Nonhuman Actors,Hybrid Networks,and Conflicts Over Municipal Waste Incinerators

Abstract

This article seeks to make an original contribution to the study of environmental conflicts on waste management infrastructures by applying concepts derived from actor-network theory in an empirical case study. The article is organized into three main parts. The first highlights how the bulk of the literature on the subject has systematically ignored the role of natural/material factors. The second part analyzes the theoretical and methodological contribution of actor-network theory to the analysis of environmental conflicts. Finally, the third part focuses on a case study from northern Italy concerning a conflict over a project for a large-scale municipal waste-to-energy incinerator. The author shows how the outcome of the conflict, namely the failure of the project notwithstanding a convergence of powerful interests, can only be fully understood by adopting a relational definition of agency that sees it as the effect of the process of building associations between humans and nonhumans.

Keywords

actor-network theory environmental conflict incineration Italy municipal waste NIMBY nonhuman actors waste conflict waste management

Introduction: Making Space for Nonhuman Actors in Conflicts Over Waste Infrastructures

This article seeks to make an original contribution to the study of environmental conflicts on the siting and building of waste management infrastructures by applying concepts derived from actor-network theory (ANT) in an empirical case study.

Sociological studies on environmental conflicts on waste management infrastructures—and especially incinerators, these being the most widely contested waste management technologies (Campbell, 2002; Davies, 2008; Leonard, Fagan, & Doran, 2009; McCauley, 2009; Rootes, 2009a; Walsh, Warland, & Smith, 1997)—have mainly focused on either the success or failure of community and environmental organizations in blocking, or at least influencing, siting decisions. As recently summarized by Rootes (2006, 2009b), various theoretical and methodological approaches have been used to explain differences in the outcomes of local campaigns against municipal waste facilities.

The majority of studies (e.g., Davies, 2007; Leonard, 2006; Saarikoski, 2006; Walsh, Warland, & Smith, 1993) have taken a discourse/frame-analytical approach and highlighted the mobilizing capacity of the narratives and representations used by local campaigners, as opposed to the dominant discourse of the advocates of waste infrastructure projects. Others (e.g., McCauley, 2009; Walsh et al., 1997) have focused on the characteristics of the community affected by the proposed infrastructures and on community resources—such as financial resources, educational resources, and political partners—as potential explanatory variables in campaign outcomes. Yet others (e.g., Leonard et al., 2009; Rootes, 2006) have adopted a political opportunity structure approach that stresses the role of contextual macro factors—such as the political geography of local authority boundaries and the changing political and policy context concerning waste management—in explaining the results of local conflicts.

Although these theoretical frameworks have the merit of pointing out various variables that combine to explain the outcome of environmental conflict and decision making on waste management facilities, all of them have largely neglected the role that nonhuman factors also play in such controversies.

Indeed, recently a numbers of scholars have specifically called for social research to take into account the materiality of waste and its interaction with social factors (e.g., Bowler, 1999; Gille, 2010; Gregson & Crang, 2010; Hawkins, 2009; Khoo & Rau, 2009). In particular, Khoo and Rau (2009) have argued that the governance of waste management is characterized by a complex “interaction between the specific materialities of waste and socio-cultural and political changes.”¹ Institutions and civil society, as well as frames and organizational structures and resources, are not the only factors involved. There is a need to take account of the material world as well, and of its capacity to act independently of, and interdependently with, human actors.

In general, the need to pay more attention to natural/material factors in sociological explanations of environmental issues has been highlighted since the article by Catton and Dunlap (1978; Dunlap, 2008). In subsequent decades, a number of authors have acknowledged that many environmental issues are hybrid entities characterized by inextricable relations among social, natural, and material/technological factors. They have consequently begun to cast doubt on the utility of the dichotomy between nature and society and to suggest new forms of synthesis and combination of the two (e.g., Carolan, 2005; Goldman & Schurman, 2000; Mol & Spaargaren, 2005; Murphy, 2002). Among the approaches that have tried to develop a more complex analysis of the relationship between the social and the material worlds, ANT occupies a prominent position because of its strong—if controversial—influence on theoretical and empirical sociological research (Murdoch, 2001).

Drawing on ANT, this article seeks to make an original contribution to research on waste conflicts by showing how this theoretical approach makes it possible to explore the complex interactions between the various social actors and nonhuman factors surrounding the decision-making process in regard to the building of such a hybrid object as a municipal waste incinerator.

