Ecologies of quantification in waste management: Landfilling,e-waste recycling,and car breaking

Abstract

Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.

Introduction

March 2021. Czech Television launches a new educational programme called Bilance (‘Balance’). They call the first topic ‘The collapse of plastic recycling’. Filip Černý, an investigative journalist, takes us on a journey to understand the paradox of recycling’s failure, despite the fact that individual consumers have been successfully motivated to separate and dispose of their plastic in special containers. The creeping feeling that something is not right with the publicly promoted recycling numbers pervades the entire story.

Following the waste stream of plastics step by step, the journalist traces the success of national waste collection, the complexities of sorting, obstacles for the recyclers, deflection of collected plastics from the recycling pathway and, finally, the views of representatives of the Ministry of Environment and the non-profit organization EKO-KOM, which is responsible for the recovery of packaging waste within the framework of a compliance scheme. The journalist demonstrates convincingly that what is being trumpeted as a great success in the management of waste is based on a creative game of words and numbers that is meant to depict Czechia as one of the best nations in Europe at recycling. There’s a problem though: rates of recovery and recycling are confused, and the fact that plastic packaging does not represent the whole range of discarded plastics is not mentioned.

After Filip Černý’s tour de force, representatives of both the Czech government and EKO-KOM have to admit that the apparent great success in salvaging plastics, reaching 70%, does not genuinely reflect the recycling rate, as their PR activities have implied. ¹ It turns out that most of the plastics collected in special containers are incinerated under the ambiguous label ‘alternative certified fuel’, or are even disposed of in landfill sites. A more likely recycling rate is probably around 30% at best, but the validity of this estimate is difficult to verify. The reportage has exposed a key problem: ways of knowing quantities require much more than simply believing in raw numbers as objective representations of how the waste industry works.

This story unfolds at a time of substantial transformation of the entire waste regime (see Gille, 2007), including ways that waste is produced, the ways it is conceptualized, its modes of circulation, metamorphoses, and socio-material entanglements, and the political as well as discursive practices associated with waste. The transformation in Czechia has been situated within the broader context of the European Union’s (EU) shift from linear to circular imaginaries in waste management, setting up hierarchies in management options to minimize negative environmental impacts, as well as plans and goals that include meeting certain quantitative indicators (Corvellec et al., 2021; EU, 2008). Regional responses to the changing perception of waste and its management in Czechia have embraced circular imaginaries as an opportunity for innovation, infrastructural development and, especially, an expansion of the market logic. The neoliberalization of waste management, as well as pressures from the state and the EU for accountability, have resulted in increasing attention being paid not only to waste management as such but also to numbers as key sources of evidence. However, extensive research on informality in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) (Henig and Makovicky, 2017; Knudsen and Frederiksen, 2015; Morris and Polese, 2014; Rakowski, 2016) suggests that numbers should be interpreted with caution. As Martha Lampland (2010) demonstrated, using the concept of ‘false numbers’, accounting in post-war Hungary required skills and creativity directed towards mastering formal procedures rather than achieving accuracy. While state socialism in CEE collapsed more than three decades ago, certain values and practices have proven to be resilient (Hann, 2018; Jehlička et al., 2020) and the creative potential of informality to overcome obstacles and reach goals has not been lost (see Knudsen and Frederiksen, 2015).

Filip Černý’s report concerning the collapse of recycling also points to the tricky life of numbers, which undermines their role as objective representations of the world ‘out there’. Our approach builds upon works that envision numbers as being inherently relational (Day et al., 2014; Star, 1995; Verran, 2010). In this view, numbers can be imagined and analysed as a component of ecologies. The perspective of ‘number ecologies’, developed by Sophie Day et al. (2014), builds upon two basic features of ecological thinking: the strength of thinking with relations, and an interest in numbers as inherent parts of life. Although this conceptualization of the ecological falls among the more abstract ones (see discussion in Walker, 2016), it resonates with Gregory Bateson’s (2000) or Tim Ingold’s (2000) visions of the ecological that should not be restricted to the biophysical environment but should also include cognition, skills and technologies. Indeed, the ecological perspective can be used as an epistemic and methodological tool for stimulating new ways of doing categorization and analysis (Star, 1995: 2). Day and colleagues’ (2014) vision of number ecologies encourages us to see the relations among different kinds of entities, such as numbers, media, infrastructures, archives or scales. Moreover, this perspective envisions numbers as being part of practices that motivate inferences, comparisons and responses that go far beyond mere calculation.

Our approach attempts to move even further and examine the entire process of quantification, including measurement as well as entanglements between matter with certain properties and experience, both of which shape the emergence and further life of numbers. We move beyond the notion of number ecologies that focus predominantly on the practices that mobilize already existing numbers and engage them with a multitude of creative acts. Since waste is notoriously difficult to quantify (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020: 18; Gille, 2007: 17; Lepawsky, 2018: 13; MacBride, 2011: 176), examination of the relations and processes associated with its quantification offers a unique opportunity to analyse frictions between the images of numbers as objective representations and numbers as part of the ecologies of quantification. Not only does waste quantification include acts that can be deeply political (Gille, 2007: 188; Lepawsky, 2018: 7) but quantification can be designed to emphasize certain qualities at the expense of others (Butt, 2020: 12; Lepawsky, 2018: 13). Numbers, then, may paradoxically serve as tools for concealment rather than revelation. As Jerry Muller (2019: 160) argues, a certain degree of opacity seems inevitable in social life, and numbers can take on this quality as well.

