Abstract
Carbon dioxide is a waste product of combusting fossil fuels, and its accumulation in the atmosphere presents a planetary hazard. Carbon dioxide is also managed and used as a resource. Emerging technologies like direct air capture present the opportunity to reclaim and re-use wasted carbon, and actors in industry and policy are increasingly understanding carbon capture, utilization and storage as a waste management process. What is the value, and the danger, of conceptualizing CO2 as a waste to be managed? This paper looks at the historical evolution of solid and liquid waste regimes to draw lessons for the future evolution of a gaseous waste regime. It finds that social decisions to clean up solid and liquid waste were driven by both culture and industry. Views of recycling and sanitation did not evolve smoothly, with recycling falling in and out of favour, and sanitation experiencing conflict between public and private actors. An earlier attempt to revalue waste as part of a circular economy—the 1930s scientific and industrial field of chemurgy—failed to become a durable term and movement. These experiences hold important takeaways for negative emissions technologies and carbon removal policy: technocratic ideas about resource management may not take hold without a broader popular movement, as in the case of chemurgy, but value change and technology development can support each other, as in the case of wastewater infrastructure. Scientists and carbon removal policy advocates have an opportunity to contextualize CO2 waste management within the struggles and goals of the larger circular economy project, and to focus simultaneously on both waste production and waste disposal.
Highlights
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) can be thought of as waste management on a gigaton scale
The IPCC’s assessment that limiting warming to 1.5°C relies on 100–1000 gigatons of CDR [1] provokes the conversation of what sinks might be found to dispose of all that removed carbon
At the same time, emerging talk about the ‘carbon-to-value’ economy, as well as legislation supporting CCUS rather than carbon capture and storage (CCS), frames carbon dioxide as an emergent resource to be used in novel products
Summary
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) can be thought of as waste management on a gigaton scale. It’s okay for people to use toilets and generate garbage; society in turn provides appropriate means of waste disposal to protect the common good’ [16] In this more neutral view, CO2 emissions are ‘a metabolic by-product of industrial activities on which billions of people depend to survive and thrive’, and we must learn to safely dispose of them. Another feature of this view is that waste management does not demand a global transformation of energy infrastructure, Lackner and Jospe point out, but the construction of a parallel one, meaning that it does not threaten fossil industry interests and trigger opposition from them [16]. We will explore: How did waste management for solid and liquid forms of waste develop? What lessons or pitfalls can be learned from these realms and applied to an emergent gaseous waste management regime?
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