The discussion is organized into two main sections. The first sets out the theoretical and methodological background of the research as represented by Callon’s (1986) version of ANT and by the studies that have recently used it to analyze environmental conflicts. The second section applies the main conceptual tools developed in particular by Callon (1986) in a case study on the building of a municipal waste incinerator in the province of Trento, northern Italy. Finally, the concluding part evaluates the contribution of ANT to research concerned with environmental conflicts on municipal waste infrastructures.

Theoretical and Methodological Approach

Since its development in studies on science, technology, and society, ANT has been used and interpreted in a wide range of alternative ways by different scholars and research subfields. The theoretical background of this article consists of those studies that have used ANT to investigate environmental social movements (e.g., Lockie, 2004) and local environmental conflicts (e.g., Goedeke & Rikoon, 2008; Lee & Roth, 2001; Lockie, 2004; Murdoch & Marsden, 1995; Solli, 2010; Woods, 1998).These studies have mainly drawn on Callon’s (1986) sociology of translation and its repertoire of conceptual tools.

Accordingly, they have shown how an environmental conflict can be analyzed in terms of the emergence and competition of different systems of heterogeneous alliances or networks made up of human and nonhuman actors.² Callon (1986) identifies three key—though often overlapping—steps in the process of building alliances: namely problematization, interessement, and enrolment. Problematization consists in forming a system of alliances among entities (Callon, 1986, p. 206). During this phase, the instigating actor identifies a problem and defines a set of human and nonhuman elements—their nature, identity, and interests—in accordance with an initial program of action.

Problematization is followed by interessement, during which the instigating actor, through the use of various kinds of devices (Callon, 1986, p. 207), tries to impose and stabilize the identity attributed to the other elements of the network and to attract them into the program, at the same time blocking other possible alignments.³ If interessement is successful, it leads to enrolment (Callon, 1986, p. 208): The actors accept the roles attributed to them and they are definitely locked into the actor network.

As highlighted by Callon’s (1986) study, experts play a central role in the interessement and enrolment phases because, through the production and dissemination of their knowledge (in the form of studies, public interventions, reports), they give voice to nonhuman actors, becoming the authoritative interpreters of their interests and behavior.

If interessement and enrollment are successful, the mobilization of allies can be achieved and the program of action can finally be implemented. However, Callon (1986, p. 207) also introduces the possibility of “dissidence” or “betrayal.” In an environmental conflict, the consensus that emerges, and the heterogeneous network on which it is based, is always precarious. Both the human and nonhuman elements of a network may detach themselves from the initial program of action and define their identity, interests, and goals differently. As a result, their action may foster a rearticulation of the initial program of action and/or they may be reenrolled by an emerging antiprogram aimed at achieving a different, often opposed, outcome.

As highlighted by Woods (1998) and Lockie (2004), Callon’s sociology of translation offers many attractive insights for the analysis of a local environmental conflict such as the one considered here. First, the relational approach that characterizes it shifts the attention from the power of any one actor—an institution as well as a social movement—to the construction of networks that enable an outcome to be achieved (Woods, 1998, p. 323). This point is particularly relevant to research on waste conflicts, which, as highlighted above, has mostly focused either on the power of political institutions or on the action of local communities and environmental movements.

Second, it provides an extended definition of agency that is sensitive to the influence of both humans and nonhumans (Lockie, 2004, p. 50; Woods, 1998, p. 323). Indeed, even nonhuman elements, by being enrolled in hybrid alliances, can change the course of action (Solli, 2010, p. 57).

Third, the attention paid by translation sociology to defining actors, and identifying their goals and interests, through the process of problematization, interessement, and enrolment, also enables consideration of the discursive and ideological dimension of local environmental conflicts (Solli, 2010, p. 47; Woods, 1998, p. 324).

Fourth, analysis of the translation process makes it possible to highlight how the nature of a program changes as new human and nonhuman actors are enrolled, and as a response to the antiprograms of the opponents (Woods, 1998, p. 324). This can contribute to understanding of how the nature of a technological solution for waste management changes in relation to shifting interactive contexts.

