The Inner Dynamics of Moral Economies: The Case of Waste Management

Abstract

This article examines the internal dynamics and relationality of moral economies. It focuses on labor relations to understand how people find balance between collective moral frameworks and individual everyday acts. Drawing on ethnographic research among Czech landfill workers during the neoliberalization of the waste industry in the 2010s, the article explores two spheres of waste management: the informal scavenging of landfill workers and the management of wastewater. Salvaging things via scavenging and management of wastewater provides two arenas for analyzing the ways people reason about the good, dignity, and justice while following their own goals. Using inspirations from the scholarship on moral economy and everyday ethics, the author argues that these two theoretical directions may benefit from the respective strengths of each other’s approaches: a capacity to recognize patterns of moral reasoning behind struggles for dignity in an unequal world versus an actor-oriented situational sense of ethics growing from everyday life on the ground. The article points at a scalar reshaping of moral economies and brings attention to a morality that does not reflect only direct transactions but also more imaginative relations to distant others.

Introduction

In June 2016, I came to the Pureland landfill one morning as usual and started chatting with Peter, the operator of a front loader. ¹ He was not in good mood. When I asked what was going on, he brought up a topic that had been re-emerging regularly during the last two years of my research work there: the landfill was supposed to be shut down, but nobody knew when. New proposals for a deadline appeared almost every other month, only to be subsequently postponed by the company’s headquarters. ² Peter was not only annoyed at the company, but also angry with the manager: “Look at what’s going on here. You see it, right? Tendon (šlachoun) ³ cares only about himself and doesn’t give a damn about us.”

Peter was complaining about his boss, the landfill manager, with whom he and his fellow co-workers had interacted for more than a decade. Although their mutual relationship at the workplace required some degree of understanding and collaboration, it included tensions that shaped feelings and moral judgments regarding who was right and what was considered good. These affects and judgments were shaped by the ongoing transformation of the waste regime in reaction to the European Union’s vision of hierarchy among the different means of waste management. ⁴ According to this vision, prevention represented the most preferred option for the future, while landfilling became a target for elimination as an archaic and harmful means of waste management. These processes had profound consequences. The previously hidden waste industry that had been silently fulfilling the capitalist dream of profit-making partially emerged from the fog and became scrutinized for its technological efficiency, environmental impacts, and respect for the law. Reasoning and negotiations concerning what could be considered good were carried out among actors at different scales, ranging from officers at the Ministry of Environment to workers who were directly interacting with the waste matter itself. The moral economy ⁵ they participated in stretched across these scales and mobilized ideas about social worth situated in a web of complex labor relations. As Tijo Salverda ⁶ argues, understanding moral economies requires going beyond spatially constrained settings to include actors at different scales. Contemporary waste management provides an opportunity to explore such relations, because waste and its representations tend to be mobile and often cross various boundaries. ⁷ The waste industry creates superb opportunities for the capitalist generation of surplus value, ⁸ but at the same time, it carries a sense of intimacy, responsibility, and the need to care for both discarded objects and society via removal of these objects. ⁹ A cocktail of these different principles situated in a formerly socialist central European country creates rich intellectual space for exploring the relation between the moral and the economic in contemporary capitalism. Since the waste industry in Europe has been going through a major transformation, the concept of moral economy, which was productively used to address socioeconomic changes in particular, seems to be well suited to understand such a process.

In this article, I examine how moral values and obligations shape labor relations in the waste industry, based on my research, initially garbological and later ethnographic, at the Pureland landfill since 2012. By examining two different spheres within the contemporary waste regime in the Czech Republic—informal scavenging by landfill workers and management of landfill water—I reveal the inner dynamics of moral economies, including not only struggles for the good but also doubts and tensions emerging during everyday action. I build upon a less accentuated dimension in the works of Edward P. Thompson ¹⁰ and James C. Scott ¹¹ to shift the understanding of moral economy as a coherent whole of shared moral ideals about the allocation of resources and labor relations to a more processual and relational model that acknowledges the role of everyday practices and meanings in shaping moral regimes. This resonates well with Dimitra Kofti’s ¹² suggestion to explore interrelations between collective moral frameworks and individual acts to understand how people find balance among multiple coexisting values and frameworks. I suggest developing this line of reasoning via building a bridge between recent scholarship on moral economy and everyday ethics. I argue that both theoretical directions may benefit from the respective strengths of each other’s approaches: a capacity to recognize patterns of moral reasoning behind struggles for dignity in an unequal world versus an actor-oriented situational sense of ethics growing from everyday interaction on the ground. ¹³ Although there has already been an attempt to find synergies between these two approaches via emphasis on practice, ¹⁴ I extend the interest into scalar reconfigurations of moral economy and relations reflecting not only direct transactions but also more imaginative kinds of relations.

