Should carbon removal be treated as waste management? Lessons from the cultural history of waste

Carbon dioxide is a waste product of combusting fossil fuels, and its accumulation in the atmosphere presents a planetary hazard. Carbon dioxide is also managed and used as a resource. Emerging technologies like direct air capture present the opportunity to reclaim and re-use wasted carbon, and actors in industry and policy are increasingly understanding carbon capture, utilization and storage as a waste management process. What is the value, and the danger, of conceptualizing CO(2) as a waste to be managed? This paper looks at the historical evolution of solid and liquid waste regimes to draw lessons for the future evolution of a gaseous waste regime. It finds that social decisions to clean up solid and liquid waste were driven by both culture and industry. Views of recycling and sanitation did not evolve smoothly, with recycling falling in and out of favour, and sanitation experiencing conflict between public and private actors. An earlier attempt to revalue waste as part of a circular economy—the 1930s scientific and industrial field of chemurgy—failed to become a durable term and movement. These experiences hold important takeaways for negative emissions technologies and carbon removal policy: technocratic ideas about resource management may not take hold without a broader popular movement, as in the case of chemurgy, but value change and technology development can support each other, as in the case of wastewater infrastructure. Scientists and carbon removal policy advocates have an opportunity to contextualize CO(2) waste management within the struggles and goals of the larger circular economy project, and to focus simultaneously on both waste production and waste disposal.