In light of these considerations, in what follows, I apply the translation conceptual repertoire to an empirical case study on a conflict over a municipal waste incinerator project. The main goal is to highlight the way in which this theoretical approach can contribute to understanding the outcome of the conflict, namely the nonimplementation of the project, in spite of a strong convergence of interests among powerful social actors (provincial and municipal governments and the future operator) and relatively weak (at least initially) opposition raised by the local community.

To reconstruct the heterogeneous alliances that emerged during my case study and the processes of problematization, interessement, and enrolment involved, I analyzed a variety of texts through which the program of action of the actors was articulated and communicated during the almost two decades–long conflict: from official documents, such as the provincial waste management plans and municipal/provincial council acts, to gray materials produced by the civil society opposing the incinerator, to media reports on the incinerator project and interviews with political representatives published in the two most important local newspapers (L’Adige and Trentino) as well as in provincial magazines (Il Trentino) between 1997 and 2008. Moreover, a number of semistructured interviews were conducted in 2008, with key stakeholders in local political institutions and civil society.

The complex dynamics of association and dissociation of nonhuman and social entities analyzed in my case study have been summarized and made clearer for the reader by means of a graphical representation adapted from Latour (1991, p. 109) and Minervini (2010). The figure in the Conclusions section shows the alliances and counteralliances that emerged in relation to the initial project of a 330,000-tonne capacity municipal waste incinerator, and to its subsequent modified versions, according to two key dimensions: substitution (OR) on the vertical axis and association (AND) on the horizontal axis. The former dimension highlights how, during an environmental controversy, human and nonhuman actors mobilized by each coalition may change and be replaced with the purpose of improving the capacity of each coalition to implement the program defined. The latter dimension concerns the number of material and human elements progressively enrolled with each coalition.

Analysis: The Case of the Trento Incinerator

Premise: Municipal Waste Management in Italy

As recently highlighted by Morisi and Paci (2009), until the mid-1990s, municipal waste management in Italy was largely dominated by a concern with cleanness and public order. The predominant waste disposal technique was municipal landfill. By the end of the 1980s also waste incinerators, mostly operated by mixed public/private companies involving municipal authorities, started to be implemented. This was the combined result of two factors (Viale, 1999): On one hand, it had become increasingly evident that municipal landfills would soon be exhausted, on the other hand, in 1992 a change in the national regulatory framework intervened. In the aftermath of the oil crisis, the so-called CIP6 rule was passed. This classified the electricity generated from municipal solid waste as being from a “renewable energy source,” thus making it eligible for tax credits. As the analysis of the case study will show, this legal device de facto encouraged the building of waste-to-energy incinerators.⁴ There are currently 48 incinerator plants active in Italy, 29 located in the north, 13 in the center, and 6 in the south (Morisi & Paci, 2009, p. 74).⁵ Compared with the incinerator plants in the other European countries, the large majority of Italian infrastructures are old—60% date to before 1995 and one third even to before 1980 (Morisi & Paci, 2009, p. 92), and they are of small size—80% of Italian incinerators treat less than 100,000 tonnes/annum.

In this context, a radical change in Italian waste management approach was introduced by legislative decree 22/97, also called the Ronchi decree from the name of the then Minister for the Environment. The Ronchi decree, by implementing most of the European directives on waste management of the 1990s, introduced for the first time in Italy the idea that a waste management policy should be shaped in relation to the overall principle of sustainability (Citroni & Lippi, 2009, p. 73). The core concept of the Ronchi decree was that of the “integrated waste management system” (Viale, 1999), that is, a waste management system based on a hierarchy among different but interconnected objectives, namely waste reduction, recycling, and finally energy recovery through waste-to-energy incinerators. In this framework, waste disposal through landfill was considered a residual option to be progressively limited and replaced in conformity with the general EU approach. The Ronchi decree also set specific recycling targets that municipal authorities had to fulfill by defined deadlines: namely 15% by March 1, 1999, 25% by March 1, 2001, and 35% by March 1, 2003 (Citroni & Lippi, 2009, p. 83).

In the years that followed issue of the decree, the percentage of waste managed through landfills at the national level declined from 77% in 1999 to 54.4% in 2005.⁶ At the same time, at the national level, the percentage of recycled waste (RW) generally increased, but growing regional differences emerged and consolidated (Citroni & Lippi, 2009, p. 93). While between 1999 and 2005 the regions of the North, where the majority of waste is produced, increased the quota of RW from about 20% to almost 40%—thus significantly progressing toward the target set by the Ronchi decree—and the central regions reached an average recycling percentage of 20%, the south of Italy remained less than 7% (Citroni & Lippi, 2009, p. 93).

