Normalizing waste, enacting sustainability

• In Event: Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic: Rethinking/Reframing

Abstract

Sustainability discourses have become almost compulsory among corporations nowadays, especially as they operate on an increasingly global scale. Such discourses are especially relevant regarding their most evident environmental impact: the waste generated by industrial processes. This issue is particularly critical for the mining industry. Even middle-sized projects generate such an amount of waste that their depositories have been identified as “probably the largest man-made structures on earth” (ICOLD 2001). As a consequence multiple devices and practices have been introduced to govern such wastes in accordance with sustainability programs of action, allowing mining corporations to improve their environmental credentials. Given the technical impossibility of reducing the amount of waste generated, such mandate usually translates in the production of "normal" waste, or waste that behaves in accordance with certain pre-established technical standards. Such standards go from wastes having a particular chemical composition to being distributed in some ways on the massive dams in which they are stored. The production of such normality, as it could be expected, is not trivial matter. Mining wastes constantly overflow; defying normalization in multiple ways and forcing corporations into a never ending search for growingly sophisticated systems of surveillance and repair that will finally allow them to reach, once and for all, the status of being "really" sustainable. In order to explore the challenges that such a pursuit entails this presentation, based on an ongoing ethnography, will explore some examples of waste management procedures developed at one large copper mine located in central Chile.

Author

• Sebastian Ureta, Departamento de Sociología, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile