This commentary is by a group of PhD fellows with the Leadership for the Ecozoic organization: Hannah Gokaslan, Tom James, Em O’Hara, Matías Vaccarezza Sevilla and Dakota Walker.
This spring, the University of Vermont announced the new Casella Center for Circular Economy and Sustainability, sponsored by a $1.5 million donation from Casella Waste Systems. The center promises research that facilitates a transition to “a more circular economy where materials are recycled to create further value.”
As part of a group of graduate students studying ecological economics, the announcement raised some questions, primarily: What does it mean for Casella, the billion-dollar company that privately operates Vermont’s only landfill, to sponsor a center for a circular economy?
It’s easy to think that we know for certain what waste is, and what it isn’t. We may consider it to be the leftovers or the undesirable parts of something. We throw it away, maybe sorting it into different bins before, and for many of us in Vermont, these bins are picked up and emptied miles away from our homes.
But what we consider waste is a relatively malleable thing (remember the adage, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?), and many forms of waste are hard, if not impossible, to manage, despite the waste management industry’s best efforts to quantify and contain them.
Take PFAS, a family of “forever chemicals” (often found in high levels in leachate) that travel through waterways, blood streams, and root systems with serious and wide-ranging health impacts. Casella’s Coventry landfill generates about 12 million gallons of leachate every year, with thousands more tons of sludge imported from out of state which can also contain PFAS.
The 2024 spill in the landfill, not to mention the discovery of PFAS contamination in nearby Lake Memphremagog prior to the spill, is a reminder that even technological advancements and environmental regulations often fail to truly contain these more amorphous forms of waste.
The circular economy has gained traction in sustainability discourses over the past 30 years. Although it emphasizes reducing waste and pollution, the circular economy often misses the core problem with waste.
The circular economy is considered a way to close the loop of resource use in society, envisioning an infinite recirculation of materials into production processes. The Casella sponsorship center at UVM is a reminder of the shortcomings of a circular economy, which is ultimately underpinned by a growth-oriented economy based on overconsumption.
In a circular economy, waste acquires economic value rather than simply being seen as valueless outputs in a linear economy. Waste is subjected to the logic of supply and demand, and waste management becomes a global, profit-oriented industry that benefits from increasing waste production (contributing to countries’ GDP).
By this logic, recycled/upcycled materials must be cheaper than raw materials to meet market demands. What type of circularity emerges when only the cheapest forms of waste can be recirculated? Are we moving towards a circular economy when we allow waste management companies to sell contaminated sewage sludge to farmers to spread on their fields?
Lowering the cost of recycled materials requires economies of scale. In other words, consolidating waste management companies into monopolies, as Casella has arguably become.
Making waste cheap enough to recirculate also means placing landfills where land is cheaper – often alongside already marginalized communities.
Circular economy approaches frequently ignore waste produced before household consumption. A huge percentage of the resources that are extracted are already wasted or mismanaged at the beginning of the supply chain to produce our goods and services.
Recycling is a resource-intensive process that still produces toxic byproducts that cannot be recirculated as “valuable” inputs. Critics see the circular economy as a new form of greenwashing, presenting solutions to environmental problems without fully addressing their root causes.
Instead of focusing on technological and market-oriented solutions that only seem to make the problem worse, we advocate for a degrowth approach to waste management. What if we focus our energies on the very root of the problem: decreasing consumption? What if we focus our efforts on holding accountable companies that produce and design waste at the very beginning of the supply chain?
A degrowth vision focuses on substantially reducing the creation and disposal of waste and reusing what is already circulating. It calls for a collective socioecological valorization of waste, which we do through community initiatives such as communal repair shops, voluntary exchanges, neighborhood-based organization composting and educational forums to design prevention strategies collectively.
We don’t doubt that the new center at UVM will contribute to innovative research to create more sustainable waste management systems, an important step in the interim. But, how much effort should we put towards a circular economy when deeper change is needed? Understanding the variable nature of waste and the technological solutions’ limitations in handling our global waste is a crucial part of shaping a better future.
This summer, the Leadership for the Ecozoic research group will be hosting coffee hours on Church Street to talk about degrowth in an informal, community-oriented space. Check out our website for more details and stop by to continue this conversation over a cup of coffee.