The province of Trento, on which this study focuses, is an autonomous province in the northeast of Italy, characterized by a predominantly mountainous territory and a population of about 600,000 inhabitants concentrated in the two main urban centers (Trento and Rovereto). Traditionally led by center–left political parties, and commonly regarded in Italy as a rare example of a well-organized and efficient local government, until very recently the province performed more poorly in the production and recycling of waste than many provinces and municipalities in the nearby more populated and more industrialized regions (Morisi & Paci, 2009, p. 68).⁷ At the beginning of the 1990s the president of the province started to promote the idea of constructing a large-scale incinerator for the area. This article deals with the complex process of translation through which this idea tried—without success—to become material.

The 330,000 Tonnes/Annum Incinerator Network

The intention of the president of the province of Trento to build a large-scale municipal waste incinerator plant was first officially announced in 1993 in the first Provincial Waste Management Plan and later specified in its 1997 and 2002 updates.⁸

From these documents, as well as from subsequent interviews of the president of the province in newspapers and magazines, there emerged a problematization that involved definition of a set of four human and nonhuman actors necessary for implementation of the incinerator project. Following Callon (1986), the problematization implied not only the definition of their roles and identity in relation to the large incinerator solution but also the identification of their interests as consistent with it.

The first element in the incinerator network was the mayor of the municipality of Trento. As the mayor of the chief town, where the bulk of the area’s waste was produced, he had the power to approve the location of the waste facility on its territory. The president of the province stressed that the incinerator was the only technical solution that could solve the local waste emergency caused by the growth of waste production and the exhaustion of the local landfill while also complying with the ethical principle of “waste self-sufficiency”: that is, with the need to confine the waste cycle within the boundaries of the local territory, without exporting waste to other regions. It was argued that compliance with this principle was a duty for a responsible local government aiming at the sustainable management of its resources (Il Trentino, May 2002).

The second element in the network was the landfill of Trento defined by the 1997 Waste Management Plan as the most suitable site for construction of the new waste infrastructure, both because of its peripheral position with respect to the center of Trento and because of its already compromised terrain.

The third element of the alliance was the local community of Trento, defined as individuals who wanted to live in a clean and safe environment. As argued by the president of the province (Trentino, April 25, 2002), it was in their interest not to oppose the siting and building of the waste facility because a waste incinerator would have many advantages for the local community compared with old waste disposal techniques such as landfills. First, it was safer for the environment and for human health. Second, unlike landfill, the burning of waste allowed energy recovery for the production of electricity and heating.

The fourth element in the network was the waste itself, defined as rubbish that was going to grow inevitably and indefinitely and that at best could be transformed into a source of highly remunerated renewable energy by being burned in a waste incinerator (Trentino, April 25, 2002).

Each of these human and nonhuman actors thus defined would have to be interessed and eventually enrolled in the actor network if the incinerator project was to be successful.

The interessement of the leadership of the Trento municipality to the incinerator project was rapid and smooth. A key interessement device in this case was the promise of the provincial administration that the construction and operation of the future incinerator plant would be assigned to Trentino Servizi, the mixed public/private company that already managed the recycling of waste, and in which the municipality of Trento was the main shareholder (L’Adige, September 7, 2000).⁹

In this way, and thanks to the CIP6 rule, which, as said, made the operating of the incinerator a lucrative business, the interests of the municipality of Trento were definitely locked into the large incinerator program. The interessement was thus rapidly followed by enrolment. Indeed, in 2000, the municipal government approved the location of the future plant on its territory and specifically on the site of the municipal landfill (Act No. 63 of May 23, 2000), thus enrolling also this nonhuman element into the network.

The interessement of the local community was mainly achieved through articles by engineers at the Universities of Trento and Milan in provincial magazines distributed to local families (Il Trentino, May 2002, February 2005). Making reference to scientific studies and research, they described the greater and hard-to-neutralize health and environmental risks of the old landfills, especially in relation to water and soil pollution, and the advantages for the local population—in terms of cheaper heating and electricity—that could derive from the building of an incinerator with heat recovery. Moreover, free visits to existing last-generation incinerators in nearby regions and nearby countries (Germany, Switzerland), open to anyone from the local community, were organized. The aim was to show that a clean and safe incinerator plant could be built, which would not affect the local community’s “backyard.” At that time, there was no opposition movement to the incinerator project, so that the interessement of the local community could be considered successful.