In this article, we critically interrogate quantification in waste management to understand the emergence of quantity through perception, classification and measurement, the creation of numbers, their lives as representations, and the role of experience in knowing quantity. Our approach can be understood as a shift from ‘number ecologies’ emphasized by existing studies to ‘ecologies of quantification’. We argue that such a shift enables us to expand the analytical focus and decentre the position of numbers themselves. We acknowledge their roles as materialized relations (Verran, 2010), devices (Lampland, 2010), or components of numbering practices (Day et al., 2014) but would like to enrich the interest in numbers by describing approximate modes of knowing quantity, and other ways of knowing that complement or correct quantitative knowledge. The ability to make continuous estimates as a mode of approximate knowledge of quantity is widely shared among the vertebrates (Dehaene, 1997: 5). Knowing quantity requires an apparatus to sense and process information about quantity. The actors in the waste industry not only engage in measuring to generate numbers but also take advantage of different sensory modalities, such as vision or having a sense of weight, to gain approximate knowledge of quantity. Such approximative quantification depends on experience. A recent critique of privileging the quantitative emphasizes the role of experiential knowledge in repositioning quantification’s relationships (Prussing, 2022). Erica Prussing’s call for the use of ‘a more multidimensional, dynamic, and expansive lens on who and what is involved in quantification’ (2022: 10) resonates with our attempt to extend the ecological imaginary beyond numbers and numbering practices. In other words, we situate numbers in a wider field of relations and processes, where different modalities of quantification coexist and are shaped by the experience of human actors.

To substantiate our claims, we present three short case studies of quantification in Czech waste management. During our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste (Daniel Sosna – DS), discarded electrical and electronic devices (Barbora Stehlíková – BS) and wrecked cars (Pavel Mašek – PM), we all encountered similar tensions and ambiguities related to quantification. We were puzzled by the contrast between the complexity of knowing quantity on the one hand, and numeric representations of waste streams that were widely accepted without any critical scrutiny on the other. The remainder of the article includes a theoretical overview of quantification and waste, three case studies, and a final section in which we synthesize our key findings. We took on the challenge of collaborative team writing of ethnography within the frame of our research project focused on the transformation of the current waste regime. Each of us individually wrote the section concerning our respective field, while the remaining sections were created together, with DS having responsibility for the initial draft and final version. Despite an attempt to search for overlaps, each of the authors retained a degree of autonomy to express his or her own perspective (cf. Matsutake Worlds Research Group, 2009: 398). Our collaborative research enabled us to recognize overlaps in ways that quantification was contingent upon materiality and experience, as well as how numbers became meaningful through relations. Comparison of different waste streams, nonetheless, uncovered the effects of the heterogeneity of the materials, amounts of waste, different modalities of informality, and temporal regimes for generating and imagining quantity.

Quantification and waste

Modernity has witnessed an expansion of quantification as a powerful force mobilizing the agency of numbers. Although the seeming pre-interpretative and value-free nature of numbers was not promoted until the 19th century (Poovey, 1998), they later became sources of trusted knowledge emerging independently of the subjective judgements of their creators (Muller, 2019: 40; Porter, 1995: ix). Numbers have been used by states to make informed decisions and to govern (Hacking, 1991). A large body of literature in the humanities, social sciences, and STS has recognized the diverse aspects of quantification and numbers that should be studied: the wider processes and relations with specific historical roots and political consequences (Hacking, 1990; Muller, 2019; Porter, 1995; Star, 1995); forms of participation and interaction with numbers-in-practice (Day et al., 2014; Guyer et al., 2010); informal manipulation with numbers (Biruk, 2018; Lampland, 2010); and the role of experience (Prussing, 2022).

The ecological perspective that we would like to build upon was inspired by Day et al. (2014) and Verran (2010), who proposed seeing the relations and processes tied to numbers as inherent parts of social life. Day et al. use this perspective ‘to draw attention to the liveliness, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of the relations’ (2014: 127). Beyond their interest in various numbering practices classified into categories, it was important for us to acknowledge that these practices are not only about knowing but also about sensing and participating (Day et al., 2014: 130). Although Day et al. engage more with the abstract level of numbering practices and less with the biophysical environment, the ecological in their perspective refers to Susan Leigh Star’s conviction that it can serve for ‘refusing social/natural or social/technical dichotomies and inventing systematic and dialectical units of analysis’ (Star, 1995: 2). To prevent the ecological perspective from becoming too remote from the biophysical environment, Tim Ingold proposed a connection between the ecology of mind and the ecology of energy flows and material exchanges (2000: 18–19). His ‘ecology of life’ embraces both matter and mind to understand the emergence and continuation of form via relations. Verran’s work on number as an ‘inventive frontier’, although not explicitly engaging with the ecological vocabulary, moves in a similar direction. Using a case study of Australian water management, Verran demonstrates the shifts between the modes of signification tied to the materiality of water and the activities of human actors. Our suggestion of using the ecological perspective to move from the ecology of numbers to the ecology of quantification is an attempt to acknowledge Ingold’s wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming (Ingold, 2013: 8). Therefore, quantification seems a better concept to cover processes ranging from the recognition of a pile of discarded car parts to controlling the implementation of EU regulations.

