ABSTRACT
Potlatch has become a byword for profligacy and “wasteful” use and/or reckless destruction in consumption-oriented societies. Given that members of industrialized societies live at a time when the technical and logistical elements of much recycling and sustainable practice are achievable, even at scale, this Afterword frames wasteful common forms of engaging in unsustainable material consumption and burning of non-renewable energy sources as planetary potlatch—a nevertheless avoidable condition that may elicit a novel resource-based approach to waste in society.
Capping a volume of essays focused on elements of waste practices in Asia, it is not a stretch for this piece to conclude that one important way of creating sustainable processes is to engage in a clear-eyed assessment of waste in everyday life. As a way of interpreting waste policy and environmental practice in key Asian nations, this Afterword critiques the circularist ideology that bolsters much recycling, some of which invokes circularity to obscure pollutant and inefficient processes. The piece takes up two unusual cases of “recycling” in order to analyze recycling implementation and circular reasoning generally. The first case centers on the curiously static and inefficient apparatus of nuclear waste reprocessing in Japan. The second case, electronic waste scavenging in China and Japan, considers the ways in which bold circularist eco-rhetoric disguises a set of systems that, at times, are anything but clean, green, or circular. The Afterword presents the unlikely moral economy of recycling that has undergirded environmental policy for decades and suggests that it might be possible to craft a more practical moral approach to resource management in order to transform the planetary potlatch in which many human societies are currently mired.
