Waste and postsocialism in Estonia: Becoming European through the management of rubbish

Changing standards and socio-technical arrangements

How could we study processes of intensive political transition through rubbish? How have transnational socio-technical arrangements been assembled with local knowledge within the European Union? And what is the relationship between continuities and discontinuities in such process? By accounting for changes in the management and regulation of a liminal, hybrid entity such as waste, we propose to analyse the way Estonia was integrated into the European political space. In the case of Estonia, the discourse of renewing the connection with Europe was a key driving factor of social and institutional changes, bestowing to the EU a remarkable capacity to have a strong impact as a policy-maker. The notion of Europe became a certain ideal to aspire to, and also a political goal to achieve – through joining the EU.

Europeanization is brought into being in the existing social relations; it is something that takes place, has a material outcome and transforms the daily practices of people. Nevertheless, the influence of the EU at the everyday level became visible in a much slower and fragmented form than rhetorically, showing certain limits in the logics of appropriateness and processes of preference formation mobilized by the EU. Indeed, we can think of the relationship between the different political scales at play as nested rather than simply hierarchical (Brenner, 2001), cooperating via diverse networks, agents of implementation, and forms of translation.

This research set out to contribute to discussions that claim to turn the focus to relations, networks and standards that operate in East European cities (Gentile, 2018), reconsidering along the different scales and scripts through which projects of Europeanization are put to work. We argue that Europeanization has produced a changing order of knowledge and system of relationships between people and institutions, generating new forms of abstraction and valuation that transformed along expectations from the state and patterns of relating. The EU has certainly impacted Eastern Europe; nonetheless, it did so not in the same manner everywhere, showing diverse outcomes and ways of putting ideas into practice. As noted by historians Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Patel (2010), Europeanization (the penetration of transnational institutions into national and regional systems of governance), has not happened in a uniform or unidirectional way, has not been just about Europe, and has included conflicts and tensions as well. These authors define Europeanization as the ‘strengthening of intra-European connections and similarities through acts of emulation, exchange and entanglement … experienced and labelled as “European”‘ (2), hence leading to ‘a certain quantum of social constructivism’ (8), according to which the EU political community is co-produced through law and policies (see also Christiansen et al., 1999).

Historian Karl Schlögel (2007) argues that Europeanization consists of the production of uniform standards, based on the expectation that the newly produced routines and discursive forms are unalterable and unshakeable. In the same vein, authors such as Andrew Barry (2001) have suggested that standardization is not simply a political project of the EU, but the political project of the EU. In addition, we are aware that the union is nowadays posited not simply as a nexus of political concern but as a problem, too, with criticism of, among other things, its characteristically top-down policy engineering (Dzenovska, 2018; Shore, 1999). Likewise, the EU is being portrayed differently – not strictly opposite – than how it appeared within the national imaginaries in early 1990s. Otherwise, Barry (2006) argues that Europeanization refers to the formation of new spaces of government as well as a ‘technological zone’ of common standards. In similar vein, John Borneman and Nick Fowler (1997; also Harmsen and Wilson, 2000) foreground the idea that Europeanization means new forms of governance and reorganizing territoriality, peoplehood and power.

However, postsocialist anthropology has paid too little attention to normalizing strategies or models, such as how waste management has been implicated in issues of national aspiration, and the way post-Soviet changes were about re-evaluating things according to rapidly changing socio-technical arrangements (for an exception, see Dunn 2005; Gille 2016). Such an object of study opens up relevant new lines of comparison with other contexts, elucidating how ideas are routed to specific effects (Corsín Jiménez, 2005). Further, aspects such as shifting the emphasis from the collective to the individual, from public infrastructures to households and from national states to global markets might suggest a rather pessimistic assumption, namely that postsocialism is nowadays everywhere. Also, we can assume, with many authors, that the concept of postsocialism has contributed to perpetuate the allegedly unfinished becoming of East European societies (Kürti and Skalník, 2013), constructing a discourse of ‘liminal Europeans’ (Mälksoo, 2006), an ‘internal other’ in the continent (Wolff, 1994), and a ‘double framing’ that presents these societies as ‘not quite European but in Europe’ (Kuus, 2004: 482).

