Beyond the Pollution Approach: Toward the Social Theory of Waste in International Environmental Law: LSTS Hub Seminar
Description
Presented by LSTS Hub.
Waste plays a critical role in both the organization of the modern economy and today’s global environmental crises. Yet international environmental law (IEL) has largely treated waste as a technical pollution problem. Through a reading of core waste treaties and related institutional practices, this article argues that international waste governance is structured by what this article terms the “pollution approach”—a recurring legal grammar that governs waste for its polluting effects and through technical management. By making waste legally visible only after it is generated, IEL diverts attention from overproduction and overconsumption in the modern economy and sidelines the production decisions and distributive arrangements through which waste is generated.
This article offers a new account of waste, both as a way to reconceptualize broader environmental problems such as greenhouse gas emissions and as an organizing concept for reconstructing IEL. Drawing on waste studies and the social theory of waste, it redefines the legal significance of waste by shifting the analytical focus from “waste” as a technical object to “wasting” as a socio-temporal process through which certain materials and populations are rendered disposable. On this basis, it proposes an alternative framework for IEL that reorients waste law toward redesigning industrial production processes, rethinking resource distribution, and addressing the social costs of the green transition. This framework also provides a vocabulary for connecting issues that IEL has long treated as distinct regulatory domains. Using the ongoing plastics treaty negotiations as an example, the article shows how a wasting-oriented approach could move treaty design upstream toward production and make IEL more responsive to the political economy of environmental harm.
Speakers
Xiaolu Fan, Yale Law School
Xiaolu Fan is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School. Her doctoral research focuses on the history of international environmental law from the 1970s to the 1990s, and on the different approaches of that period to conceptualizing environmental problems. Her areas of interest include international law, international legal history, international environmental law, and critical theory. Xiaolu obtained LL.B. and LL.M. in international law from Peking University and an LL.M. at Yale. Xiaolu was previously a research associate at the Institute of International Law at Peking University in 2020 and a Visiting Scholar at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale in 2022.
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