Using waste and its management as an arena for examining ecologies of quantification is productive because of waste’s capacity to ‘disturb the smooth running of things’ (Moore, 2012: 793). Waste can be perceived as indeterminate (Alexander and Sanchez, 2018: 3; Henig, 2019; Hird, 2012), and therefore knowing it may be understood as ‘rendering the indeterminate determinate’ (Hird, 2012: 454). There are multiple challenges to knowing waste. It is difficult to define and set bounds around what is being measured (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020: 18). Classification of highly diverse waste matter is another challenge, because ‘the complexity of the materials we produce intentionally or unintentionally increases faster than the capability of our classificatory systems’ (Gille, 2007: 17). Classification of waste can become subject to games when certain materials are or are not included as unwanted (Strasser, 1999: 125), or become reclassified as resources (Alexander, 2016: 35), or as commodities (Lepawsky, 2018: 125). While quantification seems to facilitate knowing, its role in the process is rather tricky. Quantification can shift attention away from the properties of the waste matter. The predominant emphasis on weight as a primary metric may be informative for trading in waste, but not necessarily for knowing its toxicity (Lepawsky, 2018: 103) or its material properties (Butt, 2020: 4). Also, choices can divert attention away from certain quantitative indicators in favour of those that would be most beneficial to industrial actors (MacBride, 2011: 14). Selecting specific waste metrics, nonetheless, can be directed towards almost an opposite political end: care for the daily lives of people who could be affected by waste (MacBride, 2022: 184). Comparisons of waste quantities depend on the ways these quantities are conceptualized and represented – for example, whether rates of recycling are reported as quantities of waste per capita or a ratio of waste to GDP (Gille, 2007: 188). Despite the presence of a language of quantification in transnational organizations such as the United Nations (UN) or the EU, large-scale comparisons of waste generation or mobility are questionable due to the problems such as blind spots in the data, incompatible classifications, composition of indices, illegal waste flows, methodological differences in data collection and analysis, and biases caused by the sources of funding and institutional background of those who collect and analyse datasets (Alexander and Reno, 2012: 14; Gille, 2007: 15).

Quantification has a double potential for both revealing and concealing. Taming waste, or making it familiar, as Josh Lepawsky (2018) might say, can be done through quantification when numbers represent the carriers of a message that waste can be known and therefore can be made manageable. It is important to emphasize that these same numbers, which seem to reveal, may also take part in the process of unknowing. Numbers, through their abstract, general, and disembedded nature, conceal the process of the multiple choices that had to be made to generate them (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020: 18). Still, as Samantha MacBride argues, the more we understand, for example, measurement practices in waste management, ‘the more powerful we become in knowing, and acting on, waste’ (2022: 169). This holds also for understanding waste quantities via critical interrogation of numbers and recalculation, a process that can be used to defamiliarize waste in order to propose solutions to the problems of contemporary resource management and discarding (Lepawsky, 2018). Still, waste’s indeterminacy makes knowledge of waste difficult to achieve (Hird, 2012), and it is questionable whether an emphasis on transparency is the best way to move forward (cf. MacBride, 2022). As Muller (2019: 160) argues, the power of transparency is contingent upon its degree. Opacity is not only useful but also seems to correspond with the basic need for intimacy in social relations. The very need for intimacy is clearly present in various strategies for waste containment, regardless of their real success (cf. Hird, 2012).

Knowing waste benefits from multimodality and acknowledgement of the partial nature of knowledge. Gille (2013) argues that knowing waste should not be restricted to the indeterminate–determinate axis of reasoning. Instead, she extends her interest into other modes of knowing that reflect different relations with waste and different goals that go beyond the reduction of indeterminacy. This perfectly fits our approach to situate quantification of waste in a broader relational space that includes the senses and experience. Not only does experience deepen and shape understanding of quantification, as Prussing (2022) demonstrated in her study of indigenous health, but it may also serve as a key factor for mastering formal procedures, as Lampland (2010) showed in her study of socialist accounting. The interest in different modes of knowing led us to a seemingly unlikely source of inspiration in Daniel Everett’s (2005: 623) study of the Pirahã, in which he described approximate knowledge of quantity (small vs. large amount/size) without a need for numbers or counting. We realized that paying attention to such modes of knowing in our own ethnographic material enriches the diversity of relations within the ecologies of quantification.

Playing with quantities and categories of municipal solid waste

During the last decade, landfilling has served as a dominant means of municipal solid waste management in Czechia, despite its continuous decline there. With the strengthening societal narrative about the need to reduce landfilling (see the Swedish case in Corvellec et al., 2012), waste management companies have been reinforcing the isolation of landfills by installing better fences, surveillance systems, and hiring security guards. These measures, among other things, prevent information leaks. Josh Reno’s succinct observation that ‘waste management is considered most successful to the extent that its workings and flows remain invisible’ (2015: 561) explains why the companies might be interested in controlling the flows of material and people in and out of their landfills. Fences, guards, and cameras minimize unauthorized access to the landfills and, therefore, reduce the possibility that the official representations of landfilling could be challenged. The official numeric returns, then, serve as ‘true’ representations of waste flows and a primary means for knowing waste. The following vignette suggests that numbers in the official returns are of limited value for knowing waste quantities when they are not situated in a wider ecology of quantification.

It was September 2020 when the first author, DS, was talking to Honza, a former leader of the landfill workers at the Kryl landfill ² in Central Bohemia. The landfill had been shut down just two months earlier. A restoration was in progress, and the landfill site still served as an area where recyclable waste was transferred between trucks of different sizes. This specific context – the afterlife of the landfill – enabled DS to continue with the research and to acquire knowledge that would have been difficult to obtain before the shutdown. Since Honza was alone most of the time and had a lot of ‘free time’ at work, he felt more comfortable talking about controversial issues. One day, after Honza and DS had finished covering a container full of plastic waste and moved to Honza’s office for a snack, he started talking about reporting to the state: ‘Last year, we officially reported 80,000 tons of garbage deposited here. But, in reality we deposited 110,000 tons.’ Honza’s confession suggested that such ‘false numbers’ (Lampland, 2010) could substantially distort the picture of waste flows. The scale of the distortion was striking but did not diverge from the scale of extra-legal economies observed in other parts of the world (Nordstrom, 2007). The company was silent about almost 30% of its annual disposal of municipal solid waste in a single landfill. When one adds in smaller informal acts of not weighing some of the trucks (as a result of bribery), which meant waste was brought into the landfill without being officially monitored, and the activities of waste pickers and employees who, conversely, took large amounts of mostly scrap metal out of the landfill, reported numbers become even more problematic. Although there are attempts to model estimates for such practices (MacBride, 2022: 177), this seems to be challenging given variation among the sites and methodological obstacles to measuring the magnitude of such practices, which are hidden in the shadows.