The Landfill

Landfilling is experiencing dramatic change in Europe. The EU Parliament and the European Council are pushing for more sustainable means of waste management that would improve resource efficiency and prevent waste. Landfilling, with its limited capacity to transform waste to energy, has low priority among the preferred means of waste management. This political pressure from the EU has affected national politics and has cascaded down to waste management companies, including the one that ran the Pureland landfill from 1994 until its shutdown in 2017. The company is one of the major players in the heating industry; its main business lies in running a large heating plant that provides heat for the entire region, while landfilling was always an additional activity in the company’s portfolio.

The strategic value of the landfill for the company had been in its potential as a place where polluting, but profitable, activities could be managed. A composting plant and an incinerator became new business opportunities for the company and its allies when the star of landfilling began to wane under the influence of EU plans. The end of landfilling coincided with preparations for a major shift in the ownership of the company when an international holding specialized in the energy industry purchased a substantial number of shares. The process underlined the shift from a regime in which waste was a means of profit via its deposition and treatment to a regime in which waste became primarily a source of energy. Since the new co-owner is an influential player accustomed to international markets, preparations for the change in ownership reinforced the rise of the neoliberal moral economy ¹⁵ ; the process led to increasing emphasis on accountability, efficiency, and generation of profit at the expense of the workers, who are easily disposable when new business opportunities appear and require structural changes.

The moral milieu at the Pureland landfill was permeated by the interplay between two entangled moral regimes that can be understood as two kinds of moral economy ¹⁶ : the socialist and neoliberal moral economies. Relations among the waste workers, officers, and the manager were shaped by the moral values of mutual help and flexible attitudes to rules, which resonated well with the values common in work settings during socialism. ¹⁷ The workers enjoyed a lot of freedom to pursue their own informal activities of collecting and repairing bits and bobs salvaged from the garbage. At the same time, the neoliberal moral economy pushed all the actors to fit somehow into a regime that emphasized efficiency and individual responsibility. This caused tensions, especially when these values clashed with the sense of solidarity and camaraderie. In contrast to the values that were not compatible between the two moral economies, there were some that were compatible. As Chris Hann ¹⁸ demonstrates using the example of the value of work, certain components in the “moral dimension” of economic life can be quite resilient. In the Pureland landfill, being dominated by “the system” tended to promote shared moral values vis-à-vis a common adversary: the neoliberal regime, which misrecognized the value of workers. ¹⁹ These modes of thinking have roots in socialist times when groups of people forged their moral norms in opposition to the socialist regime. ²⁰

“Tendon,” the manager of the landfill, as well as the officers at the gate, tolerated the informal activities of the workers, who were able to take home various “treasures” found at the landfill and smuggle six to ten tons of scrap metal out of the landfill per year to sell it. It was an “open secret” ²¹ that all employees in the landfill knew about. The workers appreciated the fact that the manager tolerated their informal activities without requesting any share, but it was not sufficient to make them like him. The manager embodied the company and the neoliberal regime behind it. Since the workers were frustrated by the company’s increasing disregard for landfilling and their work, the manager became a lightning rod for their frustration. They made frequent jokes about his limited experience, poor knowledge, and physical weakness, and they sometimes deserted work tasks to demonstrate that they could not be dominated so easily. The manager was not in an easy situation. He had limited power within the hierarchy, because he was in charge of what was perceived as a technology of the past. As a result, “Tendon” was not a strong leader, but rather a mediator caught between the differing visions of efficiency and profit coming from the top management and his subordinates.

The relationship between the company, the landfill manager, and the workers can be best understood using an event that was a recurring motif in the narratives of the workers. They were invited to celebrate the company’s anniversary, but when they arrived at the venue, all the chairs were occupied and they could not sit down and have dinner with the others. The landfill manager did not take care of his subordinates and nobody else cared about them either. They were left standing in the large hall while others were either staring or completely ignoring them. The humiliation was so palpable that the workers just grabbed some food and decided to leave for a nearby pub to have a few beers on their own. This brief anecdote is informative for a few reasons. First, it describes structural inequalities and their role in shaping the moral reasoning of those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Second, it demonstrates a specific act of leaving the collective celebration as a response to the social setting that ignored the workers as relevant actors who contributed to the success of the company. This story was used repeatedly by the workers to legitimize their disregard for the company and their occasional resistance or even anger toward the manager. Third, the story connects moral reasoning and action at the lowest level of individual actors with the wider structure of the company, as well as with national and EU decisions that triggered the change in the waste regime in the first place, and resulted in a perception of the landfill workers as unimportant actors who played no role in the transition to the new waste regime.

The Inner Dynamics of the Moral Economy

The inspiration for work on moral economy, coming from the works of Thompson ²² and Scott, ²³ tends to emphasize the capacity of the concept to facilitate an understanding of shared moral values about the allocation of resources and reactions to violations of these values. Moral economy is seen as useful for understanding the “inner workings of capitalism” and social reproduction in various times and places. ²⁴ Several scholars promote wider notions of the concept beyond its narrow sense as an antithesis to the market. ²⁵ As Hann demonstrates, the moral values of Hungarian villagers were, in fact, open to incorporating market logic. ²⁶ Some scholars recognize, nonetheless, the danger in applying the concept too widely or even contributing to its analytical “dulling” via its uncritical application to all social contexts. ²⁷ Hann’s ²⁸ suggestion of drawing inspiration about the relationship between the moral and the economic from Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness is a possible solution, especially given the robustness of its application across diverse societies and times. There is a danger, however, that the moral or ethical would be dissolved into the social sensu lato—the problem that Jarred Zigon ²⁹ warned about in his critique of the equation of the ethical with the social. Therefore, using the concept of moral economy can be still productive, and I make two theoretical interventions: (1) to move beyond transactional logic and (2) to include relations across the scale that do not necessarily have to be direct but are rather imaginative.

Although there is an awareness that moral economy should not be static and needs to take into account practices and inner workings, ³⁰ the interest in general patterns and social groups often overshadows the moral or ethical dynamic in the reasoning and actions of individual actors. Some elements of thinking about inner dynamics, however, can be found even in the works of the scholars most associated with opening the academic debates about moral economy. Thompson, while clearly promoting the necessity to move beyond the “face-to-face encounter” and “take a larger view of the actions of the crowd” to understand moral economy, ³¹ was still able to pay attention to the strategic maneuvering of the actors who could even promote a sense of ambiguity concerning the nature of socioeconomic relations. ³² Similarly, Scott’s interest in peasants’ reactions to instability caused by the expansion of the market enabled him not only to examine the general patterns of actions but also to account for internal tensions among the rebelling peasants. For example, he describes a case from Vietnam when a failure of the insurgents to distribute their take—previously seized from the big landowners—among all the peasants resulted in the moral condemnation and execution of the insurgents’ leader. ³³ Participants in moral economies clearly need to make judgments and decisions in specific situations. As James Carrier ³⁴ points out, people’s everyday lives are full of decisions requiring them to judge circumstances to make such decisions. For him, “the moral force . . . arises directly from the economic interactions between people.” ³⁵ As Kofti ³⁶ argues, the concept of moral economy can accommodate not only the collective dimension but relations to individuals and their actions.

The transactional notion of moral economy growing from the bottom was applied by Lale Yalçın-Heckmann ³⁷ and her colleagues to examine “how moral economic obligations and acts arise out of and within the context of work.” This direction of reasoning resonates well with my own research, because labor relations stand at the core of my field experience. At the same time, sticking with Carrier’s transactional logic of obligations would mean putting too much emphasis on interactions among the actors. As Caroline Humphrey ³⁸ argues in her analysis of favors as a specific kind of moral act, favors do not have to follow a transactional logic, but rather they represent a “moral aesthetic of action.” This idea can be useful for thinking about moral economy. While the view of moral economy growing from everyday acts of exchange and associated obligations greatly enhances our understanding of how moral economy emerges and gets perpetuated, it does not seem to provide a complete picture. ³⁹ Actors who participate in moral economies do not necessarily interact directly with each other. The sources of moral or ethical judgments can be more distant and imaginative. Consider, for example, the workers who make their everyday choices while imagining what EU officers had in mind when creating the new directives concerning waste management and, therefore, affecting the workers’ lives. It is the kind of morality that David Henig and Anna Strhan ⁴⁰ associate with the human propensity to imagine “what ought to be.” I understand this call not only as a move toward the more aspirational and imaginative aspects of the human condition but also as an extension of the scale of relations considered.

