Compost contested: the scalar politics of Montreal’s municipal composting program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is a well recited figure that approximately one third of food produced globally is wasted (Turner 2019a). Many cities in the Global North have responded by rolling out new \ncollection schemes and investing in treatment facilities for food waste. Montréal is no exception. In 2015, the city began its food waste collection program in a piecemeal fashion across the city. Prompted by provincial targets set by the waste management agency RecycQuébec, the Communauté Métropolitaine de Montréal has made ambitious organic waste management plans that increasingly espouse a “circular economy” approach. Residents are increasingly confronted with their responsibility to participate in the composting program and so to reinvent their everyday interactions with food and food waste. In this research, I employ qualitative methods to explore how the scalar politics of global food and food waste regimes shape Montréal’s municipal composting program and inform the everyday governance of food waste on the ground. I show that, despite calls for food waste prevention and promises for a “circular economy”, Montréal’s neoliberal approach to organic waste management continues to focus on lucrative downstream treatment efforts through private-public contracts. These neoliberal approaches not only compound a public depoliticisation of food waste but also obfuscate participation inequalities, download responsibility onto individuals in uneven ways, and transform everyday relations with nonhuman processes and animals. I draw on feminist, urban political ecology, and post-humanist scholarship to present municipal composting as a form of more-than-human carework that is embodied in uneven ways along lines of inequality. In this way, neoliberal environmental governance approaches shape not only what people are called to care for, and how they care, but also who has the capacity to participate in caring practices. \n \nEnviron un tiers des denrées alimentaires produites à l'échelle mondiale sont gaspillées (Turner 2019a), incitant de nombreuses villes du Nord mondial, dont Montréal, à mettre en place de nouveaux systèmes de collecte et à investir dans des installations de traitement des déchets alimentaires. À partir de 2015, la ville a lancé son programme de collecte des déchets alimentaires en adoptant des plans ambitieux de gestion des déchets organiques axés sur une approche d'"économie circulaire", répondant ainsi aux objectifs provinciaux fixés par Recyc-Québec. Les résidents sont de plus en plus interpellés quant à leur responsabilité de participer au programme de compostage et de repenser leurs interactions quotidiennes avec les aliments et les déchets. Cette recherche utilise des méthodes qualitatives pour examiner comment les transformations contemporaines et politiques dans la gouvernance environnementale influent le programme de compostage municipal de Montréal et façonnent la gestion quotidienne des déchets alimentaires. Malgré les appels à la prévention du gaspillage et les aspirations à une "économie circulaire", l'approche néolibérale de Montréal dans la gestion des déchets organiques se concentre sur des efforts lucratifs de traitement en aval par le biais de contrats publics-privés. Ces approches néolibérales dépolitisent l'aspect public du gaspillage alimentaire, masquent les inégalités inhérentes à la mise en oeuvre de celles-ci et transfèrent inéquitablement la responsabilité aux individus, modifiant les relations quotidiennes avec les procédés non-humains et les animaux. En s'appuyant sur des perspectives féministes,d'écologie politique urbaine (UPE) et post-humanistes, cette recherche présente le compostage municipal comme une forme de travail de soin [« care »] plus-qu'humain, incarné de manière inégale. Ainsi, les approches néolibérales de la gouvernance environnementale façonnent non seulement les objets dont il faut prendre soin et la manière de prendre soin, mais déterminent également qui peut participer à ces pratiques de soin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".