DS was not entirely surprised, but such an explicit statement was unusual. Similar ‘open secrets’ are rarely verbalized explicitly. Actors in Czech waste management often use rhetorical devices as a technology of unknowing waste (see Alexander and O’Hare, 2020: 19): they avoid discussions about certain topics, use euphemisms, or talk about the actions of ‘others’ to mask informal practices (cf. Ledeneva, 2016; Makovicky and Henig, 2018), or pretend that nothing happened when they are caught in the act. Honza’s case was special. He had worked at the landfill since 1998 and was very unhappy when his company suddenly announced the shutdown without any previous discussion with him and his peers. He felt that the workers deserved more respect after all those years spent in such a rough environment. The unique atmosphere shortly after the shutdown, when the landfill became the place where recyclable waste was transferred between different kinds of trucks, is slightly reminiscent of the situation right after perestroika in Russia that enabled Ledeneva (1998) to collect people’s narratives about informal practices during socialism. At the Kryl landfill, the shift in the waste regime opened a new period that stimulated one of the actors to critically reflect on the past and share his reflections. In addition, Honza was well aware that his new contract was only temporary, and he could be fired at any time.

The Kryl landfill is a mid-sized one that was founded in 1995 in an area of a former quarry and used till 2020 for the disposal of municipal solid waste. The last few years prior to the shutdown were hectic. The landfill was reaching the limits of its capacity and the political atmosphere was not conducive to extending it because of the general EU pressure to reduce landfill use. Also, the company faced criticism from local activists for its environmental pollution and for accepting large amounts of garbage from distant cities instead of serving the local communities only. These pressures resulted in the company’s race to maximize its profit in a shrinking timeframe. Playing with numbers had two effects. First, it concealed the fact that the landfill was surpassing its official capacity for disposal. Second, it was reducing the fees the company paid to the municipality and the state. ³ Accurately reporting the amount of waste disposed of at the landfill would mean bringing lucrative deposits to an end sooner and sharing part of the profit with the municipality and the state.

Maximizing profit and extending the life of landfills can also be achieved through a creative use of classification. There has been discussion among local professionals in waste management about the frequent abuse of the category ‘construction material’ at the landfills. Before the most recent Waste Act was issued in 2021, some companies had been notorious for misusing this category and disposing of various kinds of waste as construction material. Since the deposit of construction material was free of fees paid to the municipalities and the state, this was a powerful tactic for minimizing the expenses of the waste companies. A recent police investigation discovered that, at one of the large landfills, more than 90% (!) of all material disposed of was inaccurately classified to avoid fees, and the estimated financial damage to the municipality and state totalled over €160 million (Česká televize, 2021). Both strategies – undercounting tonnage of incoming waste and its inaccurate classification – go beyond the notion of ‘falseness’ as a response to formalization, as described by Lampland (2010). It seems to be more about taking advantage of the relaxed approach to formal rules in order to maximize the profit of private companies at the expense of the state and local communities living close to the landfills.

The materiality of the Kryl landfill, however, generated a different sense of quantity beyond the official numeric representations. Local people were puzzled by a growing hill which was becoming a dominant feature in the landscape. The steep slopes combined with a flat area on the top were reminiscent of a volcano. Indeed, the truck drivers were expressing their anxiety at driving up the steep sides of this hill during winter. This experiential form of knowing cast doubt on the company’s respect for capacity limits. Experience and approximation could not specify the quantity but provided an alternative relation between the waste matter and its dwelling within the confines of normative limits. This experiential regime provided both an alternative for understanding quantity without numbers and stimulated less usual operations with numbers. The mayor of a nearby town described a way to check whether the suspicions of local people could be well founded: ‘I started by counting cubic meters. Based on the capacity of the landfill, I calculated the money that would go to the municipality. I found that the hill was higher than it should have been and the money was insufficient.’ The initial approximate knowledge enabled not only an extension of the ecology of quantification by including experiential knowledge (cf. Prussing, 2022) but also helped uncover fraudulent activities.

The ecology of quantification includes interest in measurement and classification as everyday social practices. Weighing incoming garbage at landfills requires assigning waste to one of over 900 categories specified in the Czech catalogue of wastes, which is a supplement of the Waste Act. During DS’s research among landfill workers since 2012, a plethora of situations arose in which the workers tolerated even substantial departures from the categories of waste announced at the gate. For example, when a truck was supposed to contain construction debris but two thirds of the cargo was plastic wrappings, this discrepancy did not lead the workers to report it using their walkie-talkies. To dispose of something other than what was announced was seen as a normal strategy by truck drivers to solve logistical puzzles or minimize the fees for disposal. The content of trucks that transport bulky waste is rarely uniform. The workers argued that their tolerance resulted from the impossibility of estimating the weight of different fractions inside a single truck. Another reason for their tolerance was the existence of long-term relations between the landfill workers and the truck drivers. Often they had known each other for years and their friendly ties prevented unnecessary tensions. The formalized system of state control in Lampland’s (2010) sense was too abstract for the workers to insist on accuracy in reporting. The loyalty of workers to their employers or the state could never equal the loyalty among peers who shared the burden of the polluting work with the unwanted matter.

