Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 1: Dust and Ashesunless there is an infrastructure to gather it. That infrastructure will only be builtif there is a profitable gas market and if building the infrastructure does not delaythe production of oil. This is because oil is the more profitable product and rapidproduction represents the most efficient return on capital invested. The definitionof gas as waste thus turns on shareholder ‘value’. On South Africa’s gold belt, theold toxic mine dumps are being reworked with the latest technologies to extractgold that earlier miners had missed – while a fine dust laced with uranium blowsover Johannesburg’s poorer southern suburbs. Lately, mine managers have arguedthat their waste is not waste, but ‘mining residues’ which may one day becomeresources as future technologies allow for improved extraction. A similar argumentmay now be made for landfills themselves. In Britain, landfill managers startedmapping what was dumped where in the 1980s. At the height of the commoditiesboom in early 2008, several firms proposed using these maps to mine the landfillsfor materials. With the subsequent drop in commodities, this resource will havereverted to waste.In terms of materials conservation, recycling waste before it gets to landfill isobviously a far better option. Mixing waste together, even before dumping, alreadycontaminates it, sucks value from it and creates hazards. Waste pickers working atthe margins where markets require the waste of value, including human value, arealso working the wrong side of the border of the unclean and dangerous. They arethemselves represented as dangerous, not least to the procedures of orderly wastemanagement, and they work in danger and at the mercy of a volatile recyclablesmarket.Dumping on the poorFor industry and the middle classes, ‘away’ is mostly where poor people live. Observingand fighting against this gave rise to the idea of environmental injustice and racismin the US. As activist Dana Alston put it, “We have learned … that communities ofcolour are targets for the siting of toxic waste dumps and most hazardous industries”not wanted in white, middle class communities [1993: 188]. This targeting wasaccompanied by the promise of jobs in areas with high unemployment. But “the fewjobs that we did get were lower paying and more hazardous jobs” [189]. The US- 14 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation