Assume the worst

In an episode​ of Seinfeld from 1996, Kramer and Newman hatch an ingenious moneymaking scheme. In New York, where they live, bottles and cans can be recycled for five cents each, but in Michigan the refund is ten cents. They realise that if they collect bottles in New York and take them to Michigan, they can double their money. Kramer spots a hitch: transport costs, including petrol and tolls, would exceed the nominal profit. But then they realise they can save on petrol by using Newman’s work vehicle, a postal truck. It’s on.

In the event, the scheme falls apart in slapstick fashion. In reality, it wouldn’t have worked anyway: Michigan law requires bottles and cans to be purchased in-state to be eligible for refund. But there is certainly potential for what we might call waste arbitrage. If the fees involved in recycling or disposing of waste are different in different places, you can in theory move waste from one place to another to exploit that difference. You can even make a business out of it.

Waste Wars, Alexander Clapp’s new book, is about such businesses. In the 1980s, waste became a national export across much of the global North. Since then, firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South. At first, the focus of this business was hazardous waste like asbestos or paint sludge. In countries like the US it cost as much as $250 per tonne to bury hazardous waste domestically at a time when the price of burying it in many African countries was less than $3 per tonne. Even after shipping costs, American companies could save around $200 per tonne by sending their waste overseas. In 1991, a leaked memorandum on trade liberalisation sent by Larry Summers, then chief economist at the World Bank, stated that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’

In fact, so much money could be saved by exporting toxic waste that rich countries and firms based in them could, and did, pay developing countries to take it. Developing countries accepted these bribes because their economies were in a parlous state and they had mounting debts; as Clapp puts it, they faced a choice between ‘poison or poverty’. In a perverse way, these deals were tools of economic development. By 1988, the estimated dollar value of the toxic waste flowing from the global North to the global South exceeded the value of the parallel flow of developmental aid.

Eventually measures were taken to clamp down on this trade. The most significant was the Basel Convention, which came into force in 1992 and was strengthened three years later by the Basel Ban Amendment. But it wasn’t until 2019 that the amendment was ratified by enough signatories to give it legal force. The US isn’t bound by the amendment because it never ratified the convention. The upshot is that the global trade in hazardous waste has persisted, even if not on the scale of the 1980s.

Meanwhile, the North-South trade in other forms of waste – especially electronics, clothes and plastics – has hugely increased; Britain’s exports of plastic waste to developing countries, notably Indonesia and Malaysia, jumped by 84 per cent in the first half of this year. This is stuff that we in the rich world recycle for reuse – at least, we like to think so. The problem is that we are now recycling so much stuff that it’s impossible to recycle it all. Clapp tells the story of Ghana’s development in the 2000s into a major destination for Western e-waste – discarded smartphones, laptops, printers and the like. Its government had networked the country, believing that the internet held the key to future prosperity, but most Ghanaian households weren’t in a position to buy the devices they needed to get online. Acquiring second-hand electronic goods from rich countries seemed an excellent solution: Ghana would get the hardware it needed, countries in the West would get rid of their e-waste. The belief on both sides was that the goods were going to Ghana to be used, not dumped. But when they arrived, many of the devices didn’t work. According to one estimate, of the 215,000 tonnes of used electronics that entered Ghana in 2009, only around a third were functional. The non-usable items ended up in such places as Agbogbloshie in Accra, which became one of the world’s largest e-waste dumping sites. There, an army of waste-pickers rifled through the mountain of broken devices in search of anything from which rare-earth metals and other precious bits and pieces could be extracted. The site, which was cleared in 2021, was regularly ranked among the most polluted places on Earth.

For almost thirty years beginning in the early 1990s, China was the main destination for stuff dumped by the rich world. As much as half of the world’s discarded plastic was sent there – often after travelling in the opposite direction as packaging for the Chinese consumer goods on which the world was gorging. (By 2008, discarded plastic was America’s largest dollar-value export to China.) Then, in 2018, China suddenly banned the import of most waste, including mixed plastics, unsorted paper and some metals. The global waste-management industry was thrown into disarray as rich nations scurried to divert their waste exports. India, already a favoured alternative destination, was willing to assume much of the burden.

In Wasteland Oliver Franklin-Wallis visits Ghazipur outside Delhi, a garbage mountain of an estimated 14 million tonnes, 65 metres high and covering 28 hectares, to which 2500 tonnes of rubbish are added daily. Five thousand waste-pickers work its slopes, often working at night with headlamps so as to avoid daytime temperatures that can reach 50°C at the summit, which is where new waste, containing the best material, is to be found. The locals call it Mount Everest. The metaphor is apt. For one thing, Ghazipur has idiosyncratic geomorphological features. ‘During the wet season,’ Franklin-Wallis explains, ‘rainwater trickles down between the waste, forming subterranean flows that can carve off larger sections, triggering landslides.’ In the months before his visit, one such landslide killed two pickers and carried off a car. What’s more, Franklin-Wallis writes, over the course of its more than forty-year existence, ‘the weight of the upper slopes has crushed the earlier deposits into a kind of novel sedimentary rock: clothing scraps, drink cans, packets of masala-flavoured crisps, Mom’s Magic biscuits, ceramic shards, a chair, men’s razors, women’s razors, children’s toys, all held together with a nameless brown grime, like one great capitalism sundae.’ Geologists increasingly see waste as the salient marker of humanity’s presence in the stratigraphic record, the signature of the Anthropocene. ‘There are few places in the world,’ Franklin-Wallis writes, ‘that give you a better view of humanity than a dump.’

John Scanlan​ ’s The Idea of Waste reminds us that waste is a relative concept. By this he means partly that what looks like waste to one person – to you and me, say – might not look like waste to one of the waste-pickers at Ghazipur. But more fundamentally he means that waste is always defined by what it is not, or what it does not possess: value. ‘Waste’ is therefore ‘a category that could absorb almost anything that is in transit between accepted categories of value’. (In Wasteland, Franklin-Wallis claims that the waste-pickers at Ghazipur ‘know the value of every material’: to know waste is to know value.)

Marx, and the classical political economists who preceded him, distinguish between two types of value. ‘Use value’ denotes an object’s utility or usefulness: water is useful, so is a blanket. ‘Exchange value’ refers to an object’s exchangeability: its market value, if you like, measured by its price. Waste can be defined in relation to either type of value, or both. When we throw things away, it’s generally because we no longer have any use for them. But it can also be because we think they have no sale value, or – back to Kramer’s initial worry about his bottle deposit scheme – insufficient sale value to justify the cost and effort of taking them to market.

Three other insights about value from political economy are helpful here. The first is that use value and exchange value are not equally important under capitalism – or, more precisely, are not of equal importance to capitalists. Marx showed that where the two are in tension, as they often are, exchange value overrides use value: the imperatives of competition and accumulation mean that commodities must be produced principally for sale. What counts as ‘waste’ comes to be decided by reference to wealth creation and preservation. This is what Locke was doing when he justified the European annexation of Indigenous territories on the grounds that they were not being used ‘productively’: the land was, in other words, being wasted, and should be brought into the ambit of capitalist modernity and its calculus of value. In a present-day example, Franklin-Wallis describes seeing a batch of unused TVs from a major manufacturer at a US electronics ‘recycling’ plant waiting to be destroyed in order not to act as competition for the same manufacturer’s new line of products. In 2020 Apple sued a Canadian recycler for selling off some of the half a million unsold devices it had sent to be shredded. In July 2018 it was reported that Burberry had incinerated ‘deadstock’ worth £28 million in the previous financial year to prevent its being sold at discounted rates. And so on.

The second insight is that since capitalism commodifies labour power, workers must also walk the treacherous line separating value from waste. Here Marx saw a fundamental contradiction: while capitalism tends to over-produce commodities which then become waste, workers become waste when they are underemployed or unemployed – the ‘reserve army of labour’. This gives the lie to the myth that capitalism produces efficient mediation of supply and demand. Keynes was just as scathing: the defects of an economic system that generates ‘poverty in the midst of plenty’ struck him as ‘obvious and outrageous’.

All three of the books discussed here are strangely quiet when it comes to capitalism’s human waste. In Wasteland, for instance, Franklin-Wallis visits one of Britain’s thousands of food banks. He does a good job of explaining the economics of supermarket retail, food overproduction and the waste attendant on that. And he is rightly incensed by the irony that food banks have been a godsend for big retailers: because food bank volunteers collect any surplus that retailers donate, ‘every kilo of bread or fresh produce donated … is a kilo they don’t have to pay to incinerate or dispose of in landfill.’ But how did the millions of people who rely on Britain’s food banks become economic waste in the first place?

The third insight is that the creation of value leaves human waste in its wake. Joseph Schumpeter coined the term ‘creative destruction’ to capture the way capitalist innovation renders obsolescent existing technologies and industries and often the regional social structures in which they are embedded. After the unification of Italy in 1861, for example, investment in new growth sectors – textiles, machinery, rubber – was concentrated in the north, with the result that the south stagnated. Scanlan turns to Walter Benjamin to make sense of creative destruction, noting that the conception of modernity as progress disavows modernity’s ‘own broken and discarded past’. All too often, the ‘gale’ of creative destruction, as Schumpeter called it, leaves entire communities broken and rotting.

Both Benjamin and Schumpeter were writing in the first half of the 20th century. Capitalist creative destruction accelerated sharply in the postwar era, and so did the socio-economic obsolescence of regions from the Ruhr in Germany to Britain’s industrial north and America’s rust belt. This ‘macro’ wastage was accompanied by accelerating ‘micro’ wastage: just as capitalist innovation was speeding up, households were using greater and greater volumes of the short-shelf-life consumer goods that firms were churning out.

Clapp, Franklin-Wallis and Scanlan all go to some lengths to account for this transformation and its result: the mountains of consumer waste that are still growing today. The manufacturers of household items had once competed with one another not least to increase product durability: consumers had limited income and were careful how they spent it. But capitalism’s postwar golden age brought the unprecedented growth and democratisation of wealth, especially in the US. The middle classes now had money to burn, Scanlan writes, and this ‘revolutionised the relationship that people had with the world of material objects’. Spending became more important than saving, and firms responded by shifting their priorities in product design from durability to disposability, thereby multiplying the range and frequency of spending (and profit-making) opportunities. Paper towels, plastic kitchenware and ballpoint pens; disposable cameras, razors and nappies – all of these were artefacts of what Vance Packard, in The Waste Makers (1960), called the ‘throwaway’ society.

Products marketed as disposable were one thing: consumers knew what they were getting, at least in terms of how long things would last (if not, at first, the environmental implications). But before long the rise of consumer culture tempted firms to build disposability into products even where it wasn’t wanted. If consumers could afford it, it was better for manufacturers if they bought a kettle – or, decades later, a laptop or smartphone – every three years, not every seven. Sometimes, this was even said out loud, as when, in 1955, the marketing consultant Victor Lebow wrote: ‘We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.’

This was the origin of ‘planned obsolescence’. It has long been one of the consumer electronics industry’s dirty (open) secrets. Clapp writes that between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, the average life of a personal computer decreased from around six to two years. Most of us are familiar with the barriers to longevity put up by smartphone manufacturers. It is more or less impossible to get new models repaired independently and affordably, and after a certain point older devices don’t get software updates (in 2017, Apple even admitted using software to slow the performance of older iPhones). And of course a great deal of money is spent on advertising that aims to persuade impressionable consumers that their two-year-old phone is already socially obsolete. By 2018, 416,000 phones were being discarded in America every day.

As Franklin-Wallis​ makes clear in Wasteland, despite the modern recycling phenomenon, the ‘vast majority’ of waste continues to be disposed of in the same three ways it always has been: burning, burying (for example, in landfill) and dumping (either on land or at sea). The split between the three methods varies significantly between countries and between types of waste, but at the global level they figure in roughly equal proportions. Of course there is significant geographical variation in the degree of wastefulness. The US is comfortably the worst offender: the average American generates around two kilograms of waste every day.

Franklin-Wallis emphasises that for all the justifiable criticisms of recycling, it is mostly a good thing. Recycling an aluminium can uses about 90 per cent less energy and emits about 90 per cent less carbon dioxide than making a can from scratch. Recycling a tonne of steel requires a quarter of the energy of producing it new and generates less than a fifth of the air pollution. These are significant figures. Steel is the world’s most recycled material: nearly 90 per cent of it is cycled back into production. Paper and cardboard aren’t far behind: in Britain, about 80 per cent is recycled.

The problem comes with materials that are more difficult or less advantageous to recycle. In some sectors, much less recycling takes place than we like to think. Consumer electronics is one, with a global rate of effective recycling of around 20 per cent. Clothing and food also produce colossal amounts of waste. Franklin-Wallis reserves particular scorn for the fashion industry, which, he writes, ‘is the business of waste; its very existence [depends on] obsolescence.’ The figures are jaw-dropping. Around a quarter of all clothing manufactured is never sold, and the rates of return within the refund window can be as high as 50 per cent. Most of this unwanted stock is buried or burned, as, eventually, are most of the clothes that consumers do buy and wear, but which, especially in the rich world, they discard after an increasingly short period.

As for food, around a trillion dollars’ worth is discarded each year, representing as much as a third of worldwide production. The bulk of the throwing-away occurs at the point of consumption, in households: the average British household spends about £700 each year on food it doesn’t eat. What happens to the food we throw away varies from country to country. In Britain, most of it is composted or processed to produce biogas, which can be burned to generate electricity or used as a transport fuel. In America, by contrast, as recently as 2018, four-fifths of discarded food was burned or buried.

Despite all the issues with electronics, food and clothing, however, the biggest problem is plastic, the global production of which has increased two hundredfold since 1950, reaching more than 400 million tonnes by 2022. Less than 10 per cent of used plastics are recycled to produce new plastics. There are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, many plastics can’t be recycled. And there has been a growing reluctance to recycle the ones that can, because doing so takes a heavy environmental toll: China’s recycling of imported used plastics into new plastics, Clapp writes, ‘required vast inputs of energy and water and released innumerable microplastics and toxins into local ecosystems’. What’s more, there is seldom a business case for recycling plastics. Producing new plastics is usually cheaper. Indeed, it was in the late 2010s, after China had built sufficient domestic manufacturing capacity to meet its own prodigious need for plastics, that it cut off the supply of used materials from overseas.

Some plastics are reused in other ways. But as Clapp notes, these processes are often ‘energy-intensive and toxins-unleashing’ – the burning of plastics as ‘fuel’ in Indonesia’s tofu and cracker factories is an example. Even in the relatively few cases where plastics can be reused or recycled, the trick can only be repeated two or three times (unlike steel). Sooner or later (usually sooner), all plastics are burned, buried or dumped. And what distinguishes plastic from other forms of waste is that the problem does not then go away. Try as we might to make it disappear through incineration or landfill, we can’t. Plastic survives, finally ‘disintegrating into an infinite number of unfathomably tiny pieces and contaminants’.

Plastic, Clapp says, has been found floating in outer space. It has been found near the summit of Everest. In 2018, a plastic bag was photographed 36,000 feet below sea level, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth. And in 2022, researchers found that three-quarters of us have microplastics in our blood. ‘For every human being alive right now,’ Clapp writes,

there exists slightly more than one ton of discarded plastic out there somewhere, scattered on land or layered in the ground or adrift at sea; there is little question that most of it will outlive our own planetary presence by thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of years. In the ocean alone, per every human, there exist 21,000 pieces of plastic, a net mass of shopping bags and six-pack rings and bottle caps that by 2050 will exceed the weight of all fish put together and is expected to double every six years for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, in just the minute it took you to read this paragraph, another million plastic bottles have been discarded and another garbage truck full of plastic has entered the seas.

In the​ 1950s and 1960s, Franklin-Wallis writes, as the environmental consequences of plastics disposal became clearer, the plastic-packaging industry deployed a series of tactics in a bid to continue doing business as usual. One was to shift the blame onto consumers: waste became ‘litter’. ‘People, not containers, are responsible’ for ecological damage, the US National Soft Drink Association claimed in 1967. Later, the industry put a lot of effort into promoting recycling, despite knowing that in practice it couldn’t be made to work.

This story calls to mind the behaviour of Big Oil and fossil fuels. For ‘litterbugs’, think individual ‘carbon footprints’; for recycling, think carbon capture and storage. Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics companies have been hollow. In the early 1990s, for example, Coca-Cola announced its intention to make its bottles from 25 per cent recycled plastic, only to quietly ditch the target four years later, after political and consumer pressure had eased. This is not to suggest that consumers aren’t a big part of the problem. In the rich world, our wastefulness is horrific. But, as with climate change, the focus on consumers deflects scrutiny that should be directed towards industry. Not only do companies help establish false representations of consumer wastefulness, they are themselves waste creators on a gigantic scale, and often terrible managers of waste.

One example of appalling waste management is shipbreaking, the dismantling of decommissioned ships, which has until recently been concentrated in South Asia, principally Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, where labour costs are low. The local environmental consequences have, Clapp writes, been ‘cataclysmic and irreversible’: ships destined for breaking yards often contain hazardous substances ranging from asbestos to oil residues and paint. The work is hugely dangerous: statistically, shipbreaking is deadlier than mining; life expectancy for men in Bangladesh’s shipbreaking industry is twenty years lower than in the population at large.

Recently, Turkey has captured a growing share of the global shipbreaking trade on the grounds – largely spurious, according to Clapp – that its yards provide a ‘green, ethical’ alternative. Shipbreaking isn’t the only industry in which a supposedly superior disposal option emerges from time to time as a result of some newfangled technology. But where waste management is concerned, what sounds good in theory is rarely all it’s cracked up to be. The latest fad is ‘energy-from-waste’. About a third of waste worldwide is disposed of by incineration. What if this could be done without emitting toxins into the atmosphere? And what if the energy released through burning could be used productively? EfW – the generation of electricity or heat by burning waste materials – seems to offer a solution. The past two decades have seen enormous growth in this: in Britain, the proportion of waste that is burned for energy has risen from just 9 per cent in 2001 to around half today. This may seem a positive development, especially since incinerators have improved markedly in terms of toxin emissions. However, EfW plants aren’t all that efficient in generating energy and they emit a huge amount of carbon dioxide – in Britain’s case, more CO2 per KWh of electricity generated than the country’s recently decommissioned coal plants. (This doesn’t stop many countries designating EfW a ‘renewable’ source of energy.)

Franklin-Wallis notes that in comparison to consumer waste, industrial waste tends to be overlooked, despite the gravity of the problem. He cites estimates that industrial waste accounts for more than 90 per cent of total waste in Western countries (almost none of it recycled). Large-scale mining alone creates around 100 billion tonnes of waste globally each year. In February, the collapse of a tailings dam at a copper mine in Zambia released 50 million litres of waste, containing concentrated acid and heavy metals, into streams feeding the Kafue River Basin, where 60 per cent of Zambia’s population lives; within days, the local water supply had been shut down and dead fish were washing up downstream.

So why, if industry is the main culprit, does Franklin-Wallis, like Clapp and Scanlan, focus on consumer waste? Isn’t there a risk of entrenching the misconception that consumers are the core of the problem? Franklin-Wallis doesn’t broach these questions, but he does note that it’s very difficult for reporters to find out about industrial waste: ‘Very little data exists on it: what it is, where it is, how toxic it might be.’ He visits Kanpur, an industrial city on the Ganges. Since the mid-19th century it has been a centre of leather production: in the colonial era, it produced saddles and boots for British soldiers, and at its peak had more than four hundred tanneries. The tanning process is exceedingly wasteful: it is estimated that the leather industry produces two hundred times as much waste as final product. In Kanpur alone, tanneries release ‘tens of millions of litres’ of chromium effluent into the Ganges every day (the Ganges has long been one of the world’s most contaminated rivers).

Britain, of course, has its own contaminated rivers. Especially in older urban areas, water companies still use ‘combined sewers’, which convey waste and storm water in a single pipe. The theory is that pollutants can be removed before the treated effluent is discharged into local waterways. But Britain’s sewer infrastructure is regularly overwhelmed during periods of heavy rainfall, meaning that ‘combined sewer overflows’ bypass treatment and flow directly into rivers or the sea. Wasteland trots out the depressingly familiar statistics: in 2021 untreated sewage was discharged into England’s rivers on 375,000 occasions; in London alone, 39 million tonnes of raw sewage go into the Thames every year.

It’s​ a jarring experience to read these three fine books on waste at a time when all the talk is of ‘abundance’. Progressive discourse on abundance tilts at the dominance in capitalist societies of economic ideas which make scarcity seem to be a fact of life. The most common definition of economics – the study of the way individuals and societies allocate scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants – is one such dogma. Whether the call is for a ‘post-scarcity’ economics, or utopian thinking about the power of technological innovation to eradicate poverty, hunger and disease, or Green New Deal proposals for sustainable abundance, these progressive ideas share the conviction that many forms of scarcity can and should be reduced or eliminated.

Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by the liberal American commentators Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson focuses on governance and planning, particularly in the US and particularly in its cities.* As Klein and Thompson see it, overzealous planning in such cities as New York in recent decades has created scarcity – and endless fights over how to distribute scarce resources – where it needn’t exist. Their chief examples are housing and infrastructure more generally. They see the manufactured scarcity of such resources, and its consequences in runaway house prices and rents, as the chief blight on America’s cities. Abundance, simply building and making more, is their solution. ‘We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction,’ they write.

But here’s the thing: the US, of all places, doesn’t need more. It certainly doesn’t need more energy. At 77 MWh, energy use per capita in the US in 2024 was more than double what it was in Britain and France. The US also doesn’t need to build housing more quickly – even, arguably, in cities such as New York, where housing costs have climbed most rapidly in the past two decades. For all the seeming consensus among commentators that insufficient construction and hence a growing housing shortage largely explains the inflation of prices and rent, in 2020 New York City actually had more housing units per head of population (0.411) than it did twenty years earlier (0.400). It also had more housing units per household (1.07 v. 1.06 in 2000).

Tackling the world’s waste problem seems unlikely to align with the pursuit of abundance. In 2018, the US construction sector generated 600 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste: everything from concrete and masonry to gypsum, glass, plastics, metals and assorted hazardous matter. This doesn’t include the tremendous amount of waste produced in the process of mining the sand, gravel, gypsum, clay, bauxite, copper, bitumen, quartz and iron ore that constitute the foundations of all modern buildings. Not to mention the vast CO2 emissions associated with the manufacturing of steel and cement.

Franklin-Wallis, unlike Clapp and Scanlan, is willing to address the question of what is to be done about the global waste problem. His sense – surely correct – is that the answer must be less, not more. He reaches this conclusion by way of an analysis of the idea of ‘zero waste’, whose advocates hold that a ‘circular’ economy, in which resources are used and reused for as long as possible and ideally in perpetuity, is both desirable and achievable. Franklin-Wallis disagrees:

While zero waste is at its core an urgent and radical idea with the potential to reshape our world for the better, it is also, in a very real sense, impossible. Recycling eventually comes against physical limits – plastics that can only be recycled a handful of times, pulp fibres that shorten and snap – requiring a constant supply of new feedstock.

This critique of zero waste is a variant on the argument that it is not in fact possible to decouple economic growth from growing resource consumption and environmental degradation.

It is frustrating, given all this, that Franklin-Wallis puts the onus of doing something about the global waste problem back on the individual consumer. ‘What should I do?’ he encourages us to ask ourselves. And the conclusion he comes to is ‘laughably simple: buy less stuff.’ It’s a shame, since Franklin-Wallis knows full well that the companies that produce all of the stuff we buy bear the weight of responsibility for the wasteful state we’re in. Perhaps the reason he doesn’t demand that they produce ‘less stuff’ is that he knows it isn’t going to happen. One of his interviewees, a textile trader, tells him why. Producing and selling less isn’t something that big firms can countenance. ‘When you try to go back to supermarkets and tell them to produce better quality at higher prices, to sell less, they say, “You are talking to the wrong crowd.”’

Maybe the best that can be hoped for is that stuff be produced in the least wasteful way possible. Coca-Cola could be forced to manufacture bottles from recyclable or recycled plastic. Britain’s water companies could be forced to reduce and ultimately stop sewage spills. Why hasn’t this happened already? A key reason is the influence of another baleful idea which, like abundance, liberals have rallied behind: corporate social responsibility. CSR holds that firms have obligations beyond generating profit, to social and environmental well-being, for example. From the 1980s, firms started to set sustainability goals and to make much of their ethical supply chains. Policymakers were all too glad to relax in the belief that companies were effectively regulating and reducing their social and environmental impact. Coca-Cola’s setting of packaging content targets was a prototypical example.

Forty years later, it is abundantly clear that CSR was and is a myth. Even if firms claim to recognise their social and environmental responsibilities, profitability always trumps them when they clash, just as Coca-Cola demonstrated when it dropped its own targets. Whenever companies have been permitted to continue to produce excessive waste and to pollute – which is to say, whenever they have not been required to bear the full costs of doing so – that is invariably what they have done.

Consider Britain’s water companies. Since privatisation in 1989, they have failed to make the improvements in infrastructure that would be required to staunch the flow of effluent, in ever greater quantities, into the country’s waterways. Over this period, they have paid around £60 billion in dividends to shareholders. The fines they have been given for pollution violations barely register in comparison: £90 million – trumpeted by the government as a ‘record’ penalty – for Southern Water in 2021; £158 million for the sector as a whole in 2024. The message this sends is that it pays to pollute. All this has occurred under the reign of CSR, and substantially because of it: the principles of CSR have underpinned the ‘light-touch’ oversight of the industry regulator, Ofwat. ‘I expect water companies to own responsibility for the impact they have on the environment,’ Ofwat’s chief said as recently as 2022, as if such ‘responsibility’ had any commercial meaning or legal force.

Whatever the best way to tackle the world’s waste problem is, it won’t depend on CSR. In a saner world, Coca-Cola would have been given binding targets. In a saner world, Britain’s water companies would have been prevented from profiting egregiously from polluting. A far better principle to follow when dealing with these companies and their waste would be to assume the absolute worst and regulate accordingly.