This case study demonstrates the dangers of taking the official numeric representations of waste quantity and composition as meaningful by themselves. Since informality and illicitness tends to be part of waste management in most parts of the world (Gregson and Crang, 2016; Reno, 2015), numbers in waste management are likely to be shaped by diverse factors beyond those that are officially acknowledged. The waste industry is famous for its ability to confront obstacles that would reduce its profit and actively develop strategies to overcome them (MacBride, 2011). The ecology of quantification involves relations and acts that enable partial concealment of waste flows and compositions. This could be motivated by a hunger for profit, a need to solve practical problems, or in order to sustain social ties among the actors. This ecology includes also experience of knowing quantity by approximation, which extends the notion of number ecologies.

Incomplete electrical appliances messing up the numbers

Recycling electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) in Czechia is the responsibility of its producers within the regime of extended producer responsibility (EPR). The producers hand their obligations of collecting, transporting, and processing e-waste to the so-called collective systems, which represent non-profit organizations that operate in a compliance take-back scheme. ‘Collective system’ is a literal translation of a Czech designation for these companies that derives from the fact that they fulfil the obligations of several producers. The collective system organizations cooperate with waste collection yards ⁴ regarding the collection, hauliers regarding the transport, and processors regarding the processing of e-waste. They are responsible for the proper handling of e-waste, which involves prevention of illicit activities in the treatment of discarded electronic and electrical equipment. Such activities include the practices of collection yard attendants or consumers who remove and sell the valuable parts from the appliances. ⁵ The rest of the appliances are then discarded at collection yards that, according to a new law on the disposal of products that have reached the end of their usefulness, are obligated to receive both complete and incomplete electrical equipment. This causes two types of problems: first, the collective system loses the ability to extract value from e-waste and, second, there is a potential risk of environmental pollution.

The collective system aims at preventing incompleteness, that is, when appliances are in a state of missing some of their parts. Incompleteness represents an important quality that renders all numbers concerning the collection of e-waste questionable. In the ambiguous space of e-waste processing, the numbers help maintain a sense of stability and clarity and become a crucial point of reference. However, with incompleteness, there are doubts about how numbers emerge and what they represent. Lepawsky (2018: 105), who deals with the question of the ways we know e-waste, demonstrates that ‘there is no neutral set of criteria by which we can categorize or measure e-waste’. The impossibility of establishing neutral criteria for measurement becomes evident in numbers that carry only limited information if not related to the context. It proves to be useful to perceive such relations as part of ecology. Ecological thinking about quantification allows other modes of knowing to be noticed, which take place in daily negotiations with e-waste, both close and distant.

BS helped with administrative work in the collective system called Gamma from August 2021 to August 2022. In the middle of March 2022, the company’s managing director asked BS if she wanted to go into the field. ‘We need somebody who would examine incompleteness in one e-waste processing company,’ he explained. ‘We are losing precious materials.’ For the rest of the day, BS’s colleague Milan made fun of her, imagining her lifting heavy refrigerators to check whether they have compressors. BS asked him whether there was a suspicion that the processor was concealing something. Milan told her that they cooperated with another similar processing facility that reported much lower levels of incompleteness. Based on the type of transport, either the processor or the haulier examines and reports on incompleteness. The goal of checking this, Milan continued, is to find out whether the haulier is reporting the correct numbers. And Milan added: ‘But, you know, they collect the e-waste from the regions where it is black (kde je černo); ⁶ our material is disappearing there,’ thus recognizing that neither processor nor haulier may be to blame.

Gamma pays collection yards and hauliers for their services based on the weight of collected or transported appliances. Gamma’s payment for e-waste processing is a bit more complicated. Once a year, Gamma conducts batch tests in all cooperating e-waste processing companies. Through these tests, the proportion of individual materials that can be extracted from each type of appliance during disassembly is determined in each processing facility. Then, the containers transporting the discarded electrical appliances are weighed, and a visual examination determines how many washing machines, dishwashers, and other appliances fit into one container. Once a month, Gamma conducts an auction to sell the materials obtained. If the delivered appliances were incomplete, the gain for Gamma and the processor would be lower. When the e-waste processing facility does not report incompleteness, it must pay the financial loss. Based on the batch tests and container filling, the processing companies also get a monthly flat rate for processing from Gamma.

Collection and transport of ‘bulky appliances’ is done in containers or hauliers’ trucks. Loading e-waste into containers or truckloads is crucial for measuring and obtaining data (MacBride, 2022: 176). Gamma offers specifically designed containers for use in all the larger collection yards. When the collection yards do not have a container from Gamma, the haulier loads the truck with so-called bulk appliances. In both cases, the goal is to have the containers or trucks as full as possible to minimize expenditure on transport. As the hauliers put it, they do not want to ‘transport air’. Filling the containers (naplněnost kontejnerů) is the responsibility of the attendants at the collection yards, who can get a bonus for packing in more appliances. Although the filling as a physical quality refers to the volume, Gamma sets the average full weight of a container with electrical appliances, based on their long-term monitoring, at 4.3 tons. Thus weight presents a vital tool to work out what a load is worth in monetary terms. However, it conceals other properties of e-waste, such as incompleteness. In the logic of global commodity chains, containers represent crucial vehicles for keeping capital in motion (Birtchnell et al., 2015: 3; Leivestad and Markkula, 2021: 3). To maximize the movement of capital, the spatial capacity of the containers must be maximally used. Incomplete appliances cause insufficient density in filled containers as measured by weight.

