Conference Agenda

Recyclable waste from Western countries is frequently exported to countries with weaker labour and environmental standards. Most of the EU’s exported waste went to Turkey (around 11.4million tonnes in 2021), which was a threefold increase from 2004. While the exported waste needs to be recyclable and, since 2021 also sorted, the waste is usually contaminated. By shipping waste across the globe contamination increases as the conditions of storage are optimal for the growth of harmful bacteria. Consequently, the supposedly ‘recyclable’ waste is not recyclable once it reaches the countries of destination (Das Erste, 20.06.2022) and creates a risk for the overseas workers who are exposed to dangerous substances (Weghmann 2020).

This research traces the processes underpinning the export of plastic waste from Germany - the world's recycling champion - to Turkey, where large proportions of Germany’s recyclable plastic waste end up.

With an aim to address the need of rethinking and restructuring of the Global Value Chain (GVC) model, this research expands the literature ‘to incorporate analysis of post-consumption recycling activities’ as suggested by Wang et al. (2022: 534). When critically examining global recycling waste value chains, the research contributes to the well-established fields of Global Value Chains (GVCs) (Gereffi, 1994, 1996) and Global Production Networks (GPNs) (Coe et. al., 2008, 2019; Coe and Hess, 2013) that to date has solely focused on production, disregarding the dismantling stage of the product cycle. To fill this analytical gap, a Global Destruction Networks (GDNs) framework has been developed to examine the extraction from waste for recycling and re-use (Wang et al., 2022: 534; Herod et al., 2014) to point to the lack of attention on the labour process of waste disassembling as a formal or informal activity. With this theoretical perspective, the study aims to address the following questions:

1. Who are the key actors representing capital and labour in the circular economy supply chain of the plastic waste trade between Germany and Turkey?

2. What are the specific social and environmental consequences of Global Destruction Networks and do these meet the key principles of the circular economy?

3. What control mechanisms and power dynamics underpin the labour process of waste recycling?

Methodologically, this ongoing research utilises ethnographic mapping alongside semi-structured expert and worker interviews to identify the geographic locations and spatiality of formal and informal waste management and the labour process at different points along the waste supply chain.

Private regulatory programs in global value chains seek to motivate suppliers to improve compliance and to build supplier capacity for social upgrading. Buyers and multi-stakeholder initiatives have invested heavily in training programs and international organizations have promoted training as a form of stimulating social upgrading. Can training programs improve social compliance in supply chains? What aspects of social compliance, if any, can they improve? To answer these questions, we analyze data from 24,366 suppliers that participated in a large-scale social compliance training program. Suppliers that participated in the training represent 20 industries, including textiles, electronics and agriculture, and are part of the value chains of 1,848 buyers. The program involved a series of short workshops for factory managers introducing them to the content of standards and diffusing management systems that enable compliance improvements. Taking a difference-in-difference approach, we estimate the overall causal effect of training on social compliance, showing that training programs do improve compliance. However, we show that improvements were limited to specific areas of social compliance that are most closely related to management systems. Our paper contributes key empirical findings regarding the efficacy of one of the central components of governing social compliance in global value chains.