Postsocialism is a comparative anthropological term coined in the West to study what followed the break-up of the Soviet Union, meaning the privatization of public goods and the means of production, the discrediting of capitalism’s critics and the dismantling of Cold War geopolitical barriers. Later on, it evolved into a rather closed or constraining sub-discipline with an emphasis on micro-studies of specific values and local processes of appropriation and resistance (Humphrey, 2002). But even if the concept is first of all associated with East-Central Europe in the 1990s, the experience has had several collateral effects on the world as a whole (Stenning, 2010; Stenning and Hörschelmann, 2008). Tauri Tuvikene (2016) brings forward this debate by arguing that nowadays postsocialism does not only refer to a particular condition or region, but has evolved into a de-territorialized notion referring to processes of neoliberal privatization, spatial de-planning and fragmentation, and economic stratification. Along this line, Michał Murawski (2018) argues that postsocialism remains a generative term and ought to be retained and supplemented to capture how socialist modernity continues to affect the global present. In short, postsocialism can travel far as a concept, if focusing on the political substance of the concept and decoupled from historical and geographical categories; helping then to understand how radical experiences of change in transnational standards and socio-technical regulations were simultaneous to a retreat of the state and the dismantling of welfare systems.

Nonetheless, postsocialism has been mostly framed by the past and future aspirations, focusing on societies’ expectations and what things were, instead of what they have become, as if the present did not exist or was just an in-between time. Accordingly, postsocialism studies have been obsessed with re-narrating what happened in the past, paying little attention to the present, which seems to not even deserve a name beyond the post prefix (Hirt et al., 2016). Further on, postsocialism has evolved differently within the varied countries to which the concept was originally applied. While in Russia, postsocialism has come to be seen as an era that endured without becoming conventionalized (Nafus, 2006), characterized by informal practices and making do (Morris, 2016); for Estonia post-Soviet transformations implied a radical break and an intensive social negotiation within the framework of the EU, characterized by the aspiration to join this transnational political space through the translation of regulations and standards. All these elements indicate that postsocialism is gaining a new comparative potential as a corollary of globalization (Gille, 2010), contributing to the emergent field of globalization ethnography because of its conceptual relevance throughout different scales and corporate players.

Waste is information

Waste is a key source of information. An example of this is the ‘Garbology’ project (1996), whereby archaeologist William Rathje investigated fresh rubbish as if it were archaeological evidence, studying consumer behaviours from the material realities they leave behind rather than from self-reports. Through waste, we can determine how new infrastructural forms were generated through harmonization efforts and strategies of standardization that reach into the realm of life itself (Barry, 2001; Farías, 2018). Also, we can study how EU rules are interpreted, deciphered and translated into national contexts by governing bodies through mimetic behaviour, ritualistic forms and regulative activities (Jacobsson, 2010). Waste can be considered as an analytical tool through which social relations themselves can be looked at, since it is always part of a larger set of epistemological assumptions, norms and social conventions. As Mary Douglas (1966) explained, waste and dirt are connected with the processes of cognitive ordering. Hence, the concept of waste is part physical, part social and involves classification, separation and exclusion. Indeed, there is an intrinsic discrepancy between the diversity of practices of waste-making and the categorical ideal of what waste is. Also, designations of waste are enmeshed in relations of power and domination, inciting people to make moral and political judgements based on associations with rubbish, trash and garbage (Alene, 2018; Argyrou, 1997; McKee, 2015; Martínez, 2017b).

Historian Susan Strasser (1999) observed that garbage is created by sorting; hence what becomes rubbish, when, and how, depends on all-too-human decisions, both underscoring and creating social differences based on economic status. However, for sociologist Zsuzsa Gille (2007), such a statement about sorting is too simplistic and places too much emphasis and responsibility on single individuals. Gille instead emphasizes the social aspect of garbage and maintains that it is not always a free choice to classify something as waste. For Gille (drawing on Douglas), no material is ‘born’ to be waste, hence attention should be given to the processes that make something categorizable as rubbish, since waste is always a leftover of concrete systematic activities. In her historical ethnography of the waste regimes established by official institutions to deal with waste production and disposal in Hungary, Gille questions to what extent waste issues have been a subject of public discourse and why matters such as who is capable of dealing with waste, and with what tools, have not been sufficiently considered from a political angle. The social aspect of garbage is also of great importance in our present endeavour to study how Estonian society after independence organized itself in relation to waste, in addition to the ordering aspect of people’s quotidian behaviour concerning rubbish. Indeed, an important notion connected with garbage is value. Rubbish is generally seen as worthless. However, and as Gille notes, in the socialist system, waste was often still considered more of a resource than in capitalism. Also, when compared to Western market practices and consumerism, Soviet societies had a smaller amount of packaging.

On this issue, Gille speaks of different ‘waste regimes’, in relation to how institutions determine what resources a society considers valuable, as well as regulating the production and spread of waste. Hence, quotidian attitudes towards garbage cannot be fully separated from politics of waste, as people operate within the framework of the state, and the state’s decisions unavoidably influence their behaviour, decisions, hierarchies of value and broad political sensibilities. As Gille argues, these waste regimes are never static but rather dynamic, and therefore need to be studied in the context of time. People categorize waste in different ways, based on spatial, symbolic, economic, legal or technical aspects. Categorizing rubbish also depends on the waste management system which itself creates specific epistemic categories. In other words, the structure of waste management gives a framework which enables things and materials to become or un-become garbage.

Such technical categorizing can differ from ways people see things in their daily lives. For instance, a common category such as ‘packaging’, which actually constitutes the larger part of municipal solid waste in Tallinn, might often have a controversial reception and interpretation among people. First because of the increasing complexity of packaging itself, and second because municipal waste-making has been traditionally based on material instead of function. In newer containers though, the category of ‘mixed packaging’ has been introduced, which makes people reconsider the function of the thing before throwing it away (e.g. was it used for packaging?) while inspecting the material of the product.

Likewise, waste is often associated with the margins, social exclusion and poverty. An example of rubbish seen as a factor in the marginalization process is the informal economy generated through can collecting in Tallinn. Hundreds of people in economically precarious positions do this, originally for recycling, as a way of earning money. As well, many cities of Eastern Europe have seen how poverty has become an acute issue in the last decades, with people trying to survive or scrounge out an extra living by rummaging through garbage containers or landfills. Attitudes towards these people have been varied, yet rather negatively presented in Estonian media and often associated with a particular ethnicity – Russian. Newspapers have reported on their behaviour and how neighbours did not want ‘geologists’ ² rummaging through their rubbish, devising in turn such means as fencing or locking containers.

When the first closed structure for garbage was built in Tartu, a nearby resident was said to be happy with the solution as neither cats nor ‘geologists’ would be able to get in anymore (Jõesaar, 1996). The measure was also carried out because people from neighbouring areas used their container too, turning the abuse of waste infrastructures into an act of private property trespassing. In St Petersburg, however, attitudes towards the ‘geologists’ were more sympathetic; homeless people were perceived as a useful part of the waste infrastructure and city authorities even presented them as an example of how to recycle (Beilmann, 2018). Nowadays, scavenging has acquired new layers of ambiguity. At first glance, better-off people have no need to do so; however, practices such as ‘dumpster diving’ among not necessarily deprived youngsters are becoming increasingly popular, as part of a larger process of re-making values and moral assessments, influenced by Western cultural referents and motivated neither by a negative assessment of the socialist past nor by the aspiration to become European. The practice of dumpster diving (salvaging food that has been thrown away despite being edible) is rather related to moral concerns about global waste along with anti-consumerism and notions of embodied transgression (Lotman, 2015).

EU scripts

Once Estonia regained its independence, Europe, together with the market economy, became the key ideas and recipes to replace the socialist system and make the Soviet past disappear. The ‘return to Europe’ discourse was therefore part of the strategy of reinvention of tradition and a construction of ‘normality’ (Lauristin and Vihalemm, 1997), reducing the socialist experience to waste, and presenting postsocialism as an exercise of cleaning and undoing (Ilves, 2000; Ries, 1997). The EU was then seen as a source of funds, an example of ‘normal life’ (Martínez, 2014; Rausing, 2004), and a political space where to consolidate the new independent state; in other words, as a resource to use for the project of nation building (Wilson and Galbraith, 2011). For instance, in Estonia, integrating within this political, economic and legal union was understood as an opportunity to reaffirm the country’s national sovereignty and defend itself from Russia; contrarily, the need to transfer national competences and funding to the continental supra-national organization was overlooked. Then, postsocialist societies actively engaged in becoming European even if what that meant often remained unclear (Dzenovska, 2018). Also, the discrepancies between ideals and actual practices in the socialist period were not always resolved, and in many cases were simply replaced for new discrepancies (Ozoliņa, 2019). To a great extent, and retrospectively, many of the attitudes towards the EU in the 1990s appear as naive and ignorant of the implications of joining it (Martínez, 2017a). As observed by Garri Raagmaa, Tarmo Kalvet and Ragne Kasesalu in a study of the Estonian Regional Policy after the Soviet break-up, the 1990s was the period of a more intense Europeanization – “when an institutional framework was created, in parallel with intensive learning from the West” (2014: 775). However, once Estonia joined the EU, a process of de-Europeanization process took place in this country (with a selective application of the rules and driving policy tools away from common European values).

