Generating anxiety, short-circuiting desire: Battery waste and the capitalist phantasy

Abstract

While batteries are ubiquitous in modern life, they often go unnoticed; that is, until they stop working. Each time a battery dies and becomes waste, our modernist expectations of convenient, reliable energy sources, and our unexamined dependence on these volatile combinations of heavy metals, plastics, and chemical pastes is exposed. In this paper, we document and visualize battery waste flows across North America to reveal the anxiety-ridden processes through which we manage, mismanage, and attempt to forget about battery waste. Drawing on Lacan’s seminar on Anxiety, this paper contributes to understandings of the role of psycho-social objects in constituting both material landscapes of risk and the symbolic structures of capitalist modernity that repress these risks in the interest of continued economic growth. We examine the “total management narrative” around battery waste as a Lacanian phantasy preserved through dysfunctional responses to underlying anxieties about the continued production, circulation, and distribution of toxins necessary to the maintenance of modern life. In challenging these total management narratives, we argue that processes of denial, disavowal, and foreclosure only partially mask the myriad ways that battery waste escapes, exceeds, or endures our practices of disposal and recycling, producing problematic and often environmentally unjust outcomes.

Excessive . . . but not wasteful? Youth cultures of everyday waste (avoidance)

“…Yet, as noted by Sarah A. Moore (47), material excess is the product of a cultural-economic system perpetuated by consumers' acquiescence to the conveniences it offers. At the same time that system produces expectations of socio-material order (from the home to the municipality, and beyond) which the nature of everyday excess makes it increasingly difficult to fulfil (48). Thus, as framed by Moore, the notion of excess highlights the range of multi-scalar cultural structures that produce it, as well as the potential for those structures to be challenged by individual acts of resistance.…”

Undermining methodological nationalism: Cosmopolitan analysis and visualization of the North American hazardous waste trade

“…The final dataset includes over 40,000 import and export entries, with each import entry containing up to 41 quantitative and qualitative attributes and each export entry containing up to 29 quantitative and qualitative attributes. The hazardous materials found in the data range from nail polish to mercury-laden light bulbs to byproducts from oil sands refining to batteries (Moore et al, 2018;Rosenfeld et al, 2018). We found hundreds of separate waste types in the data, each with relatively unique chemical properties, regulated in different ways that require specific kinds of processing including recycling, landfilling, and incineration.…”

Greening extractivism: Environmental discourses and resource governance in the ‘Lithium Triangle’

“…5 Green extractivism represents a new phase in the complex relationship between mining and the environment, whereby extraction and valorisation of mineral resources is rendered not only compatible with ‘sustainable development’, but necessary to it and the possibility of a ‘low-carbon’ future. Lithium embodies the fantasy of a ‘technological fix’, capable of turning the climate crisis into a political and economic opportunity for those in power (Moore et al., 2018; Wainwright and Mann, 2015), by displacing and rendering invisible the outfall of ecological disaster. From the periphery, this fantasy is coupled with imaginaries of national development and affirmation, and the possibility of redeeming a dark past of dirty extraction and of foreign plunder of local wealth, by inaugurating a form of extraction capable of generating high tech industries and ‘green jobs’.…”