The numbers can indicate various inconsistencies, but it is challenging to reveal incompleteness without having the reference numbers created by batch tests. To make those numbers trustworthy and reflective of the actuality, Gamma requires incompleteness should be reported. This puts pressure on collection yards, hauliers, and processors. When Milan came back from the company where they mostly disassemble refrigerators and where he discussed incompleteness, he was asked how they recognized it. Milan explained that they controlled it by weight. With some microwave ovens, it is easy to tell they have been dismantled just by looking at them. With others, it is necessary to lift them to feel their weight, and then it becomes immediately obvious because an incomplete oven is heavier on one side. Incomplete washing machines are recognizable only when they are missing a motor. However, sometimes the motor is replaced by construction debris, so one cannot check it only by weight alone. A missing power supply cord might be a clue, but those are usually cut out by employees of collection yards in any case.

Weight represents a plausible unit of waste management, as it can be measured, and the resulting numbers can be compared and managed. As Butt (2020: 12) states ‘[w]eightage and monetary worth are key modes of knowing and representing waste materials, ways in which a sensuous thing can be evaluated in the abstract as a physical object’. In his observation of informal waste workers, he focused on ways of understanding the attributes of waste materials. Quality cannot be weighed but requires ‘the cultivation of certain habituated capacities’ (2020: 12). These capacities to recognize the missing parts of e-waste are not obvious. The hauliers and attendants at collection yards have a rather reserved stance on incompleteness. The attendants explain that they must accept everything, so they are almost powerless. The hauliers mostly react irritably to the challenge to turn every washing machine upside down. They complain that it is not possible under the time pressure during loading. Incompleteness represents an annoying aspect in the lives of those dealing with e-waste daily.

The employees of the collective system monitored the collection of e-waste without having direct personal experience of the process beyond rare visits to collection yards and processing facilities. The numbers served as proxies for the monitoring and controlling of e-waste streams. Still, they provided only partial information. As Lepawsky (2018: 96) emphasizes:

data about e-waste generation are typically measured in terms of weight. Weight is relatively easy to measure, but it tells us nothing about other important characteristics of e-waste such as its potential for toxicity (e.g., 1 kilogram of aluminum and 1 kilogram of mercury are identical in terms of weight but radically different in terms of toxicity).

Incomplete appliances represent the risk of toxicity; for example, the compressors from refrigerators contain oil and chlorofluorocarbons. If these substances are not drawn off properly, which is more than can be expected from those who steal the compressors, the pilfering of parts generates risks to the environment and to human and non-human health. The numbers indicating the weight of e-waste can inform Gamma about incompleteness, but they do not reveal the potential harm.

The incompleteness of electrical appliances is almost impossible to infer from the weight of collected e-waste. Only in relation to other numbers, in the sense of what Day et al. (2014: 128) call ‘numbering’ as ‘apparently endless ways of being and having relations’, can one discern some tensions. While it may be possible to conceal incompleteness, it has a considerable impact on quantification. The municipality then has containers that are less full, which decreases the benefit it gets from Gamma. Similarly, the haulier transports half-empty containers. The materials that the processor is able to extract from appliances are less valuable. Finally, the company operating the compliance take-back scheme fails to meet the annual targets for collection rates when reporting to the Ministry of Environment. Incompleteness as a specific issue in e-waste recycling demonstrates the embeddedness of quantification in relations that emphasize sensual and tacit processes. Zooming in and out with the numbers (Day et al., 2014: 131–2) necessarily involves embodied experience and ‘certain habituated capacities’ (Butt, 2020: 12) of recognizing incompleteness by weight, as well as batch tests relying on the physical work of disassembly and weighing.

Quantitative metamorphoses in informal processing of wrecked cars

Similarly to the observations of DS and BS about the importance of weight for managing municipal solid waste and electronic waste, PM encountered the issue of waste quantification during his fieldwork at an informal breaker’s yard, where he spent several months working and living, surrounded by various types of waste from disassembled wrecked cars. The yard premises consisted of two large warehouses, a spacious courtyard full of wrecked cars at different stages of processing, and a workshop with two car hoists where all the breakers’ art was performed. In the process PM realized that numbers were performed in all of the objects around him. Because of the informal nature of the yard, these numbers were open to divergent perceptions and interpretations of those who attempted to follow what was going on there. Rather, numbers served as temporary devices for knowing the quantities of the materials that were emerging in the process of disassembling the wrecked cars.

The informal, although it is an inseparable part of the formal (Hart, 2010: 142–3), is often understood as being hidden. In the case of breakers’ yards, nevertheless, the elusiveness of informality is a matter of perspective. On the one hand, the practices of informal breakers are not monitored and reported. On the other hand, the results of their work do appear in the official statistics because of being reported as part of the activities of the legal yards. This works as follows: legal yards report processing of wrecked cars that never actually appear on their premises due to an informal deal created among informal and formal breakers, motivated by their common goal: profit. A considerable number of wrecked cars are either dismantled, repaired, and returned to the roads, or processed and disposed of at informal places, while this activity, at least according to official reports, is supposedly happening at legal breakers’ yards. Thus, in this case, one could see numbers as vehicles of relational and creative agency between two actors to hide things that need to be revealed somewhere else while still being hidden in the original context. In other words, cars as material objects have often been hidden where they have been physically present and made visible in places where they never appeared; in a way, the numbers in official accounts enable one to see the informal without realizing it.