Before joining the EU in 2004, European ideals influenced Estonia first as an example, and later in terms of aligning local legislation with the norms and standards of the EU. Interestingly, in the words of Peeter Eek, adviser in waste issues concerning Estonia’s environment, the prospect of joining the EU (as a soon-to-be-true fact) brought about more transformations than during the time after becoming a member. As explained by Eek, the political atmosphere before 2004 supported every change that seemed somehow positive in the context of joining the EU, and creating changes at the state level was easier. However, once Estonians entered ‘the club’, they became more conservative in their positions. For Eek, in environmental issues Estonia is nowadays a ‘bench player’ and people make changes only when forced to. Therefore, the bigger changes in the environmental field – waste issues included – were brought about at the end of 1990s and the early 2000s (including the compulsory waste collection system). Also, Eek argues that many transformation processes in Estonia occurred only because of the requirements and financing programmes of the EU (Interview 26 October 2017).

Otherwise, Maie Kiisel (2013) also notes that the process of aligning the legal environmental framework with EU laws and directives took place as an uncritical translation of environmental norms, models, standards and sub-policies. In 1992, the Estonian Waste Act was adopted to define general waste management politics. This was one of the first specific environmental laws in the new Estonian Republic. ³ Nevertheless, the law had no implementing acts until 1998, when the Waste Act was completely renewed and aligned with EU waste directives, taking into account all its demands. This was one of the first steps in aligning the Estonian legislation with the legislation of the EU, necessary for becoming a member (Surnenkov, 2015). Interestingly, the long absence of the implementing acts of the Waste Act triggered the foundation of the Estonian Waste Management Association in 1996, with key goals to pressure lawmakers to pass implementing acts, to increase recycling practices and to reduce illegal waste dumps in the country (see below).

The EU constitutes an important source of agency, and the meanings and values of European integration have been seen as powerful forces in social, political and economic life overall (Wilson and Galbraith, 2011). In the case of Estonia, we learn however that Europeanization did not converge and harmonize linearly. Europe-making and the application of socio-technical arrangements went hand to hand with postsocialist transformations, embedding new normative ideas in the realm of everyday life in a period of radical openness and intensive political translation. In the 1990s, Estonian society often presented itself as ‘backwards’ in relation to other European countries. For instance, journalist Aita Ottas wrote that ‘it is difficult to predict, how many years it will take before we achieve Europe’s current level in waste management. If we will at all’. ⁴ Issues with rubbish were one of the aspects taken into consideration for comparisons with European standards. At that time, Europe was still an ideal, something that Estonians did not feel fully part of. As stated by the Chairman of the Estonian Waste Management Association, Mati Arro, Estonia was 30–40 years behind Europe in recycling and waste management. ⁵ Estonians had to recycle in order to become European. However, the existing waste infrastructure had to accommodate not only new EU standards and regulations but also increased quantities and types of waste (Scheinberg and Mol, 2010), as well as to be part of a changing conception of the private and public sphere.

A matter of the private sphere

In a footage from the environmental TV show ‘Osoon’ (Ozone) in 1996, a young man explains how to sort out garbage despite the limited waste infrastructures in Estonia. He himself decided to start sorting out after visiting Germany and seeing how well the recycling system functioned there. In this scene, he pedagogically explains what to do with the new Tetra Pak packages:

Seemingly these are made of paper or cardboard, and they could be successfully burned. I collect all of these and put them down into the basement. I squeeze them together in this way, and put them into the basement. And then in the summer I take them into my summerhouse and there I burn them. Although, I really do not know what harmful gases it emits into the environment when burning. Because there is no kind of information about what is this packaging really made of. ⁶

In 2004, a few months before Estonia joined the EU, the Estonian Waste Act was renewed and completely aligned with all the demands and directives valid in the EU at that time. Waste collection then became compulsory for all municipalities with a population of over 1500 inhabitants. ⁷ In the process of creating a system of compulsory waste collection, several controversies arose as official narratives clashed with the everyday practices and mindsets of local people. As Ülo Kasema, a long-time executive in the waste management company Ragn-Sells, describes, practices of burning and dumping rubbish were quite widespread among Estonians:

People used the darkness of the evening to put the garbage into someone else’s container, like a thief. Or they put it into the bin at the bus stop. In places where waste collection was not arranged, people buried it in the garden, dumped it in the forest, perhaps in holes and then burned it. In some cases, they left it by the roadside. (Interview 9 March 2018)