To enrich our understanding of the inner working of moral economy, I suggest using inspirations from ordinary ethics that build upon the Aristotelian notion of ethics. ⁴¹ Although ordinary ethics has been exposed to criticism and is certainly not the only way to theorize about the immanence of ethics in everyday action, ⁴² it offers a possibility of accounting for the imaginative dimension of moral reasoning beyond obligations and of incorporating inconsistencies, ambivalences, and tensions in social encounters. ⁴³ The proponents of ordinary ethics critique a reductionist understanding of morality as a straightforward domain where the good just waits to be recognized, approached, and applied; it is instead negotiated and can include even contradictions. ⁴⁴ Michael Lambek proposes a notion of ongoing judgment that nicely develops Carrier’s ideas about choices being crucial for moral economy. ⁴⁵ Judgment is part of everyday action; its temporal directionality can be prospective, immediate, or retrospective, and it can include others as well oneself. ⁴⁶ Another stimulating line of reasoning in ordinary ethics is performance, where the body represents the locus of ethical acts and is the vehicle for speech. ⁴⁷ This is a productive direction for thinking in the world of discard, where minor acts and habits provide the backbone for theorizing about the ethical dimension of relations between humans and waste. ⁴⁸

The second intervention builds upon Salverda’s ⁴⁹ claim that moral economy benefits from the multiscalar approach. He argues that studies of moral economies should include what he calls “external” actors who “operate from afar.” These could be nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), journalists, scientists, or others who affect reasoning and action on the local level. Building upon Thompson’s crowd, Salverda creates a notion of “distributed crowd.” ⁵⁰ This approach fits well with Jörg Wiegratz’s call “to study the morals of all actor categories and practice variations in the economy.” ⁵¹ Both of these authors extend their analytical focus to understand how moral economies operate within global capitalism, with its structural inequalities extending through space; this is the kind of approach to moral economy proposed by Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta ⁵² as well. I follow these inspirations about the implications of extra-local factors for moral economies, but I focus attention on relations instead of the agency of the actors. Relations provide a more general framework for reasoning that can accommodate the imaginative dimension of relating to others.

Scavenging Scrap Metal

Landfill workers spent a substantial portion of their time at work collecting, processing, and repairing various things they found at the landfill. This was not part of their official work requirements. It was a typical kind of informality that could be found in various post-socialist settings, where employees used their time at work to pursue other activities, mostly for their own benefit. ⁵³ Collecting material was not a mere survival strategy, but an experience that shaped the ways the workers saw the world. ⁵⁴ They were convinced that it was not right to be merely passive witnesses of the process whereby the potential value of discarded objects disappeared under a new layer of garbage. There was a great degree of agreement at the landfill that rescuing objects was right. The workers reused and recycled things, which was in agreement with the EU’s official “Circular Economy Action Plan.” At the same time, these activities enabled them to maintain social relations with the people with whom they shared or exchanged rescued objects. It was common to share discarded packaged food, detergents, tools, sporting equipment, and other objects within the networks of workers’ relatives and friends. In addition to perceiving the acts of salvage as good for their ability to prevent the disappearance of value, scavenging and exchange of objects offered an opportunity to challenge established norms and ideologies. As Josh Reno ⁵⁵ argues, scavenging and associated activities “serve to disrupt idealized relations between landfill, home, and market.” While the manager and the officers mostly tolerated scavenging due to its thrifty nature, the workers enjoyed its disruptive potential. It was a vehicle for turning things upside down: enjoying the landfill’s abundance as a means to thrive instead of being faceless, disposable laborers dependent on the company’s will.

Scavenging scrap metal represented a special part of these informal activities. The labor associated with scrap metal scavenging enabled workers to earn extra money through the sale of scrap metal to a local center for the collection of raw materials. Transporting already disposed waste out of the landfill, however, was illegal. Czech law requires that a company running a landfill must prevent any theft of waste and its transport out of the landfill. Since the manager did not want to prohibit workers’ activities but needed to minimize the risk of getting a fine from the Ministry of Environment, he created a special institution that the workers called a tithe (desátek). It was a payment that had to be made to their company to legalize the workers’ informal activities. The institution of the tithe comes from medieval times, when villagers paid one-tenth of their annual produce or earnings to the church. Desátek paid by the workers followed the same logic. Once per year, the workers had to officially announce and measure one load of scrap metal transported out of the landfill, so that the company would have evidence that the transport of scrap metal was organized by the company and, therefore, legal. In other words, the workers converted their informal practices into an official treatment of scrap metal, pretending that this was all the scrap metal that had been collected throughout the year. The workers were convinced that the manager had not created desátek to keep the money in his pocket. All available information, including the manager’s own oath, indicates that he really did report desátek to the authorities and knew that there was little danger of a detailed audit that would scrutinize the real scrap metal flow. The workers, however, hated desátek, and interpreted it as a kind of revenge by the manager for their occasional resistance to his orders. They argued that there were far more serious and legally threatening issues at the landfill—primarily issues related to environmental pollution—that made their scavenging insignificant.

The landfill workers felt they had the moral right to earn extra money through scrap metal collection and sale because they did not feel they were being treated fairly within the system. Their mediocre salaries did not reflect the dangerous and unpleasant nature of work they performed. Yet their endurance was never acknowledged or rewarded. The real “rewards” were an increasing uncertainty about the future of their jobs and this method of preserving evidence of material flows in and out of the landfill. The company’s leading managers did not show much interest in the workers, who were considered merely disposable tools of profit—a common feature of the companies in the region. ⁵⁶ As Peter, one of the workers, described it, “Look how these masters (páni) cheat. And they’re gonna tell us something? Come on . . .” The workers’ moral justification for their right to perform informal activities and to resist orders reflected the unequal relations and distribution of power. ⁵⁷ Their resistance grew from the view that labor is not just an economic process, but rather an “art of living” in Thompson’s ⁵⁸ sense. As Kathleen Millar ⁵⁹ points out, building upon Thompson’s work, resistance does not have to be seen through the lens of scarcity and need; rather, it is a way of experiencing and inhabiting the world. The transgression of rules did not represent an issue for the workers because the rules were viewed as a vehicle of oppression rather than justice. When laws clash with moral values, especially when these values relate to equality and human dignity, such laws do not have to be seen as worth respecting. ⁶⁰ In fact, during socialism, some laws were even considered “immoral.” ⁶¹ Given the workers’ ages (45+ years), they all had experience with this perception of laws and frequently referred to the fact that not much had changed in this respect during the preceding three decades. The neoliberal moral economy of the 2010s was changing economic efficiency and controlling international links and flows of capital, but clearly it was entangled with moral reasoning that was rooted in the socialist moral economy.

The inner workings of these two moral economies, however, were not as uniform and predictable as suggested above. There were differences among the workers in terms of understanding scavenging. While some viewed it as a response to injustice inherent in formal labor relations, others put emphasis on acts of care or opportunities created by mass waste. Moreover, employee individuality played a role. For example, the most senior worker, Karel, had an ambivalent position among the others. He was excluded from the collective efforts of other workers who collected scrap iron together, smuggled it out in a single container, sold it, and divided the money. There were at least two reasons for this. First, Karel refused to contribute financially when the workers decided to buy their own metal container for the storage of their scavenged objects and materials. Second, he provoked others with his careless approach to purifying practices; others often complained about his body odor and the smell of his clothes and boots. Because of his specific position, Karel was the manager’s favorite worker and the only one who received a job offer after the landfill was shut down in 2017. When some official work tasks required collaboration among the workers, they did collaborate. The workers even respected Karel’s extensive experience and ability to find things inside the piles of garbage or to help when necessary. When the workers negotiated with the manager, resisted orders, or complained about unjust treatment, their inclusion of Karel was strongly dependent on the context, and over the years, I witnessed highly variable acts with a moral charge. Similarly, when another worker, Slávek, crossed the line of usual complaints and attacked the manager physically, his act was not approved by everybody. Others knew that Slávek liked to avoid work and had a problem with self-control. These situations weakened the homogeneity of workers as a group. Instead of seeing a crowd pushing forward notions of justice or defending dignity, ethical judgments were situational and flexible. ⁶²