At breakers’ yards, the interconnection and interdependence of weight, quantity, quality, and property of an object is important. Weight is relatively easy to measure and, as such, might be used to transform a quantity of material objects into a general number. The result of this metamorphosis of the quantity represented in the form of an accumulation of individual material objects into a rather abstract yet very concrete image of another kind of general number in the form of money is directly linked to the quality of objects and their properties at breakers’ yards. To explain more thoroughly: breakers are skilled in processing and creative utilization of most of the parts of any wrecked car. Nevertheless, dismantling cars at breakers’ yards is not only about extracting usable parts and their subsequent resale. On the one hand, that is indeed a profitable activity; on the other, breaking up cars generates a lot of waste. Basically, there are four types of waste produced during car dismantling: (1) vehicle fluids, (2) plastic components, (3) glass, and (4) metal car parts. While the first is sometimes used as combustible material to heat the yard’s buildings during winter, the second and third types of waste usually end up as an anonymous mass at landfills or incineration plants. However, the fourth type of waste – metal – is the one in which breakers are most interested, because the market for metals is among the largest in the world’s recycling economy (Alexander and Reno, 2012; Minter, 2013: 27; Reno, 2016: 121). Therefore, it is not only quantity that is determining, but also the quality and properties of material objects that breakers deal with.

When breakers try to eliminate the rubbish generated during dismantling, their quantitative imagination derives from piles of material. During his research, PM would often hear breakers cursing, ‘Kurva to je bordel!’ (‘What a fucking mess!’) as they restlessly waited days for a delayed garbage truck to come and make all the piles of rubbish disappear. In this case, the pile was regarded with annoyance by the breakers because it contained plastics. However, on other days, PM could see the owner’s eyes silently counting while looking at piles of metal and larger objects sorted into two containers, and could hear his mumbling voice saying: ‘Furt málo’ (‘Still not enough’). In this case, the pile of metal and its continuing enlargement were highly desirable. Breakers would sort metal into two types: aluminium and the rest. Car components made of aluminium were understood as highly desirable commodities. Consequently, the material quality of aluminium meant representing an object’s quantity in different numbers – seen in the form of money – than any other type of metal. As already mentioned, we can see here the interdependence of quantity, the creation of a number, and an object’s material quality. In other words, the property of an object or its material quality is as important as its weight, that is, its quantity, for it to be transcribed into numerical form. In this sense, it is possible to apprehend numbers, along with numbering, as socially formed within number ecologies (Star, 1995). This means that numbers are able to perform relations, ‘that is, to travel, to make possible comparison, conversion, and exchange, to be stored, to inform and to make sameness and difference’ (Day et al., 2014, 5). Numbering is a dynamic concept always in motion, shifting through the different sorts of meanings, expressions, and thoughts of those who think with and in numbers.

Another dimension of this dynamic emerges when one follows the trajectory of numbers to see where they come from and where they go, while simultaneously attaching to new meanings and losing others, which depends on what particular numbers are for and what they do. To address this pursuit, the image of a trajectory of a wrecked car through its cross-border journey to a breakers’ yard might be helpful, as this journey for the purpose of getting cheap spare parts and – consequently – to earn profit, is an excellent example of creative classification resulting in multiple meanings of numbering and its representation in official statistics. As PM observed, imported or exported wrecked vehicles are not transported as waste, because they are sold with a foreign registration certificate; therefore, these cars are classified as commodities in Czechia. While the transport of waste is constrained, commodities travel in a relatively unobstructed manner. Furthermore, after their export, there is no requirement to confirm the proper ecological disposal of wrecked vehicles unless they appear in the vehicle registry. However, these vehicles do not appear there. This abundantly practised circumvention ultimately not only allows the recycling of motor vehicles without the necessity of confirmation of official ecological disposal, but also shows the performative capacities of classificatory categories and, consequently, the performative capacities of numbers.

Ecologies of quantification

Our case studies provide insights into quantification viewed through the prism of the relations it engenders. We point to problems emerging when numbers are stripped of their relations and appear to be independent representations of the world ‘out there’. Imagining numbers as an inherent part of ecologies, as Day et al. (2014) propose, is a productive way to tackle the tricky lives of numbers as seemingly independent carriers of meaning. The indeterminacy of waste lends it a special potential for destabilizing the position of numbers as uncontested heroes of the evidence-based era and uncovering the relations that make numbers meaningful. Since numbers in waste management exist in relations with other entities – such as people, other organisms, materials, categories, and variables – approaching them as autonomous phenomena would be a fallacy comparable to understanding an ecosystem through a single species. Our interest in different waste streams, with their specific materialities, practices, and ways of (un)knowing waste led us not only to appreciate the relationality and liveliness of numbers but also to stretch the ecological reasoning to the entire process of quantification. The overlaps of our findings include the recognition of the vitality of experience and approximate knowledge in quantification, the revealing and concealing effects of numbers, the entanglement between material quality and quantity, and the creative use of classification. All these themes can be understood best when viewed as part of the wider ecology of quantification.

Numbers seem to have a special capacity to reduce the relational space – or ecosystem if we use the ecological inspiration – and serve as simplified representations of it. Verran (2010) suggests envisioning numbers as materialized relations in a way reminiscent of Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) understanding of pigs as objectifications of social relations. But there is an interesting difference. While the pigs in Strathern’s ethnographic material serve as materialized embodiments of relations that are recognized and appreciated as being socially constitutive by her interlocutors themselves, the relationality of numbers in Verran’s and our cases tends to be underestimated, or even suppressed, by our interlocutors and emerges only via ethnographic analysis. Verran (2010: 174) argues that her Australian volunteers were not aware of the unintended consequences of their data collection: numbers became constitutive of water as a commodity because of the iconic mode of signification. Although we can hardly boil down the heterogeneous perspectives of our interlocutors into just one, their appreciation of the relational nature of numbers was also limited. Such a circumscription of imagination worked differently for different actors. Landfill workers constrained their understanding of numbers to meanings relevant primarily within the network of their peers. The accounting of the breakers of wrecked cars was highly dependent on the relation to a legal breakers’ yard, but further spheres of relations were too distant to consider. Employees of the collective system for e-waste had to imagine numbers in a wider context than the hauliers, who took numbers primarily as proxies for efficiency and profit. None of these actors, however, reflected on the mode of signification when numbers become constitutive of the market itself. There is little doubt that market logic is a dominant force in the waste industry (see e.g. Alexander and Reno, 2012; Irvine, 2022; Strasser, 1999) and that numbers lubricate the forward movement of the capitalist machine. This dimension of understanding numbers, nonetheless, was absent among our interlocutors.