Contrarily, Peeter Eek (Adviser to Estonia’s Environmental Ministry) argued, back then, for binding people to the service and not leaving too many options outside the system, as otherwise people would continue burning waste at home. Hence, in the eyes of the state, the lesser evil was to connect all inhabitants to one single system, while homeowners saw the compulsory system as a violation of their rights to choose, arguing that private property should only be minimally interfered with by the state and its regulations. In other words, rubbish was considered as part of private property and thus a matter of the private sphere. As explained by Eek,

Grassroots democracy also has its drawbacks. One of them is that a lot of unpopular decisions are not made, are postponed, because they are not welcomed by the local community. And the elected leaders would like to make decisions which are popular or at least neutral. (Interview 26 October 2017)

Culture of rubbish

In the mid-1990s, the problem of unauthorized rubbish dumps began to emerge to the media and be discussed. These dumps appeared not only in the countryside but also within the cities such as Tallinn. As claimed by Estonian Environmental Board, the area of such dumps was almost 150 hectares (the area of Tallinn itself is 15.937 hectares ¹² ). Also, over 30% of the companies collecting municipal waste did not have a proper waste permit for it and in the case of construction waste the amount of companies who did not have a waste permit was about 80%. ¹³ One of the key reasons why such dumps appeared was the absence of laws dealing with the matter. ¹⁴ According to Taidus Aave, a founder of the Waste Management Association, although the problem of dumping has been decreasing in recent years (in Tallinn decreased from 29% in 2012 to 2% in 2015), the problem was earlier so widespread that ‘we would not have had enough space in the newspapers to describe all this’ (Interview 16 January 2018). ¹⁵

Another issue that complicated the process of building up a system was the restitution of residential property to those who had owned it before the Soviet regime, hence re-establishing private ownership rights over properties that in many cases used to belong to the state. This process lasted unexpectedly long and was full of conflict between renters and owners (Feldman, 1999). Most of the restitution claims were settled only by the end of the 1990s, and in the meantime people had no waste collection contracts and garbage was often simply dumped. Likewise, there was an idealization of private property and a belief that once a house got an owner, the situation would improve by itself. For instance, the head of Tallinn’s waste collection company (Ragn-Sells), Ülo Kasema, expressed his hopes that the restitution would generate new values among homeowners and enable the company to start introducing separate waste collection. ¹⁶ In other words, if garbage was to be considered a private matter, individuals must be more responsible for its management. However, not all individuals wanted to assume these new responsibilities, and the absence of a legal framework did not impel people to accept them. Indeed, several institutional attempts to introduce separate waste collection ended in failure, as noted by Taidus Aave:

We started to put out these containers for cardboard and paper, in the nineties … Then we found all kind of stuff in this container. Mainly paper and cardboard but there was food waste and small dead animals, and bricks and all kind of things. So we took the container away, put it back, and still remarked, with stupid perseverance: ‘Waste paper and cardboard’. Then, kids came and set the container on fire. It burned up and all the paint came off the container; we repainted the container, emptied it and again, continued with stupid perseverance: ‘Waste paper and cardboard’. And so we did for quite a several years. And then it slowly started to get better.

A gap seemed to exist, however, between the will to become more European and the utter impossibility to reproduce such practices and standards, due to a lack of overall garbage awareness among Estonians and also because of financial hardships. In many cases, improper littering practices were due to the absence of a functioning system of waste collection. As observed by Kiisel ‘if a person puts their dead cat into [a container of] scrap paper, is not because of a “bad mentality”; they just needed to put their cat somewhere, they had nowhere to put it’ (Interview 8 March 2018). The ‘absence of a waste culture’ frequently arose as the reason for not being able to implement separate waste collection, yet most often demonstrated shortcomings in the management system. In general, the implementation of compulsory waste collection has been slow and rather problematic in Tallinn, with reports of a lack of professional management (Pikner and Jauhiainen, 2014). ¹⁸ Still, only 55% of packaging waste generated in Tallinn is being sorted for recycling, according to the official data provided by the City Hall. The waste collecting system is also unequally organized across the city districts, remaining privately contracted (instead of collectively arranged through public competition) in the central district.

