Beyond the Pollution Approach: Toward the Social Theory of Waste in International Environmental Law: LSTS Hub Seminar

Presented by LSTS Hub. Waste plays a critical role in both the organization of the modern economy and today’s global environmental crises. Yet international environmental law (IEL) has largely treated waste as a technical pollution problem. Through a reading of core waste treaties and related institutional practices, this article argues that international waste governance is structured by what this article terms the “pollution approach”—a recurring legal grammar that governs waste for its polluting effects and through technical management. By making waste legally visible only after it is generated, IEL diverts attention from overproduction and overconsumption in the modern economy and sidelines the production decisions and distributive arrangements through which waste is generated. This article offers a new account of waste, both as a way to reconceptualize broader environmental problems such as greenhouse gas emissions and as an organizing concept for reconstructing IEL. Drawing on waste studies and the social theory of waste, it redefines the legal significance of waste by shifting the analytical focus from “waste” as a technical object to “wasting” as a socio-temporal process through which certain materials and populations are rendered disposable. On this basis, it proposes an alternative framework for IEL that reorients waste law toward redesigning industrial production processes, rethinking resource distribution, and addressing the social costs of the green transition. This framework also provides a vocabulary for connecting issues that IEL has long treated as distinct regulatory domains. Using the ongoing plastics treaty negotiations as an example, the article shows how a wasting-oriented approach could move treaty design upstream toward production and make IEL more responsive to the political economy of environmental harm.