow Accounts and Derived Indicators’ (Luxembourg, 2001), 40.
112. Ian Gazley & Dilan Bhuvanendran, ‘Trends in UK Material Flows between 1970 and 2003’, in Economic Trends 619 (London: Office for National Statistics, 2005).
113. Goodall notes that Britons ate 4% less in 2007 than in 2000; Chris Goodall, ‘ “Peak Stuff”: Did the UK Reach a Maximum Use of Material Resources in the Early Part of the Last Decade?’, http://www.carboncommentary.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Peak_Stuff_17.10.11.pdf, 2011. Compare the critique by George Monbiot in his blog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/nov/03/peak-consumption-hypothesis-correct.
114. Andrew W. Wyckoff & Joseph M. Roop, ‘The Embodiment of Carbon in Imports of Manufactured Products: Implications for International Agreements on Greenhouse-gas emissions’, in: Energy Policy 22, no. 3, 1994: 187–94; Roldan Muradian, Martin O’Connor & Joan Martinez-Alier, ‘Embodied Pollution in Trade: Estimating the “Environmental Load Displacement” of Industrialized Countries’, in: Ecological Economics 41, no. 1, 2001: 51–67.
115. According to the UK Energy Research Centre, territorial-based emissions declined by 19% between 1990 and 2008, while consumption-based emissions increased by 20%; government figures give higher figures for the former: HC 1646, 18 April 2012, House of Commons, Energy and Climate Change Committee: Consumption-based Emissions Reporting, Twelfth Report of Session 2010–12, Vol. I.
116. M. Dittrich, S. Bringezu & H. Schutz, ‘The Physical Dimension of International Trade: Part 2: Indirect Global Resource Flows between 1962 and 2005’, in: Ecological Economics 79, 2012: 32–43.
117. Atiq Uz Zaman & Steffen Lehmann, ‘The Zero Waste Index: A Performance Measurement Tool for Waste Management Systems in a “Zero Waste City” ’, in: Journal of Cleaner Production 50, 2013: 123–32.
118. American Physical Society, Efficient Use of Energy: The APS Studies on the Technical Aspects of the More Efficient Use of Energy (New York, 1976), no. 25, 77.
119. Arthur H. Rosenfeld, ‘The Art of Energy Efficiency: Protecting the Environment with Better Technology’, in: Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 24, no. 1, 1999: 33–82.
120. E.g., 12th Congress of the World Energy Conference, New Delhi, 18–23 Sept. 1983, division 2, section 2.3.12: Naoto Sagawa, ‘Prospects for Japan’s Energy Supply–Demand System’, 22.
121. Department of Energy and Climate Change, ‘Energy Consumption in the United Kingdom’, 2012; Eurostat: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&plugin=1&language=en&pcode=tsdpc310.
122. The size of the rebound effect and how to measure it remains a subject of considerable controversy. The International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook in 2012, reckoned it to be a modest 9%. Other experts reach 50%: e.g. Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger & Jesse Jenkins, Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena (Oakland, MD, 2011).
123. 2011 ‘Consommation durable’ fair, Paris: ADEME (French environment and energy management agency), Petites réponses, 9.
124. 1993: 10.01 quadrillion Btu vs 10.17 quadrillion Btu in 2009: US Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2009.
125. Swedish Parliament, ‘Think Twice! An Action Plan for Sustainable Household Consumption’, in: Government Communication 2005/06:107 (Stockholm, 2005).
126. Peter Kemper & John M. Quigley, The Economics of Refuse C
ollection (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 83.
127. See the 2009 residential data by the US Energy Information Administration, esp. table HC 3.4, at: http://www.eia.doe.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/excel/HC3.4%20Appliances%20by%20Number%20of%20Household%20Members.xls.
128. DTI, Energy Consumption in the United Kingdom (2004). For American singles, see the EIA data cited in the previous note 127.
129. Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality; and Shove, Pantzar & Watson, The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes.
130. For the UK, see Energy Saving Trust, The Rise of the Machines: A Review of Energy Using Products in the Home from the 1970s to Today (London, 2006), and the follow-up report, The Elephant in the Living Room: How Our Appliances and Gadgets are Trampling the Green Dream (London, 2011). In the USA, 426 million electric units were sold in 2007, seven times as many as in 1987: see New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Beyond Waste (New York, 2010), 63f.
131. EPA, Municipal Solid Waste in the United States 2009, ch. 2. For clothes in Britain, see Guardian, 28 Feb. 2006.
132. K. Parrott, J. Emmel & J. Beamish, ‘A Nation of Packrats: Rethinking the Design Guidelines for Kitchen Storage’, in: Housing on the Urban Landscape Conference (Chicago, 2004). See further: Oriel Sullivan & Jonathan Gershuny, ‘Inconspicuous Consumption: Work-rich, Time-poor in the Liberal Market Economy’, in: Journal of Consumer Culture 4, no. 1, 2004: 79–100, esp. 95–6; Martin Hand, Elizabeth Shove & Dale Southerton, ‘Home Extensions in the United Kingdom: Space, Time and Practice’, in: Environment and Planning D 25, no. 4, 2007: 668–81.
133. The cities were Fredrikstad, Groningen, Padova, Guildford and Sodermalm/Stockholm: see Eivind Stø et al., ‘Consumption and Environment in Five European Cities: European Report’ (2002).
EPILOGUE
1. Serge Latouche, Le pari de la décroissance (Paris, 2006); Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London, 2009); Paul Ariès, La simplicité volontaire contre le mythe de l’abondance (Paris, 2010); Niko Paech, Befreiung vom Überfluss: Auf dem Weg in die Postwachstumsökonomie (Munich, 2012). Compare: Irmi Seidl and Angelika Zahrnt (eds), Postwachstumsgesellschaft: Konzepte für die Zukunft (Marburg, 2010).
Empire of Things Page 109
