Dissertation Research: The Social Life of Garbage: Beliefs and Practices of Recycling in Germany

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Project SummaryPeoples of all times and places have used old materials anew, but in contemporary Germany recycling involves complex processes of renewing waste into secondary raw materials. In the belief to be saving natural resources, over 90% of Germans recycle on a daily basis, which allows for more than half of domestic waste to be reused. This anthropological study views recycling as a complex social practice that is rooted in, and gives rise to widespread beliefs about the environment, the economy, and the future of society. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, the researcher will pursue the hypothesis that contemporary Germans articulate their experience of the social environment, specifically their experience of the present economic crisis, in terms of an imminent crisis of the natural environment. Focusing on beliefs and practices of household recycling, this project investigates how the daily practices of recycling might relate to beliefs in the scarcity of environmental resources and to personal experiences of a shortage of economic resources. The researcher will be a participant observer by joining garbage trucks on curbside collections of household waste in selected neighborhoods in twelve districts of Berlin Informal interviews with garbage workers will allow her to sample 120 households for administering a survey and conducting 60 interviews with ordinary people, who are the central interest of this study. Finally, a few interviews with recycling experts and some archival research will help situate the ethnographic data in the larger historical political and economic context of recycling. SPSS will be used to compute the correlation between environmental attitudes and behaviors, measures of economic status, and perceptions of the economy and the environment. Anthropac will be used to document patterns of agreement and variability among respondents using consensus and correspondence analysis. Interviews and field notes on observations will be analyzed using AskSam.Intellectual Merit This study of household recycling will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between science and technology and society. Research will investigate how recycling technologies have shaped society and what impact society in turn is having on use of recycling technologies. It aims to close the gap in knowledge that exists on the differences between experts' knowledge and ordinary people's knowledge of recycling. This exploration of differences between scientific and local knowledge will contribute to our theoretical understanding of the contemporary environmental movement in Germany.Broader Impacts The rise of environmentalism in Germany has brought legislative changes that now involve all citizens in the environmental movement. While many studies of recycling technologies have relied on interviews with environmental activists and experts in the environmental sciences, this project contributes to the field by broadening its scope to include the larger number of ordinary citizens. As a daily practice, the recycling of household garbage invokes in ordinary Germans myriad beliefs about the environment, economy and society, which sometimes differ from those of environmentalists and recycling experts. By addressing the gap that has developed between existing recycling technologies and people's actual beliefs and practices of recycling that impact these technologies, this project will produce a knowledge base that can be used by policymakers and waste management for improving the quality of people's lives, both environmentally and economically.