Anna Krzywoszynska

Doing the ‘dirty work’ of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play.

Co-producing energy futures: impacts of participatory modelling

This transdisciplinary research case study sought to disrupt the usual ways public participation shapes future energy systems. An interdisciplinary group of academics and a self-assembling public of a North English town co-produced ‘bottom-up’ visions for a future local energy system by emphasizing local values, aspirations and desires around energy futures. The effects of participatory modelling are considered as part of a community visioning process on participants’ social learning and social capital. This paper examines both the within-process dynamics related to models and the impact of the outside process, political use of the models by the participants. Both a numerical model (to explore local electricity generation and demand) and a physical scale model of the town were developed to explore various aspects of participants’ visions. The case study shows that collaborative visioning of local energy systems can enhance social learning and social capital of communities. However, the effect of participatory modelling on these benefits is less clear. Tensions arise between ‘inspiring’ and ‘empowering’ role of visions. It is argued that the situatedness of the visioning processes needs to be recognized and integrated within broader aspects of governance and power relations.

'Waste? You mean by-products!' From bio-waste management to agro-ecology in Italian winemaking and beyond.

This paper engages in a critique of Italian and EU agricultural bio-waste policy, taking a relational approach to understanding the role of these materials in socio-material networks of production. Specifically, I consider how the challenges posed by excess materials of agricultural production fit into larger concerns about rural sustainability, both social and environmental. Drawing on a number of case studies from the Italian winemaking industry, I demonstrate the legislative creation of waste from the by-products of winemaking such as grape marc and vine wood. By physically removing bio-wastes from the socio-material context of their production, the current legislation privileges capital and technologically intensive methods for the management of bio-wastes. This process results in environmental contradictions and an unequal distribution of economic and societal benefits from the utilization of these materials. What is needed, I argue, is the incorporation of excess materials into thinking about local agro-ecologies as environmentally, economically and culturally sustainable.

Interdisciplinarity in transdisciplinary projects: circulating knowledges, practices and effects

Abstract This article argues that the emphasis on solving substantive “real-world” problems through interdisciplinary research collaboration can neglect the wider value created by such collaborations. Championing the role of a knowledge integration and reflection facilitator, the article contends that more recognition be given to the value of “spillover” effects associated with interdisciplinary modes of working, rather than focusing solely on knowledge outputs and impacts. Drawing on embedded research conducted in relation to a project on local energy futures involving physicists, architects and geographers, the paper illustrates such “spillover” in relation to academic practice in teaching, project management and research methods. Such “spillovers” signal that what travels in interdisciplinary working is much more than formal knowledge and point to potential long-term legacy effects from interdisciplinary working occurring back in the disciplines.