Circularity and Enclosures: Metabolizing Waste with the Black Soldier Fly

Abstract

This essay traces a scientific pilot project to transform the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) into a biotechnology to treat urban organic waste in accordance with the dominant cultural logics of an ecologically modern approach to waste management in contemporary China. A principle of urban waste management, circularity, and a spatial logic of urban living, enclosures, condition the scientific intervention that promises to harness animal metabolic labor as a biotechnology and a waste infrastructure that can be adapted to the urban ecologies of Guangzhou. While scientists emphasize the natural proclivities of insect metabolism to transform waste into value, my ethnographic research illustrates that the practice of aligning animal metabolism with urban metabolism is anything but natural or automatic. Together, circularity and enclosure, as guiding logics of waste management in Chinese ecological modernization, uphold a fiction of biocapital; they create the illusion that nature generates value and remediates environments without human intervention while mystifying and naturalizing the appropriation of nature and labor in the new green city.

Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

“…On the other hand, we are witnessing new ways of recruiting animals' metabolic labours into techno-political imaginaries of the automated, green city. Large-scale deployment of the black soldier fly in waste disposal is a case in point (Zhang, 2020).…”

“…Under regimes of austerity, infrastructuring animals can be read as a capitalist politics of re-engineering society and privately appropriating the commons (Harvey, 2012a), but what is also at stake is putting the unwaged labour performed by humans and non-humans (Barua, 2018b) to work for the smart, entrepreneurial city. As ethnographic work is beginning to indicate, the infrastructuring of metabolic animal labour tends to naturalize ‘the appropriation of nature and labour in the new green city’ (Zhang, 2020: 96). Animal infrastructures are once more becoming a component of the modern metropolis, but as a means of reorganizing work and fuelling the creeping neoliberalization of those infrastructures that provide staples and public goods.…”

Introduction to the urban ecologies open collection: A call for contributions on methods, ethics, and design in geographical research with urban animals

“…In a biopolitical reversal, nonhuman animals who were previously considered infectious, toxic, or as pests, are being re‐figured as agents of environmental sustainability. For instance, black soldier flies have been cast as metabolic labourers for circular waste economies (Zhang, 2020 ). Through design initiatives and infrastructural programs, non‐humans “are being encouraged to (re)colonise specific neighbourhoods” often via “deliberative human provisioning of nesting and feeding sites, such as insect hotels, beehives, hedgehog boxes and bird‐feeders” (Hubbard & Brooks, 2021 , p. 7).…”

Embodied Urbanisms: Corruption and the Ecologies of Eating and Excreting in India's Real Estate Economies

“…Corruption talk in Gurgaon situates itself in conversations of embodied urban ecologies (e.g., Chen 2012; Agard‐Jones 2013; Zhang 2020): it links the metabolic systems of the body (e.g., Watanabe 2015; Solomon 2016) to the metabolic systems of urban infrastructures and ecologies (e.g., Swyngedouw 2006; Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2013) to highlight the coproduction of built environment and embodiment in real estate economies 2 . Corruption talk deploys aspects of urban metabolisms to speak of the economy as corrupting both the body and the urban region; these aspects express how waste and value are mediated through embodiment, and serve to express localized conceptions of the urban metabolic rift 3…”

“…Urban political economy owes a debt to Marx, whose interest in metabolism and nature formed the foundation for his theory of labor. “Marx employed the notion of metabolism to conceptualize two processes …: the production of labor power through the exchange of energy between bodies and the environment, and the emergence of an ecological crisis under capitalism” (Zhang 2020, 82). The metabolic rift emerges as a lively debate to examine the historical, social, and ecological ruptures produced by transforming agrarian and urban operations (see Wittman 2009; Schneider and McMichael 2010; Moore 2011).…”