Finally, waste was interessed through scientific projections contained in the Provincial Waste Management Plans, which stabilized the idea of a growing production of rubbish that could not be managed by recycling alone, but which required a large-scale incinerator. In particular, the 2002 Waste Management Plan highlighted a municipal solid waste production of 287,834 tonnes in 2001 and foresaw a rising trend for the following years, with an annual growth rate of more than 1%. In contrast, the plan noted that the percentage of RW in the province of Trento was still very low, reaching only 16% of the waste produced in 2001. Consequently, the need to build an incinerator plant with a capacity of at least 300,000 tonnes/annum was stressed in the 2002 Waste Management Plan.

On the basis of this analysis, an attempt actively to enroll waste in the incinerator project was also made: The municipal solid waste tipped into the Trento landfill started to be stocked and piled in balls of polyethylene. The new waste-stocking system, devised by engineers at the University of Trento, was presented as an innovation that would save space in the landfill while the incinerator was being built, and as a technology that would maximize the energy recovered from waste through incineration (Il Trentino, May 2002). At the end of 2001, the ecoballs amounted to 33,500 in number, and the engineers predicted the production of at least 57,000 ecoballs per year and the exhaustion of the landfill by 2006 (Trentino, October 26, 2000). Through photographs published by the provincial magazine (Il Trentino, May 2002), the mountain of ecoballs piled up in the landfill became the public image of the waste emergency, and it worked as a powerful mechanism with which further to lock the landfill into the large incinerator alliance.

In conclusion, by the beginning of 2000, the instigating actor, namely the president of the province, had apparently managed to align both human and nonhuman actors around the common goal of building an incinerator of 330,000 tonnes/annum in the municipality of Trento. However, as we shall see, as a result of dissidence by actors who had been defined as crucial for the network, this apparently strong alliance progressively crumbled.

The Detachment of Waste and the Emergence of the MBT Network

As said, at the end of the 1990s, an important change was made to the national regulatory framework concerning waste management. The Ronchi decree set the priority of waste reduction as well as of waste recycling and made the principle of “waste self-sufficiency” a guiding criterion for the national waste management system. As a result, it redefined the nature of the waste problem and the goals and interests of the interconnected actors. It can thus be considered an intervening nonhuman actor that began to destabilize the initial network.

Indeed, in the years following enactment of the new law, local municipalities in the province of Trento started actively to promote waste recycling by mounting information campaigns and by investing in the building of infrastructure for sorted waste collection.

Also as a result of these efforts, in 2002, the recycling of waste in the province of Trento started to accelerate: As detailed by the 2006 Waste Management Plan Whereas in 2001 the percentage of RW stood at around 16%, it grew to 21.3% in 2002, reaching in some areas a peak of 48%. Not only did the percentage of RW increase in the province but also waste production progressively decreased. In particular, the growth rate of waste production fell from 1.22% in the period 2000-2001 to −2.7% in the period 2001-2002.

As a consequence, in the summer of 2002, the mayor of Trento asked the president of the province to revise the forecasts and the relative targets contained in the Waste Management Plan and to reduce the size of the incinerator accordingly in order to comply with the “principle of waste self-sufficiency” (L’Adige, June 29, 2002,).¹⁰ The new, unexpected patterns of waste production and waste recycling thus marked the progressive detachment of waste from the large incinerator program.

Other acts of disassemblage followed and further challenged the stability of the large incinerator program. In the spring of 2001, an amount of polluted liquid leaked from the landfill into the nearby river. Despite the attempts to keep the leak secret, in 2002 the safety of the municipal landfill and the efficiency of its management started to be questioned by public opinion and by the main local newspaper (L’Adige, July 31, 2002). Under pressure by public opinion, the director of the landfill eventually recommended the full sanitation of the site and the total removal of the ecoballs, which were to be transported to other regions (Trentino, August 23, 2002). The leak thus resulted in the further detachment from the large incinerator network of both the waste and the landfill, previously enrolled through the device of the ecoballs.

In the attempt to maintain the stability of the network, the incinerator project was progressively scaled down: In the spring of 2002, the president of the province announced that the capacity of the future plant would be reduced to 280,000 tonnes; in winter 2002, it was further reduced to 240,000 tonnes.

However, these attempts to adapt the program to the changing material circumstances did not block the emergence of a new competing network. This sought to redefine the human and nonhuman actors involved and to interesse and enroll them in an antiprogram. Indeed, at the end of 2002, a collective actor emerged which, taking advantage of the resistance of waste to the province’s project, started a new problematization. This actor was the Committee for a Fair Management of Waste, formed at the end of 2002 by citizens’ committees and municipalities in the city’s northern areas located close to the landfill, under the direction of the local representatives of the main environmental organizations (Italia Nostra, Legambiente, WWF).

The committee started to promote an alternative program of action that was no longer based on a large waste-to-energy incinerator but on a Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) facility. The committee thus contested the problematization articulated by the president of the province—namely the definition of the role and interests of waste, the local community, and the municipality of Trento—and sought to show that the large incinerator was not in their interest.

To this end, it argued that the building of a large-scale incinerator, which would have to burn a great quantity of paper and plastic in order to work, would discourage the recycling of waste, which national and European regulations require municipalities to prioritize.¹¹ Moreover, given the increase in RW and the decrease in waste production in the province of Trento, making a large-size plant work would have required the importing of waste from other regions so that the principle of “waste self-sufficiency” would have been violated. Eventually, if the large incinerator was built, the local community would have to bear the environmental costs of burning the waste of others.¹²

On the basis of this counter-problematization, the Committee started to interesse and enroll human and nonhuman actors in the new MBT solution. The interessement of waste was straightforward because, as said above, the pattern of RW and waste production was already consistent with its program of action. However, if the Committee was to see its solution implemented, it had to interesse municipal councilors as well. These could apply pressure on the mayor and obtain his enrolment in the new MBT network. The mayor in his turn had the power to oppose the building of the large incinerator in the municipality of Trento and to pressurize the president of the province into considering the MBT solution.

A key interessement device consisted in public debates during which national MBT experts invited by the Committee explained that MBT was a process of refined separation that shredded and biologically dehydrated the part of mixed municipal waste that remained as the residue from recycling, so that it was not in conflict with the recycling of waste. Moreover, it was argued that the result of MBT was refuse-derived fuel (RDF), a “higher quality waste” characterized by greater calorific power and lower environmental impact, which could eventually be burned in a smaller incinerating plant.¹³ Between 2002 and 2003, the number of public debates organized by the Committee in Trento’s various neighborhoods and in nearby municipalities increased.

Numerous interviews with MBT experts were also published in the main local newspaper, which fostered rearticulation of the public discourse around the issue of the consistency with the recycling of waste of either one or the other technical solution (L’Adige, February 18, 2002, April 15, 2002).

As a result, the interessement of municipal councilors to the MBT program of action proved successful. At the beginning of 2003, all the councilors in the opposition, and a number of councilors in the majority, started to apply pressure on the mayor to organize a special session of the municipal council with invited experts so that the MBT technological solution could be studied and discussed.¹⁴ Thereafter, also the mayor of Trento was enrolled in the MBT alliance. In a letter to the president of the province, he expressed his support for the MBT solution and asked that serious consideration be made of that technological alternative in light of the significant progress made by the municipality of Trento, as well as by many other municipalities of the province, in the recycling of waste (L’Adige, January 3, 2003).

However, in an attempt to resist the new problematization, in the spring of 2003, the president of the province decided to create a technical commission consisting of five experts—two engineers, two chemists, and one doctor—to make comparative assessment of the two technological solutions. The commission’s report, delivered in summer 2003, recommended three lines of action: the removal of the ecoballs to other provinces and full sanitation of the landfill; pretreatment of the waste to be burned in the incinerator with a MBT facility; reduction of the incinerator plant’s capacity to at least 140,000/170,000 tonnes/annum. The president of the province subsequently acknowledged the need to change the incinerator project in accordance with the Commission’s conclusions (Il Trentino, July 14, 2003). The commission report thus worked as a further mechanism for the enrolment of both human and nonhuman actors, stabilizing the pro-MBT network in apparently definitive manner.