None of the relations between the workers and their superiors were uniform or based on a simple model of inequality. The manager tolerated the workers’ scavenging because these activities had been tolerated long before he became the manager. His tolerance emerged from the perception that a good person should support this continuity, especially given the environment-friendly nature of these activities. Also, scavenging was advantageous for the company because it increased the space available for the deposition of new waste. From the perspective of the manager, establishing and requiring desátek was therefore an ethical act that enabled him to find a balance between formal rules, whose significance increased with the expansion of the neoliberal moral economy, and the moral value of scavenging. It was a favor, a specific mode of acting that did not reflect the logic of obligation. ⁶³ To enable the collection, processing, and transport of scrap metal required multiple small, everyday acts; the manager had to decide the amount of time he would tolerate for the scavenging activities of his workers, when and how they could use the front loaders, and what portion of the smuggled metal should be legalized and reported. It was an ongoing exercise of judgment reflecting specific circumstances and being able to compromise when necessary. ⁶⁴ For example, during a rainy, busy day when the garbage trucks got stuck in the mud or on a day after a TV broadcast investigating the gray economy, the manager was angry at the workers and urged them to really “work,” but when there was little buzz and he was in good mood, the workers could spend almost all their time at work searching for or repairing objects from the garbage.

The moral economies surrounding scavenging included not only the values of being a good person and saving the environment, but also a sense of having a moral right to earn extra money regardless of the official rules. There were clear structural inequalities that left the workers exposed to various dangers associated with mass waste, earning mediocre salaries, and wondering about the future of their jobs. There were, however, ambivalences and tensions in social relations among the manager, the workers, and the company. The manager established the tithe and required workers to report more than a symbolic amount. It was partially a reaction to increasing pressure from headquarters that placed emphasis on control as one of the mechanisms to prevent trouble and maximize profit. But it was also a kind of revenge of the manager against some of the workers for their insufficient obedience. The workers, while acknowledging the manager’s tolerance of informality and considering him to be a fair person, disliked his weakness and lack of courage to fight the system; therefore, they ridiculed him or resisted his orders. Their complaints, however, were not directed only to the manager or the officers with whom they interacted every day, but also to distant actors at the headquarters, the Czech government, and the EU who were seen as being responsible for the decline of landfilling.

The Emergence and Disappearance of Landfill Water

During my research, I realized, to my surprise, that water was one of the most important themes that kept re-emerging in discussions and in practice. It was primarily related to spraying leachate: the wastewater accumulated in the body of the landfill. Spraying leachate on a landfill’s surface is a common practice. It serves to moisten the surface during dusty days and it reduces the amount of leachate that has to be processed when its amount exceeds the capacity of the tanks for its storage. The significance of water became clear in the contrast between the workers, who repeatedly complained about pumping and spraying leachate, and the manager, who never spoke about the topic himself despite our extensive debates on various aspects of waste management over the years. It took me a while to understand why water was such a sensitive topic. Water has the capacity get through various barriers and limits. It is often not the waste itself, but the water filtered through waste that can “bite,” that is, have severe effects on its surroundings. Although I could move about freely at the landfill, the workers always discouraged me from going with them to the leachate sump. Later, I realized that they had received an order from the manager to keep me away from the sump to prevent me from discovering the real trouble in the landfill: leachate leaks.

Slávek, one of the workers, was upset because the manager was being pushed by headquarters to fire somebody, and Slávek knew that he would be the most likely sacrificial victim, due to his frequent absence from work and his tense relationship with the manager. One day, after half an hour of complaining about the system, Slávek invited me to join him to check the sump. When we reached the entrance to the sump structure and Slávek opened the door, it was like nothing I had ever experienced. The air was so humid and volatile that it was difficult to breath. A dense fog swirled around the underground system of concrete pools and metal pipes as we walked on shaky wooden stairs and bridges; it was like a different world. Beneath our feet, a steady stream of leachate was gushing from the end of a massive pipe about a meter in diameter. I started to get the point about the manager’s silence. He was afraid of the growing amount of this filthy, toxic fluid. If the leachate leaked, the company would be responsible for the damage to the environment and to human well-being, and it would result in a fine from the Ministry of Environment as well as moral condemnation by communities living in the vicinity of the landfill.