Waste and ideology

Waste management can be an ideological battle. In Estonia, environmental problems have been often presented as a socialist legacy and as an issue of secondary importance compared to more acute problems and priorities, such as poverty and the consolidation of the state. For many years, the problematization of waste management was locally perceived as a ‘luxury’ and therefore more to do with European preoccupations – as something that should be dealt with only when Estonian society had achieved a certain level of development. ¹⁹ Hence, waste management follows trajectories deeply influenced by local conditions and practices and more complicated than a simple adoption of EU performance norms. For instance, negative assessments of the Soviet past, which shaped garbage practices and attitudes towards waste in Estonia, differed from those in Russia. While in Tallinn, the trope ‘Europe’ appeared as a role model and the ultimate goal to achieve, then in St Petersburg different European waste practices were taken more as positive examples, they did not have normative character (Beilmann, 2018). In Estonia, these practices served as an illustration of a lag – lag of Estonia from Europe. They also served as concrete examples, which, if followed, could ‘bring’ Estonia into Europe.

In Russia, where the Soviet past was not perceived as something needed to be rid of, there was no such need to replace ideas. There, ‘Europe’ was not something to aspire to. ‘European’ waste practices were discussed in St Petersburg newspapers as something from which Russia could also learn, but there was no need to copy them. More so, Russia could also use the Soviet past as a source of positive examples alongside the European ones. And then, by the 2000s, the Soviet experience seemed to become an even more credible source of inspiration than those practices coming from Europe (Brednikova and Tkach, 2008).

In Estonia, the infrastructural possibilities for recycling were very limited in the 1990s, and the break-up of state socialism participated in the rapid disintegration of existing systems for the recycling and reuse of goods, hence the functioning of public infrastructures was in many cases interrupted or neglected. The changing and disappearing structures nevertheless did not erase the old practices, and in cases such as glass management, people did not throw glass into the general waste despite the lack of alternatives. Indeed, when in Tallinn the first containers for glass were re-installed in 1995, they filled up very quickly, demonstrating that people had not been throwing glass away but collecting it in hope that in the future it could still be recycled. ²⁰ Something similar occurred with paper. ²¹ These insights show that postsocialist transformations were neither simple nor unidirectional, and involved non-linear trajectories of change (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999; Materka, 2012), as well as different struggles to preserve the existing mechanisms and infrastructures (Collier, 2011). Although not that large an amount of material was recycled in the Soviet Union, ²² such practices were enabled still by the existing infrastructures at the time. For instance, the collection of waste-paper by students was connected with carrying out social work, and people received money for returning such items as glass bottles and jars. Likewise, informal networks for recycling were also widespread during Soviet times (Siim et al., 2013). However, the concept of environmental awareness was quite new and practices of recycling were based on a different notion of value and use of waste than due to ecological considerations. Furthermore, we could draw some historical comparisons here with other contexts, as for instance Maoist/post-Mao China and wartime/post-war Britain, whereby new forms of waste management were introduced as a means of reusing resources in times of strife, playing then a role in building a sense of community and ownership, and as a morale-boosting exercise – rather than for explicitly environmental reasons (Cooper, 2009).

Cleaning campaigns

The spatial aspect is important in the case of rubbish, connecting normative behaviours and cognitive order with what is presented as out of place (Douglas, 1966). Dumping garbage in inappropriate places is thus not only an environmental problem but also a deviation from social norms. In the 1990s, different civil actions were initiated to remove garbage from where it did not belong, emphasizing the aspect of order in a straightforward way. For instance, the Clean the Road (Tee Puhtaks) and Clean the Forest (Mets Puhtaks) initiatives specified that roads and forests should be free of polluting elements that are out of place. These two initiatives were the first mass cleaning campaigns in Estonia, commencing in 1999 and taking place every year until 2007. The campaigns mainly involved schoolchildren (about 80% of the participants), having thus a pedagogical purpose as well. Discourses on civil society and volunteering were important in mobilizing various resources. In the 1990s, both concepts were perceived positively, as forms of rebuilding the Estonian state. However, according to Meelis Muhu, organizer of ‘Clean the Road’ and ‘Clean the Forest’ actions, that attitude changed in the early 2000s: ‘ … the state had already made big changes – the negotiations with European Union and NATO and everything else. Then, it seemed that the state was already so independent that all these things should be done by the state itself’ (Interview 7 September 2017).