The Zero-Waste Network

The stabilization of the MBT network almost managed to “black-box” the incinerator (Latour, 1987). General consensus was apparent among local political institutions and a large part of the civil society on the idea that the integrated incinerator was “the inevitable step” in solving the waste emergency.

However, as highlighted by Callon (1986), in a controversy, every alliance is always temporary and precarious and can always be contested. Indeed, already in 2004, the problematization articulated by the MBT network was challenged by a new local committee—which called itself Nimby Trentino. Nimby Trentino was born from a split with the Committee for a Fair Management of Waste, and its leaders belonged to a campaign-hardened cultural association of a disadvantaged neighborhood in the north of Trento, bordered by the motorway and by the railway and located close to the landfill site.¹⁵

Nimby Trentino tried to destabilize the MBT alliance by showing that not even the smaller integrated incinerator was in the interest of the municipality of Trento and of the local community. First, Nimby Trentino challenged the idea of the small integrated incinerator as the only possible way to close the waste cycle within the province’s borders. As argued by its leaders, in nature “nothing is created and nothing is destroyed but everything is transformed.”¹⁶ The burning of waste in the incinerator would not destroy waste but multiply it by transforming it into components, such as dioxin, highly dangerous for humans and the local environment and especially for the local high-quality agriculture.

Moreover, it was emphasized that the incinerator would not solve the problem of the municipal landfill’s exhaustion: The residual ashes inevitably produced by incineration, which would represent about one third of the burned waste, would themselves have to be disposed of in specialist toxic waste landfills. Furthermore, the argument that the incinerator would serve as a means to enhance energy production was challenged. It was demonstrated that the burning of waste was in fact a waste of energy, because only one fourth of the energy contained in the materials could be recovered.¹⁷

Accordingly, Nimby Trentino started to promote an alternative program of action based on the concept of zero waste. In the new problematization articulated by the group, the goals and role of waste, as well as of the local municipality and of the local community, were redefined. Waste became a source of emissions dangerous for human and environmental health and whose production had to and could be limited. The local municipality had the duty to promote a different and more sustainable way to produce and distribute in order to achieve the goal of reducing waste production to zero. The local community had to fulfill its responsibilities by finding a safer and more sustainable solution to the waste crisis and by further changing its waste and consumption behaviors.

The pattern of a constant decrease in waste production and an increase in waste recycling was already evidence of the interessement of waste to the zero-waste program. However, for Nimby Trentino to implement its program of action, it was crucial to interesse the local community, and in particular, important and powerful sections of it, which had not previously been mobilized by the other alliances, such as the Catholics and the farmers (fruit and wine growers) working in the area. By voicing their opposition to the integrated incinerator project through the representatives of their organizations, they could apply pressure on the mayor of Trento to seek another solution to the waste problem.

Devices to interesse the local community in general included public debates and meetings with presentations by national and local experts from the health sector, who provided “scientific evidence” of the long-term effects on human health, especially in nearby areas, of dioxins produced by waste burning.¹⁸

Moreover, as also highlighted by other empirical studies (Solli, 2010), the interessement of the local community was also enacted by connecting the local conflict with the international campaign carried forward by the International Zero Waste Alliance. The speeches by the American leaders of the International Zero Waste Alliance, invited by Nimby Trentino to talk about the experience of towns in the United States, showed that the fight against waste incineration in the name of an alternative social solution could not be reduced to the selfish opposition of a small local group. They therefore worked as a further device to stabilize the new program of action.

Moreover, to interesse farmers in particular, agronomists were invited to discuss scientific research findings on the possible impact of dioxins on the local agriculture, and especially on the high-quality local wine production. A key role in the interessement of the local Catholic population was played by a nationally renowned representative of the Catholic pacifist movement, who was invited to highlight the need for the Catholic community to move toward a more environmentally and socially sustainable way of life that would make the incinerator unnecessary.¹⁹

Between 2004 and 2005, the representatives of the main local agricultural union and of the Church were enrolled on the zero-waste solution. On various occasions, the president of the main local farmers’ union (Trentino, October 5, 2005) publicly expressed opposition against the building of an even smaller incinerator. Moreover, at the beginning of 2005, a number of priests joined the leaders of Nimby Trentino on a hunger strike in protest against the local government’s decision. Their action also received indirect support from the Bishop of Trento who, although did not explicitly voice opposition against the incinerator, highlighted the need to fight consumerism and the waste of resources in favor of sustainability (Trentino, October 22, 2005).