Later, when we climbed out of the underground sump, there was already a tanker truck waiting for us. The driver asked Slávek to start filling his truck with leachate. Slávek attached a hose to an outlet valve and leachate started flowing to the truck. During the subsequent discussion, the driver described his experience with a previous load he had taken to a sewage treatment plant: “Man, I was lucky that nobody took a sample [grin]. Otherwise, I would be screwed. I would have to take it to Alita. That wouldn’t be good.” There were two ways to process extra leachate. It could be sent to Alita, the company that specialized in processing hazardous waste, but that would be expensive. The second option, less environmentally friendly but cheaper, would be to send it to the sewage processing plant. When the driver mentioned Alita, I recalled one of my very few discussions with the manager about landfill leachate. He mentioned that leachate required special treatment at Alita and that he was sending a tanker truck there “every now and then.” More importantly, the manager mentioned the high cost of the treatment. The choice between these two options was dependent on the degree of leachate toxicity. The Czech Waste Act gives only approximate guidelines for classifying any waste as “hazardous” based on the types of waste matter, the activity that produced it, or dangerous substances that it contains. ⁶⁵ Whether waste falls or does not fall into the category of “hazardous waste,” therefore entering a different regime of treatment, depends on a decision by certified specialists who take samples and analyze the concentration of key chemical substances. If one avoids or manipulates sampling, it is a way to keep waste, including landfill leachate, in the regime of non-hazardous waste and send it to a sewage processing plant. Although I never witnessed any manipulation with sampling directly, there were a few indirect suggestions by employees of landfills and incinerators who directed my attention to sampling as an arena where magic can be done.

The neoliberal moral economy of leachate management was complex. Spraying leachate was good because it enabled the manager to postpone and minimize its processing, therefore conserving the budget. For the landfill workers, these acts of budget savings were predominantly perceived as the manager pandering to his boss via saving the company’s resources. This shows not only the moral ambivalence of saving, ⁶⁶ but also the perception of pandering. The workers perceived pandering as a morally inferior kind of behavior, and they despised the manager for it. They not only hated spraying leachate because its toxic droplets hit their faces and the work of pulling the heavy hoses was so demanding, but they also disliked the fact that all of this was done just to save the company’s resources and to make the manager look better at headquarters. They considered it unjust to accept the danger of potential future health problems just to make “the guys with ties” (chlápky v kravatách) richer. Their acts of resistance to spraying, such as complaints and deserting their duties, were responses to inequality. These acts did not have a dramatic effect on the existing power structure, but they at least made the workers feel better. Sometimes their actions made the manager to think twice before exercising his power through orders. These tensions, however, did not prevent the actors from collaborating on an everyday basis. Despite the tensions, there were still slight elements of respect. The workers respected their manager’s responsibility on one hand, and the manager respected the workers’ ability to cope with challenging weather conditions and dirt on the other. This mutual respect, nonetheless, fluctuated over time and was not uniform among the workers.

The transport of leachate mobilized a sense of ethics that was situational and grew from practice. ⁶⁷ The manager was reacting to fluctuating levels of leachate in the sump—dependent on weather conditions and the nature of incoming garbage—via increased spraying of the toxic fluid back on the surface of the landfill, and strategizing about the frequency and type of leachate processing. Since it was difficult to predict the amount of leachate generated at the landfill and the degree of its toxicity, he could use this uncertainty to divert some loads to the sewage processing plant. The manager, the truck driver, and somebody at the sewage processing plant all accepted the fact that it was not the most environmentally sensitive way to deal with the leachate. They violated the widely shared moral norms about the need to protect nature. This issue extends moral economy far beyond any individual landfill or dump and its immediate surroundings; it may harm distant others. Justifications of harm can be part of moral economies where the acceptability of harm may be imagined as an issue of intensity rather than a simple matter of condemnation. ⁶⁸ The manager never admitted this, because he did not want to lose face. We both shared an interest in nature and hiking in the mountains, which was one of the topics that I used as an icebreaker during our discussions. It is hard to imagine that he would be able to admit intentional environmental damage to me. However, he commented frequently on the landfill’s shrinking budget and the pressure to achieve efficiency, which he believed was intended to reduce costs and increase the company’s profit. After all, he had family and an uncertain future after the shutdown of the landfill. It is very likely that he wanted to impress his superiors with good budget management. Since the processing of leachate was one of the major expenses, it was a natural target for savings. The manager took advantage of the ambiguities in classification of waste and prescribed procedures concerning its processing to the benefit of the company and himself. Since the filth in leachate will flow away through a river far from the landfill, it could be understood through the logic of the Czech saying: “What the eyes do not see, the heart does not grieve over” (Co oči nevidí, to srdce netrápí), which means that one does not need to care about things that are beyond the immediate reach of one’s senses. This kind of argumentation can be seen as “moral boundary drawing,” ⁶⁹ which is used to divert external criticism. The actors in this story decided to draw a boundary for their moral reasoning and disregard the spaces beyond their immediate reach.