In 2008, another massive cleaning campaign took place in Estonia, called ‘Let’s Do It!’ (Teeme Ära!) with the intention to clean the country in one day through voluntary work. Even though the cleaning aspect was important in this case, the organizers also emphasized the notion of talgud (people working together for a common purpose). Close to 50,000 persons participated in their first event, ²³ making the fly-tipping problem visible and pointing that people had become used to seeing garbage around them (Interview with Tarmo Tamm, 5 March 2018). After ‘Let’s Do It!’, Estonia was warned by the European Commission of a possible fine for not complying with EU directives due to the large amount of rubbish still dumped, noting a lack of proper storage sites in Estonia and that in many municipalities no waste collection systems had been organized. ²⁴

‘Let’s Do It!’ was in several ways different from ‘Clean the Road’ and ‘Clean the Forest’ campaigns. While these two were carried out in close cooperation with state organizations: ‘Clean the Road’ with the Estonian Road Administration, and ‘Clean the Forest’ with the State Forest Management Centre and also in cooperation with schools, then ‘Let’s Do It!’ did not cooperate that much with state institutions, but mainly with municipal ones and with different private companies who contributed to the campaign in various ways. According to the organizers, they had more than 500 partner-organizations. ²⁵ Although the campaigns have received a lot of symbolic support from the state, presenting this activity as contributing to develop civil society in the country, the state institutions did not play a key role in organizing the events. Further on, the ‘Let’s Do It!’ campaign often brought up the issue of garbage as a matter of private sphere, emphasizing individuals’ responsibility instead of a public one. The campaign also relied on a rhetoric of success, presenting this one-time private initiative as the ultimate solution to lasting collective and structural problems. As a result, the ‘Let’s Do It!’ discourse favoured the transfer of the responsibility for waste issues to non-profit organizations and households, fostering principles of outsourcing public services.

The criticism of the individual-centredness of the ‘Let’s Do It!’ effort could be also applied to Estonian waste management in general. Be it civic cleaning initiatives, or the compulsory waste collection system, they all put the emphasis on individual practices and the need to correct personal behaviours, instead of engaging in infrastructural changes. As explained by Maie Kiisel, the individual-level approach was simply the ‘easiest’ option (Interview). Another interesting aspect is that at the beginning of the 2000s new projects of waste valorization appeared and garbage started to be considered for its potential monetary worth, when in the previous decade it was rather seen as having zero value. Europeanization involved thus different conceptualizations of value in relation to waste. This shift was also noted by Meelis Muhu, who observed how different organizations became interested in the material that volunteers were cleaning up for free during the ‘Clean the Road’ and ‘Clean the Forest’ campaigns, asking them to collect it separately: ‘we are giving you garbage bags of different colours, put the plastic here, glass here, and everything else here’ (Interview).

Postsocialist becomings

One of the key points of this article has been to consider how the socio-cultural processes initiated by Europeanization were themselves relying on taxonomic changes introduced through legal frameworks, information infrastructures and socio-technical arrangements. The emergence of changing taxonomic systems is intrinsically related with politics and modernization, as Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (2000) have argued in Sorting Things Out. These authors note how classification carries meanings, moral and information across different spaces, encoding political values and exerting a twisting force on individual biographies. Otherwise, nowadays, dealing with waste involves global economies’ displacement and technologies of governance that do not prioritize making waste systems comprehensible and, in some cases, produce a form of neo-colonialism where consumer societies of the global North get rid of their garbage by sending it to developing countries (Alexander and Reno, 2012). For instance, Estonia invested 105 million euros in a new waste-to-energy plant at Iru, which can only keep running by importing rubbish from elsewhere. As explained by Raine Pajo, board member of the state-owned energy company Eesti Energia, ‘Let’s be honest, the handling of foreign garbage pays better’. ²⁶ Since the waste incineration plant began operating, less sorting has been taking place in Estonia, with the plant focusing instead on importing waste from Finland and the UK.

So, opening up the borders meant, among other things, the arrival of foreign waste, capital, products, laws, people, ideas, standards and valorization strategies. Another direct change was that of the composition of material which ended up in garbage: many plastic and aluminium cans appeared, which were not widely used in the Soviet Union (Pryde, 1991). As well, the amount of household waste increased exponentially, which made it more difficult to plan the collection of garbage (Interview with Aleksei Gurnev). Further on, consumer products played an important role in a process presented by the media as one of returning to normality and identity construction. In the post-Soviet period, consumption in Estonia was particularly related to the collective identity and national aspirations (Keller, 2005; Rausing, 2004), and only more recently has evolved into a matter of the satisfaction of individual desires, a material conception of a good life and an aspiration to be distinguished as middle class (Fehéhérvary, 2011).