Eventually, the citizens’ committees of the neighborhoods close to the landfill and the mayors of the municipalities north of Trento, which had previously been enrolled by the MBT network, also joined the zero-waste alliance (L’Adige, October 5, 2004).

The emergence of the new zero-waste network had important effects on the functioning of the MBT network and on the outcome of the decision-making process analyzed here. In a last attempt to stem the rising protest and to defend the MBT alliance against the dissidence of other actors, in 2006 the president of the province, in the updated version of the Waste Management Plan, further reduced the size of the proposed integrated plant to 100,000 tonnes/annum and raised the target for the RW to 65%.

However, this generated a further act of disassemblage in the pro-MBT network. Indeed, it soon became evident that the smaller size of the integrated incinerator plant made the project no longer profitable for the company that had already been informally designated as its operator (L’Adige, August 3, 2007). In fact, the European tender for the incinerator launched in 2010 attracted no bids, and at present no waste incinerator plant of any kind has been built in the province of Trento.²⁰

Conclusions

This article has sought to complement existing research on conflicts around waste management facilities by highlighting, through a case study, the added value of an ANT-based approach. As the foregoing analysis has shown, the ANT relational approach to social interaction has first of all enabled me to highlight how the conflict over the siting and building of a waste management facility can be read as a story of a group of actors attempting to achieve power through the construction and stabilization of heterogeneous associations (Woods, 1998). Indeed, as shown by Figure 1, the program of the president of the province of Trento entailed alignment around the solution of the large waste-to-energy incinerator of a variety of heterogeneous factors, both human—like the mayor of Trento and the local community—and nonhuman—like waste, local waste production, and recycling. The processes of interessement and enrolment through which the president of the province attempted to lock them into the alliance resulted in the further expansion of the network to other human and nonhuman actors, such as experts, the landfill, and the ecoballs. As illustrated by Figure 1, the story analyzed above then proceeded through the construction of competing heterogeneous networks by emerging collective actors, namely the Committee for a Fair Management of Waste and Nimby Trentino, and the attempt by the president of the province to maintain its network stable.

Figure 1.

The hybrid alliances competing over the incinerator project

Moreover, the ANT conceptual repertoire has enabled me to highlight the role played by not only human but also nonhuman actors in changing the course of the action and in explaining the outcome of the case study, namely the nonimplementation of the project for a large-sized incinerator. This can be interpreted as the result of the acts of assemblage and disassemblage of human actors—the mayor of Trento, the president of the province, the local community, the Committee for a Fair Management of Waste, Nimby Trentino—material actors—the waste production and waste recycling trends, the leak in the landfill—and symbolic ones—the CIP6 rule, the Ronchi decree.

In the case of the Trento incinerator, as highlighted by other recent empirical cases of environmental conflicts (Goedtke & Rikoon, 2008; Solli, 2010), nonhumans were catalysts of change. Resistance to the program of action of the president of the province was initially raised by waste—whose production, contrary to the expectations and the interest-led calculations of the experts in the provincial administration, was decreasing and whose recycling was rapidly increasing—and by the landfill, which had to be sanitized and could no longer host the waste enrolled through the ecoballs.

The unexpected behavior of material actors then gave rise to a transformation in the action and narrative of human actors. Initially, the detachment of waste induced the president of the province to reduce the size of the proposed plant in an attempt to recompact the network around the proposed solution. Later, it enabled the civil society actors to promote an antiprogram and to reassemble human and nonhuman actors around the alternative technological solution of an MBT-integrated incinerator. However, even this new consensus was soon challenged by the radical reproblematization articulated by Nimby Trentino, which managed to enroll important sectors of the local community around the “zero-waste program.”

In the competition among these heterogeneous networks, the incinerator project never fully acquired the status of a black box (Latour, 1996), namely a stabilized sociotechnical assemblage and an accepted and uncontroversial solution for the waste problem, and in fact it was never implemented.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their very constructive and helpful suggestions. Special thanks go also to G. Osti, L. Pellizzoni, L. Struffi, and A. Vaona for their comments on a previous version of the article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Bio

Natalia Magnani holds a PhD in Sociology obtained from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is Assistant Professor ofEnvironmental Sociology and Rural/Urban Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, Italy.

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