Glut: Affective Labor and the Burden of Abundance in Secondhand Economies

Abstract

This paper explores the interlinkages between the abundance of stuff moving through community-based reuse organizations and the labor needed to manage this material. The glut of donations is due to the sheer volume of materials moving through a wasteful linear economic system, as well as the practice of donation dumping, where unusable used goods move through reuse economies, washing their previous owners free of guilt while entangling laborers in messy relationships with objects. I draw on theories of gendered, social reproductive labor to explore how the work of localized reuse, disproportionately borne by unpaid women, reproduces communities. Following calls for work that explores the social dimensions of circular economies, this research uses a qualitative approach that draws on two main methods: participant observation in reuse establishments and in-depth interviews with reuse participants. This qualitative data provides a picture of reuse activities at a local scale and helps us understand the complex relationships formed and perpetuated through reuse. I find that the labor of volunteers is often unseen and undervalued and suggest that policies designed to address material surplus do so with these laborers in mind.

Circular economy disclaimers: Rethinking property relations at the end of cheap nature

“…While the implications of these shifts might not be readily apparent, research on second hand markets suggests that the various pursuits that compose repair practices are associated with significant community and localized benefits which include flexible forms of labor, the redistribution of value within the community, local job generation, and economic multiplier effects (Millar, 2018;Berry, 2022;Isenhour and Berry, 2022). Small and independent repair entrepreneurs often do much more than pick value out of discards, repair iPhones, fix small appliances and mend clothing.…”

“…We have suggested that we may indeed be moving increasingly toward a time when accumulation is tied not only to the appropriation of surplus labor, the exportation of surplus production or the accumulation of nature, but increasingly the very detritus of a failing system (Isenhour and Berry, 2021). Unfortunately, as our case studies illustrate, this new focus on improving the efficiency of the system is often at the expense of people who have long been practicing circularity as discards are increasingly claimed as corporate property, essentially excluding informal workersresellers, repairers, cleaners, waste pickers-whose livelihoods often depend on this work and whose labor creates significant local social, economic and ecological value (Anantharaman, 2017;Millar, 2018;Berry, 2022).…”

Planning Reclamation, Diagnosis and Reuse in Norwegian Timber Construction with Circular Economy Investment and Operating Costs for Information

“…In research on the circular economy and waste management, various scholars document evidence and express concerns about how vulnerable groups subsidise the circular economy by volunteering in reuse shops [77], collecting waste for low salaries under poor working conditions and inputting them into the capitalist circuits of recycling and production [78]. Although their work creates value and benefits for society and, mostly, for other people, these workers subsidise and bear the greatest risks and costs.…”