Hazardous Travels. Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy
The DFG Emmy-Noether Research Group "Hazardous Travels. Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy" investigates structures and dynamics of international hazardous waste trade since the 1970s. The team, consisting of three PhDs and one head of research, works with an asymmetrical comparison of "ghost acres" case studies from North America, Germany, Ecuador, and India. It seeks to understand how the system of the global waste economy simultaneously relied on structures of "voluntary exchange" of toxic materiality as well as "garbage imperialism" and environmental racism.
The project works with two concepts identified as fundamental to the functioning of the global waste economy post-1970s: (1) hazardous waste mobility and (2) emergence of “ghost acres” in the aftermath of the environmental turn. Moreover, the project postulates that after industrial countries’ 1970s environmental turn, nationally and regionally distinct waste regimes emerged and facilitated the exchange of toxic materiality within the global waste economy in the first place. One country's toxic waste become another country's recycling or secondary material. Western and non-Western ideologies of nature informed moreover, diverging practices of the use of nature in waste disposal schemes.
Research Projects
• Hazardous Travels. Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy
• Hazards in the Amazon: an Environmental History of Oil Production in Ecuador
• Toxic Divide? The Hazardous Waste Trade between the Two Germanys
• India's Shipbreaking Business, Emerging Economies, and the "Right to Pollute"
Each PhD project investigates one case study situated at points of friction between different waste regimes, be they based on different economic systems as with the two Germanys, different stages of economic development as with emerging economies such as India or western and non-western concepts of nature as in the case of Ecuador. The PI’s study investigates the different systemic stages of the relationship between ecology and economy from an international and global perspective by following the emergence and development of the global waste economy and the trade in hazardous waste as a whole.
Nature of the project:
DFG-Emmy Noether Research Group
Duration:
2016- 2021
Participating researchers:
Dr. Simone M. Müller (PI)
Ayushi Dhawan
Maximilian F. Feichtner
Jonas Stuck