Immersion in diverse waste environments enabled us to observe the unstable nature of numbers. When the managers of landfills, e-waste collective system organizations, or breakers report numbers to the state, they primarily follow the formal procedures of enumeration and rarely think about the accuracy of the numbers and their further lives after they have been created and reported. As one CEO of a waste management company once told DS, different state agencies use forms with different categories, sometimes in contradiction to the classification used in waste management on the ground. Wondering about the sanity of the state results in little respect for reporting and requires creative balancing between standardization and improvisation, which Crystal Biruk (2018) aptly calls ‘data cooking’ and Lampland (2010) depicts as being responsible for the production of provisional or false numbers. Everyday practices of quantification in waste management often take the pragmatic position and use numbers as temporary devices to get a provisional sense of quantity or to fulfil the requests of those who require the data. Different users of numbers, nonetheless, have different experiences and expectations, and understand numbers differently. While some of the representatives of the waste companies use numbers as tools for discovering new, and sometimes illegal, horizons for profit, state officers, NGOs, or even scientists may approach the same numbers as accurate representations of waste streams. Then, as Butt (2020: 14) shows, numbers can live surprisingly rich lives without having clear origins. The closer one gets to knowing the process of how numbers emerge, the more one doubts the universal and context-free conceptualization of them that is widely used in evidence-based knowledge politics (cf. Prussing, 2022).

Our article demonstrates that there are multiple ways of knowing quantity. It goes without saying that numeric quantification is often perceived as the most reliable way. Other ways of knowing quantity, however, play an important role in this process and even challenge enumeration itself. When e-waste hauliers evaluate whether microwave ovens have high-voltage transformers inside them via manually holding them and ‘feeling’ the distribution of weight along the right–left axis, they reveal the incompleteness of electric devices not captured by the numbers referring to the weight of entire loads of e-waste. Similarly, when people living in the vicinity of a landfill recognize a visual disagreement between, on the one hand, the claims of the waste management company that they still have a lot of space for disposal and, on the other hand, the steep and hardly accessible hill casting a shadow on their town, they come closer to knowing the quantity of waste than the state officers receiving reports with ‘cooked’ numbers. When car breakers rely on visual estimations of the size of their piles of materials, their approximate knowledge varies with the qualities of the material. Although monetary value is a primary means for establishing equivalence with the piles of materials (see Butt, 2020: 13), imaginative horizons tied to piles of plastic differ markedly from the relations nurtured by valuable aluminium. Our experiences with the three different waste streams demonstrate that approximate modes of knowing, grounded primarily in visual and tactile senses, may provide resources for including quality in quantification or may correct official numeric representations.

The research of three waste streams enabled us to avoid the shortcut of understanding a single stream as a representative of the life of waste sensu lato. We observed different modalities of informality, material qualities, and temporal regimes that affected quantification. While the informal breaker’s yard remained completely hidden through mimicking the operations of car repair shops, collective systems were concerned primarily with small informal acts of the hauliers and visitors at collection yards, and landfills witnessed practices ranging from small classificatory favours to friends to large-scale fraud of the management. These modalities structured who could shape the production of numbers or mobilize other ways of knowing quantity – and when and how.

Material qualities, such as the toxicity of certain e-waste components, the ductility of aluminium, or the unpleasant odour of rotting household waste yielded different sensitivities for estimating quantities. Heterogeneity of the materials and the amounts of waste in the three different streams affected quantification as well. Although both e-waste and discarded cars are far from being determinate and easily manageable, the heterogeneity and immenseness of mass waste provide arguably the greatest space for creativity in quantification. The flows of discards to landfills are so extensive that scrutiny of the nature and composition of waste can only be superficial. In contrast, the e-waste stream requires more attention to classification and individual items. Approximate knowledge of quantity, then, emerges via experiencing different entities. While inhabitants living near landfills estimate the size of the sheer mass of the landfill, the car breakers estimate the monetary value of a pile of certain metal, and the hauliers of e-waste need to handle individual electrical devices to detect incompleteness masked by seemingly valid numbers.

Quantification operated within different temporal regimes. Intensive everyday flow and recording of garbage trucks coming to a landfill set different conditions from the occasional need to get rid of a pile of plastic car components, or the regular transport of containers with e-waste by the hauliers. Approximate knowledge served as an irregular, and therefore unexpected, correcting device for knowing the quantity of garbage at the landfill. Among the hauliers of e-waste, the sensual ability to feel incompleteness was incorporated into everyday rhythms of handling e-waste and uncovering potential discrepancies between the numeric representations of weight and the (in)completeness of discarded objects. Moreover, the practice spread to other actors in e-waste management and resulted in regular checking to maintain good relations among the actors. Among the car breakers, approximate knowledge did not serve as a corrective but rather as a prospective device, enabling them to imagine the monetary value of scrap metal which would eventually end in their pockets.

Clearly, there are various ways to shape relations and practices within the ecologies of quantification. Our article was not intended to debunk numbers per se but to shed light on diverse relations and practices that are active in the process of quantification. It seems to us that the more expansive lens on quantification provided by ecological reasoning offers a productive approach to understanding how numbers come into being and what they do.