From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary

Notes

215 Notes 1. Was State Socialism Wasteful? 1. The energy intensity index is the amount of material or energy used per unit of GDP. 2. In environmental policy circles, the term ‘‘end-of-pipe technologies’’ refers to the management and treatment of already produced emissions and waste, rather than to their prevention, which would require an intervention into product design and the production process. More about this distinction later. 3. Greens active in the Garé case included Green Circle, based in the nearby city Pécs, and the Green Alternative Party. 4. I am using the word ‘‘exotic’’ in Gudeman’s (1986) sense, as something markedly different and alien to Western cognitive models. 5. These are the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. 2. Toward a Social Theory of Waste 1. An exception is Berki 1992. 2. I have elaborated on these links in an article (Gille 1997). 3. An exception is Tickle and Welsh 1998. 4. ‘‘Tap’’ and ‘‘sink’’ refer to the two functions of nature, as a source of resources and as a dumping ground for emissions and wastes. 5. In the absence of earlier data, I had to accept post-collapse data for socialist countries , that is, data from 1990. Then the economic decline was not yet as deep, and the ‘‘logic’’oftheeconomywasstillunchangedenoughfor1990wasteoutputdatatoserveas a proxy for the pre-1989 data. In the next chapter I will analyze such absences of data. 6. An obvious candidate for such a factor was the economic, and more directly the industrial, structure of a country. Industries vary a great deal in terms of the amount of waste per unit of output, which makes countries with a larger share of waste-intensive industries appear more wasteful than those with a smaller share. Having put together a number of tables with too many empty cells or too many footnotes indicating differences in measurement, I had to admit that there was just no easy way to quantify industrial structure according to waste intensity; in fact, even the classification of the origin of wastes is subject to significant enough variation from country to country to make cross-national comparisons unreliable. Again, more about the problems of measurement and comparison in chapter 2. 7. The 1966 edition of Kingzett’s Chemical Encyclopaedia provides the following explanation for the term ‘‘Wastes (Industrial)’’: ‘‘Many industries related to chemistry produce wastes that are troublesome, not only to the industries themselves but also to the surrounding communities. As industrial areas become more and more congested this matter becomes a serious problem.’’ Here waste is not a problem in itself, but Notes to pages 19–34 216 congestion is, although what industrial areas become congested with—people, buildings , or perhaps wastes—is left unclear. The problem of waste is that it is in the wrong, i.e., congested, place, it lacks value, and therefore the solution is its disposal. 8. Of course, one characteristic feature of consumer societies is that the intended time of usage is getting shorter. See my analysis of Toffler (1970) and Packard (1960) below. 9. For a useful theorization of the life of objects, primarily commodities, see Appadurai (1986). 10. Other economic models treat by-products as overproduced commodities which then ‘‘can be disposed of, that is, the prices of these will be zero’’ (Schefold 1987, 1031, explaining von Neumann), or stipulate that ‘‘joint products can be disposed at zero cost’’ (Schefold 1987, 1031, explaining Koopmans). That is, they ‘‘allow for’’ recycling and dumping, but it is assumed that either could be done at no expense to the producer or that, at least, those costs need not be integrated into the accounting of usual production costs. 11. Gourlay castigates dictionaries and working definitions of hazardous wastes and special wastes by various supranational agencies, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Health Organization (WHO), for including disposal in the definition of waste, thus ‘‘fudg[ing] the issue by including the potential and the existing within the same category’’ (Gourlay 1992, 23). This is a fallacy in thinking I referred to above as ‘‘operationalism.’’ 12. He makes the claim that waste ‘‘can be taken into account by analyzing the social relations that 1) govern the degree to which real engines deviate from ideal engines by failing to minimize the waste produced, 2) govern what happens to waste (dumping, recycling, reusing, purifying, etc.), and 3) govern...