Introduction

For several decades there have been global conflicts over waste disposal, often a euphemism for dumping or burning waste. In late 20th-century Europe, a default mode was landfill, whose methane emissions are a potent GHG. Towards improvements, there have been policy agendas to reduce or reuse waste rather than dispose it.

The 2008 EC Waste Framework Directive formalized the waste hierarchy. This ranked management steps from best to worst – prevent, prepare for re-reuse, recycle or other recovery, and lastly disposal. The Directive brought ‘a modernised approach to waste management, marking a shift away from thinking about waste as an unwanted burden to seeing it as a valued resource’ (EC, 2008, 2010: 5). The framework sought innovative solutions for decoupling ‘the link between economic growth and the environmental impacts associated with the generation of waste’ (EC, 2008: paragraph 40; EC, 2010; cf EEA, 2009).

Through the waste hierarchy, the EU framework integrated the ‘alternatives of reducing waste and extracting value from it’ (Corvellec and Hultman, 2011: 5–6). As an instrument of ecological modernization, the framework stimulated a search for technoscientific innovation which could reconcile economic growth with lower resource burdens. The EU's policy framework expected waste authorities to manage private-sector competition for contracts, thus potentially blurring responsibility to interpret and implement the waste hierarchy. ‘Municipal waste-management companies perform the fix’ (Hultman and Corvellec, 2012: 2418).

Throughout the EU, waste-management systems have undergone pressures to move waste beyond mere disposal, towards valuing waste as a resource. Some governments expanded mass-burn incinerators, claiming that the electricity generation was resource recovery. Such programmes provoked protests and public controversy.

According to such opponents, incineration programmes perpetuate a system that wastes resources and generates GHG emissions. As an alternative, a circular economy would redesign production systems to minimize and reuse waste (EMF, 2013). A circular economy has been espoused by the European Union and many member states, generally as a technical-managerial agenda relegating responsibility to companies (EC, 2014, 2015).

Within that EU framework, the UK has had a long-time controversy over waste conversion. Relevant UK policies can be understood as a techno-market framework. This creates market competition to generate techno-innovations that could reconcile the diverse objectives of waste management, especially through waste conversion. These techno-optimistic assumptions have served to perpetuate systems that waste resources and displace responsibility.