Maxence Mautray, sociologue et doctorant à PAVE et au CED, communiquera à Helsinki autour de la transformation des déchets en ressources.
“From Rubbish to Resource: an Ethnographic Analysis of the Moral Economy of Reuse in a French Waste Collection Center”
Although scavenging for items, furniture and construction materials in waste collection center was informal and even illegal in France since the 1990s, local authorities are now encouraging this activity. The goal of public policies promoting reuse is to protect these artifacts from being deemed ‘rubbish’ (Thompson, [1979] 2017).
Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper explores scavenging and reuse practices within a French waste collection center, aiming to understand how discarded items are evaluated, reclaimed and reintegrated into social and economic circuits. The waste collection center’s instructions promote a straightforward approach —’give – take – recycle’— but the practice of reuse is embedded in a nuanced and implicit normative system, a moral economy of waste (Ortar and Anstett, 2017; Hawkins, 2005) that encompasses users and items.
Which tacit norms influence reuse behaviors? What impact do they have on populations that have historically relied on scavenging in landfills?
Two main results emerge. Firstly, reuse is a codified process. Dispossession is anonymous and transform items into commons. Evaluation relies on both skills and social interactions. Recovery forces the taker to justify himself, revealing an implicit giver-taker contract. Second, some users are stigmatized by others accusing them of violating the “spirit of the place”, by staying too long and reselling the recovered objects. Yet these people are often highly skilled in reuse. These findings highlight the ethical and political dimension of reuse and contribute to ongoing debates on scavenging in landfills (Reno, 2009) and in the discard studies field (Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022).
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
fger (13 mars 2025). Maxence Mautray à la conférence “Waste Matters: the many afterlives of junk” | Helsinki | 12-13/06/2025. Laboratoire PAVE. Consulté le 8 novembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14egp