Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the life of plastic bottles in two villages to show how local economies, relationships, and responses to environmental crises shape circular strategies. It looks at local aspirations for connectivity and its effects on the access, use, circulation, and disposal of plastic bottles.

Paper long abstract:

The global plastic crisis is one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time. With the increasing production of disposable and single-use plastic items, the world generates millions of tons of plastic waste every year. However, many places lack the proper infrastructure and capacity to deal with it locally, and much of the discarded plastic leaks into the environment and negatively affects both natural ecologies and local communities. This paper explores the life of plastic bottles in two remote villages in Viet Nam and Papua New Guinea. While the image of an empty plastic bottle may have become the symbol of environmental pollution, the object was once (and still is) deemed a brilliant invention. The paper explores how Vietnamese and Papua New Guinean interactions with plastic bottles are shaped and what can these objects’ circulation, reuse, and disposal tell us about their local and global value and impact. In the run-up to the UN treaty on plastic, this paper offers insights into the ways in which local economies, relationships, and responses to environmental crises shape the communities’ circular strategies. It examines the different aspirations for and effects of connectivity between various people and places, and how understanding these can offer critical insights into solving the plastic challenge. It draws attention to the differentiated access, possession, and use of consumable commodities and how encounters with tourists and researchers, as well as the expansion of capitalist logics and land use restrictions, inject these into the circulation arenas of rural spaces.

Paper short abstract:

Is the “tomato day” still a rite de passage of a world with an uncertain future? The study of this tradition highlights the ecology of what today, in hyper-modern societies, are called “circular economies”, but in popular cultures have existed before.

Paper long abstract:

Major crises triggered by environmental disasters, climate change, economic upheavals, and devastating wars all hold many lessons and offer tactics for dealing with and coping with suddenly emerging complications. And so, we ask, what are the everyday practices of coping with uncertainty?

Arranging food for future consumption is the most ancient economic policy: you move it from the time or place where it is abundant to the time or place where it is scarce. For the last two centuries, the tomato - a prized fruit native to the Americas - has been the heart and soul of Mediterranean cooking and is still preserved at home to be consumed when it is out of season, namely in winter. A jar of tomatoes made by a grandmother is the alternative to store-bought kind. It is not some silly tradition, but a symbolic therapy that reminds how nature is rich, generous, and powerful. Setting aside resources for tougher times focuses on future generations and through them on the future of humanity.

My proposal focuses on the “red culture” as a legacy of small, well-balanced economies and on the ritual of “making salsa” between myth and morality and is supported by pictures and videos on the “big day of tomato” I recorded in Europe. How people (re)interpret the past and past cultures and how they (re)invent the future considering the uncertainties that face us? Is the “tomato day” still a rite de passage of a world with an uncertain future? The study of this tradition highlights the ecology of what today, in hyper-modern societies, are called “circular economies”, but in popular cultures have existed before.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses on a set of practices and meanings that the fishermen of Lake Trasimeno assemble in order to deal with unbalancing forces and to cope with environmental and economic challenges.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of the paper is to describe how a small community of fishermen manage to stay on the market and safeguard their traditional activities, promoting an heritage of techniques, work ethics and a peculiar relation to nature.

"The Cooperative of Trasimeno Fishermen” is the local organization which includes most of the professional fishermen, representing the interests and the history of this traditional activity. Cooperation is the only mean to achieve economic sustainability, and while fishing has always been at the core of their activity, now the new management had to build up a different scheme, based on differentiation of the activities and the reconversion of fishing as a tourist attraction.

However, the strategies of the Cooperative depend on the perception of present and future threats and opportunities, that is to say that different perception of risk (Douglas,1992) result in different sets of practices and narratives.

The research, which consisted of participant observation and in-depth interviews, would like to describe this changing environment, which entails a present of drought, economic crisis and critical entanglements, and a future of uncertainties, tracing human and non human associations (Latour, 2005) and sympoiesis (Haraway, 2018), following the dialectic among local knowledge, scientific discourse and political strategies around an endangered lake.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines debates over “Inclusive” EPR among members of the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, and argues that rejecting an inclusion narrative was simultaneously a demand to center waste picker knowledge of circular economy systems and to chart a just transition on their own terms.

Paper long abstract:

The circular economy is increasingly being constructed through new legal arrangements that require extended producer responsibility (EPR) over the lifecycle of consumer products. Such arrangements place producers at the center of circularity by requiring their financial investment and, in some cases, management of the recycling process. As EPR policies extend producer control over circularity, they have the potential to monopolize opportunities within emerging systems for multinationals and to exclude informal workers from performing work they have long performed as part of the circular economy. It is estimated that there is around 20 million waste pickers around the world reclaim, segregate, and sell materials from households and landfills for recycling or reuse. In 2021, the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers began implementing popular education to develop knowledge about EPR models that would ensure that waste pickers could be effectively included as stakeholders in policy debates. This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the implementation of “Inclusive EPR” popular education among waste pickers (canners) in New York City, and the collective formulation of a formal waste picker position on EPR, both of which evolved in the same time frame. The idea of ‘inclusion’ or ‘inclusive EPR’ as a frame was variously contested across the global network, particularly among long-established waste picker collectives in Latin America. These processes reveal efforts to push back against the decentering of waste pickers in the EPR arena by examining their demands to contribute knowledge and chart a just transition on their own terms.

Paper short abstract:

The citizens of Taranto, Italy, co-exist with one of the largest steel plants of Europe. Amidst industrial interests, political strategies, elusive epidemiological data and a collapsing welfare system, the community knowledge-sharing practices uncover the health effects of pollution.

Paper long abstract:

In 2022, a UN report included the Southern Italian town of Taranto as one of the world's "sacrifice zones". These are areas where the population suffers from the health consequences of living with high concentrations of toxicants, often originating from the proximity with an industrial site. Taranto's "Ex-Ilva" is a steel-plant larger than the town itself. The pollution deriving from the industrial site has destroyed entire ecosystems in the local area, compromising the local food production industry. More crucially, toxic exposure has caused an alarming increase in the rate of cancer and other cardiopulmonary diseases in the local population.

The correlation between industrial steel production and ill health, however, remains a terrain of uncertainty and debated truths. Ex-Ilva is the biggest steel production site of Europe, employing several thousands of people. International corporations have interest in keeping the site open, whilst domestic politics remains entangled in partisan decisions. More recent epidemiological data appear to counter the fact that Taranto is more polluted than other Italian city.

Toxic chemicals are often invisible particles- and so seem to be the rights of the local population in the complex entanglements of capital, politics and ecological disaster. However, the community finds intimate, mundane ways to share their knowledge on the effects that chemicals have on their bodies and lives. These forms of epistemological circulation involve medical practitioners, activists and young people in a tireless- albeit quiet- fight to objectivise their everyday experience and seek a more just future.