In this country, and despite everything socialist being rejected after regaining independence (Martínez, 2018) and enduring discourses of pollution, disease, degeneration and darkness around the Perestroika, many old habits and representations of waste persisted (Alexander, 2008). After paying attention to concrete everyday practices and local implementations, we have seen that old and new practices have often coexisted, with the nuance that old practices have been recontextualized gaining new meanings or, in some cases, mutating into something that is not totally new neither the very same old. A case in point is that of an elderly person living in the countryside. He was used to burning his garbage and dumping it in the forest, and continued to do so until recently as he did not ‘trust’ the garbage collection system. His daughter finally convinced him to try using the waste container. He once left a garbage bag beside the container, and for this reason the waste collection company asked him to pay an extra fee, because the container was not full. After this incident, the old man never went near the container, and his daughter gave up trying to get him to use it (anonymous interview).

Overall, discarding things became easier and items were designed to last only for a short while, hence accelerating the cycles of production–consumption and flow of disposal and replacement. The post-Soviet transition relates thus to the making of a throwaway culture, producing an attitude shift towards material objects (Strasser, 1999). Interestingly, when discussing the practices related to garbage and waste management, the Soviet system was not always perceived in negative terms, and some positive aspects were acknowledged even in Estonia, such as the habit of sorting materials (‘people have always had this pile of newspapers in their hallway’, Kiisel interview). We can thus see a complex relationship between continuities and discontinuities, as well as a lack of flexibility and pedagogical exercise by new institutions. As we observed, people often continued their practices in the ways they were able to, especially if considering the context of uncertainty and radical changes. At the same time, local people were often presented as ‘backwards’ in comparison to their European neighbours, and new regulations and initiatives were oriented to teach them how to be more European. In this light, the change in the waste collection system revealed disagreements at several levels, including how homeowners saw the development of regulations and infrastructures as infringing on their freedom of choice – a sensitive issue in the post-Soviet context, where private property has been considered extremely important and state intervention a sort of violation or abuse.

Waste burning and dumping still continues in Estonia, and a meaningful public debate about the importance of sustainable infrastructures for waste collecting has not occurred either. However, both dumping and burning have decreased over the last decade. It is hard to identify one overriding reason for this – the cleaning campaigns, the new collection system or a change in the culture of garbage – as the outcome of transformation measures has been shaped not only by the design of the policies and the opening up to foreign capital and standards, but also by the inherited conditions and expectations. Nevertheless, we can argue that regulations coming from Brussels were an important part of situated processes that turned valueless, undesired matter into useful matter, influencing along how recycling is increasingly considered as an asset and the recognition of ecological values in Estonia. Moreover, and despite the existing continuities in practices, new waste collection taxonomy and infrastructure contributed to reconfigure the way people dealt with their garbage overall, establishing a new normativity of behaviours (according to European models). And yet the way the EU is perceived today in Estonia is changing, by some social actors and stakeholders as hindering local development due to its rigid structures and regulations. ²⁷ Though this is a matter to develop in further research.

Conclusion

This article discussed how perceptions of different rubbish practices as well as the issues of waste politics have been changing during the post-Soviet period in Estonia, addressing practices and imaginaries of daily engagement with the EU in order to making sense of everyday encounters with its policies and standards. Europeanization is here considered as an evolving construction available to ethnographic research. As the Estonian case shows, we can understand processes of political translation and how these regulations and standards might generate broader social change. Waste politics have been studied thus to gain a better understanding of the process of Europeanization, the changing relationship between the state and the people, and how transnational socio-technical arrangements are assembled with local knowledge. To study this, we have looked at everyday practices and infrastructures concerning garbage and how these have changed (or have not) in the post-Soviet period based on the attraction of the trope ‘Europe’. Also, we accounted for the transformative impact of the EU by analysing the particular influence of transnational norms and legislation in localities, as well as how the communicative action of ideas and discursive formations contributed to the integration and standardization in this political space.

The research therefore makes a significant contribution to international studies of transition processes, geographies of Europeanization and social change in Eastern Europe, as well as to the study of waste in relation to everyday spatial, political and socio-technical arrangements. We conclude that Estonia’s inclusion in the EU political project implied a break in standards and value-making in waste regimes, despite the continuation of some habitual practices and that the chain of legislation was not always one-directional and often showed complex negotiations at multiple scales. The article set out therefore to open up relevant new lines of comparison with other contexts about normalizing strategies, globalization ethnography, and how waste management has been implicated in issues of collective identity and national aspiration. Everyday practices have been presented as critical in indicating any changes in postsocialist settings, in our case study, helping to better make sense of Estonia’s postsocialist manoeuvring between the European scripts and persisting relevant practices of waste management from the Soviet era.

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.