At the same time, their moral reasoning did include components beyond the landfill and immediate labor relations there. When the manager, officers, and workers complained about ongoing negative changes in waste industry, they frequently referred to the company and its new owner in Prague, the Czech government, and the EU officers in Brussels. Although there were slight differences in this kind of relational moralizing, there was a good deal of agreement about the company being greedy and not interested in its employees at the landfill, and about government and EU officers not understanding the real workings of waste management. While the manager, as I described above, served as a mediator of policies coming from these distant actors and stood in opposition to the workers in many respects, he shared the workers’ suspicion that the distant others did not have enough direct experience and therefore prescribed policies that caused negative consequences, such as a significant increase of paperwork, the waste’s mobility, or the construction of infrastructures that were not designed well to reflect everyday handling of waste matter. It seems that scale not only provides a powerful conceptual tool for tracing how moral economies work far beyond a spatially restricted setting, as Salverda ⁷⁰ suggests, but it also offers an opportunity to examine how the actors themselves shift between different scales of moral reasoning and action to live meaningful lives. The local participants in the neoliberal moral economy were able to strategically relate to distant actors or disregard the effects of waste management on distant others to justify their own acts.

Conclusion

I have argued that the approaches of moral economy and everyday ethics complement each other and that using their respective strengths can be productive for understanding the moral dimension of economies. The case study of the Czech landfill shows that there are concepts and values such as collaboration, the salvaging of the value of things, or respect for labor that circulate among the persons associated with the landfill and beyond. There are also moral obligations that grow from the long-term interaction among the actors who work or regularly visit the landfill. At the same time, specific situations require ongoing judgment of multiple and sometimes incompatible or conflicting components of moral reasoning and action. There were antipathies and individual interests among the employees of the landfill but they still shared certain moral values that enabled them to transgress the official rules. The employees navigated through the ethical landscape, sometimes feeling they were doing the right thing despite transgressing the formal rules, because their acts were compatible with general assumptions about the value of labor or a circular economy that promotes reuse and recycling. At other times they certainly knew their acts were not about “the good,” but about the selfish generation of financial value, job security at the expense of others, punishment of others, or allowing environmental harm.

When the landfill workers collaborated and negotiated with each other and with outsiders, they judged a specific set of relations and conditions and adjusted their actions to each of these situations. The same was true for the manager, who negotiated with his superiors, subordinates, and representatives of other companies and adjusted his understanding of moral values and justice to specific situations. The resulting picture differs from a model where moral economy could be understood through acts based on a wider consensus of a collectivity. While consensus could be reached on certain topics, it left space for alternative interpretations and actions that diverged from the consensus. There were situations and relations that generated more ambivalence and uncertainty about what was right or good, and the actors were open to flexible situational solutions. Moreover, it is challenging to identify the actors as being part of a single moral collectivity. Their position was rather fluid. This was clearly the case of the manager, who balanced between, on one hand, enacting neoliberal values and policies as a representative of his company charged with leading a group of undisciplined workers and, on the other hand, being part of a group of employees who were isolated in an obsolete industrial sector that was destined to be eliminated. Similar shifts, although at a lower scale, could be recognized when one of the workers was sometimes integrated into a collaborating group and at other times was ignored or even rejected.

I have argued that understanding moral economies benefits from accounting for relations at different scales: the microdynamics of relations within a team of workers and the larger scale of the entire landfill, the company, the state, and the EU. While obligations based on long-term direct interactions among the actors play an important role for moral economies, everyday ethical judgments include relations that go far beyond interactions. There were consequences of various policies and decisions coming from distant places and actors, but they were felt by those who were taking care of society’s waste. While the top managers of big waste management companies, the state, and the EU officers were not concerned much about the people who handled waste at the landfill, the employees of the landfill included their relations to these distant others in their everyday ethical judgments. These relations were more imaginative and grew from a variety of fragmentary information gleaned from the rumors circulating around as well as from the news, but they still provided an important resource for moral reasoning and action that enabled the employees to justify their frequent transgression of the official rules, building upon a similar perception of the rules during socialism. Interestingly, the employees of the landfill and their working partners from the outside could use the opposite strategy and establish a boundary for their moral reasoning. It enabled them to shrink the relational scale and disregard the problematic consequences of their actions related primarily to environmental pollution. Therefore, one might see scalar shifts for making ethical judgments that add another dimension to understanding the inner workings of moral economies.