re-use and repayment is really just a prolongation of its exchange. Considered from another angle, the only effective way to curb the production of waste might simply be to stop collecting it in the first place. If indeed the only way to break the cycle of repayment is for someone to outright refuse a gift in the first place (an act, according to Mauss, that usually results in an individual being socially cast out), what would it mean today to deny waste’s ability to repay, to prohibit its usefulness as a measure against its perpetual reproduction? What is insidious about this analogy (and why, I think, Mauss laments the moral depravity of a money economy) is that the debt incurred through modern prestations is not a debt that exists between you and your neighbour, or even between two communities, but a debt that is owed by individuals to the total system itself. Like the burning up of gifts and their transference to the spirit world, as a result of the extensive material transformation waste undergoes over the course of its reclamation, and how few traditional problems associated with waste (sight, smell, health rists) linger after its transformation, the ontology of waste as it drifts from a material thing into something immaterial (energy,habitat and social programming, for example) raises a considerable problem of perception. What, after all, are the consequences of wasteful behaviour when trash is transformed into an innocuous grey sludge and buried eight kilometres offshore? At once central to the well-being of an economic system premised on consumption, the issues surrounding waste’s material/immaterial flux and its ability to return, in exchange, an economic and environmental benefit is, at the very least, a vexing and often overlooked problematic resulting from new waste practices.
Enter wasting. On the one hand, wasting is fundamental to this total system since it is practically synonymous with consumption – but waste, too, fits neatly into the fold. And here one has to firmly believe in the value of waste and its contribution to economic production. The impasse to this realisation are modern cultural attitudes that conceal the value of waste beneath layers of taboo, from a deeply- felt revulsion towards uncleanliness to its association with moral and economic depravity. From the earliest use of excrement as fertiliser to Parisian rag pickers, the re-use of industrial wastes to waste-to-energy plants and, now, artificial islands, garbage has and continues to play a prominent role in our modern exchange system. And while it may be hard to imagine lining your pockets with garbage, consider the fact that in 2010 Oslo pursued a plan that would have seen 200,000 tons of Naples’ trash shipped northwards to fuel Oslo’s own under-capacity incineration plants that supply the city’s heating. Once you assign a value to waste, both as an economic activity and in its basic material form, it is not entirely farfetched to see how its exchange conforms to Mauss’s basic rules: like gifts, waste is given and accepted, and its repayment engenders a kind of self-fulfilling total system. Where Singapore’s example is useful is in showing that no matter how effectively you destroy, reduce or put waste out of sight, Mauss’s basic rules still rings true: despite the abstraction of gifts into capital, energy and islands, waste’s ability to repay again and again only cultivates the production of more waste. As with gifts (I give to you, so you give to me, and so I give again to you, etc. etc.) so too with waste: the consumption of goods compels the purchase of more goods, the incineration of waste compels the incineration of more waste, waste’s burial ensures its subsequent burial. In essence, waste’s
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