Abstract
Urban waste only turned into a negative externality, i.e., garbage, in the 20th century, changing the metabolism between city and countryside. During the development of the modern city, urban waste was a coveted source of resources that fed industrial and agricultural activities, which, in turn, fed cities with diverse material goods and food. Garbage is a recent invention that breaks this circulation of organic and inorganic materials, starting with the institution of undifferentiated collection—which mixes all waste—destined for landfills, incinerators, or open dumps. Starting from the experience of collecting recyclable materials created by Brazilian waste pickers, which today finds reflection in urban agroecology, this article discusses how these activities contribute to creating a new man–nature metabolism, broken by capitalist production processes, as well as its limits and the conditions necessary for its development.
Zusammenfassung
Siedlungsabfälle haben sich erst im 20. Jahrhundert zu einer negativen Externalität entwickelt, konkret zu Müll, und so den Stoffwechsel zwischen Stadt und Land verändert. Während des Aufstiegs unserer modernen Städte war Abfall noch eine begehrte Ressourcenquelle, die industrielle und landwirtschaftliche Tätigkeiten beförderte – welche im Gegenzug die Städte mit verschiedenen materiellen Gütern und Nahrungsmitteln versorgten. „Müll“ hingegen ist eine neuere Erfindung, die diesen Kreislauf organischer und anorganischer Materialien unterbricht. Sie beginnt mit der Institutionalisierung einer nichtdifferenzierenden Müllsammlung, bei der alle Abfälle gemischt werden und damit für Mülldeponien, Verbrennungsanlagen oder zur Aufschüttung von Landschaften bestimmt sind. Ausgehend von den Erfahrungen brasilianischer Müllsammler*innen mit wiederverwertbaren Materialien, die sich aktuell mit Ansätzen urbaner Agrarökologie verbinden, wird in diesem Artikel erörtert, wie solche Aktivitäten zunächst zur Entstehung eines neuen Stoffwechsels zwischen Mensch und Natur beitragen – der jedoch durch kapitalistische Produktionsprozesse unterbrochen wird – und in welchen Grenzen sowie unter welchen Bedingungen dessen künftige Entwicklung verläuft.
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Notes
Wealth can be measured as flow or as stock, in the first case privileging the capital accumulation based on the private appropriation of the surplus or of the new value created, in the second, the social usufruct of what has already been produced (Sachs 2007).
Cooperation here consists of “taking into account the restrictions of others in the choices and arbitrations that the actors make in their real activities. It is based on everyone’s ability to combine their own field of competence with the challenges, restrictions and skills of others. Therefore, cooperation refers to the quality of work as an activity that creates value on an economic, social or personal level, and the quality of the relationships between the actors” (Du Tertre et al. 2019, p. 5).
“Urban agriculture is a multidimensional concept that includes the production, transformation and provision of services, in a safe way, to generate agricultural products (vegetables, fruits, medicinal plants, ornamentals, cultivated or derived from agroextractivism, etc.) and livestock (animals small, medium and large) aimed at self-consumption, exchanges and donations or marketing, (re)making efficient and sustainable use of local resources and inputs (soil, water, waste, labor, knowledge, etc.). These activities can be practiced in intra-urban or peri-urban spaces, being linked to urban or metropolitan regions’ dynamics and articulated with the territorial and environmental management of cities. These activities should be guided by respect for local knowledge and wisdom, by promoting gender equity through the use of appropriate technologies and participatory processes promoting the urban, social and environmental management of cities, contributing to the improvement of the quality of life of the urban population, and for the sustainability of cities” (Santandreu and Lovo 2007, quoted in Almeida 2016, p. 95).
“Marx reiterated the Italian political economist Pietro Verri’s statement that human production was not properly an act of creation but merely ‘the reordering of matter’ and was thus dependent on what the earth provided (Marx 1976 [1867], quoted in Foster 1999, p. 390). The human interaction with nature always had to take the form of a metabolic cycle that needed to be sustained for the sake of successive generations. Technological improvements were a necessary but insufficient means for the ‘improvement’ in the human relation to the earth” (Foster, 1999, p. 390).
“The evaluation of the technological routes that are presented today to deal with the problem of urban solid waste, in addition to technical requirements, must consider heterogeneous criteria (social, environmental, economic, political, cultural) that cannot be equalized in a technical decision model” (Lima and Souza 2016, p. 352).
Given the effects of counterproductivity, Graziano Neto ponders: “It is necessary to think of a new concept, the search for possible productivity, which would be defined as that which can be achieved, in each concrete situation, without compromising the stability of the agro-ecosystem and the quality of final products. Certain productivity gains do not matter socially […] the work done for this purpose has no social value” (Graziano Neto 1982, p. 144; emphasis in the original).
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Lima, F.d.P.A., Souza, M., Toffanelli, V. et al. For a new territorial metabolism. Urban waste as a resource for social and sustainable development. Soz Passagen 12, 291–311 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12592-020-00363-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12592-020-00363-0