In the series Prospects for Degrowth
“You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!”
Growth, Degrowth, Post-Growth
There are so many accepted definitions of economic growth that it’s almost a monad, “a most basic substance” that goes without question. In one recent example, Max Roser (2021) defines growth as “an increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces.” However, what goes with it is also inevitable but ignored; growth depends on increased production and distribution, which always increase waste.
Waste, like Macavity, is an inextricable part of growth, always there, mostly invisible, hard to measure. After all, as UNEP (2024: 17) reports “Some countries have no official waste data whatsoever, or this data may be incomplete or inaccurate” – some 2.7 billion people live their lives outside any waste collection (ISWA, 2024).
Oscar Wilde pointed out in The Picture of Dorian Grey, “In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures.” Waste endures; human waste will outlast humanity… we live in the Vastocene, the era of waste, not the Anthropocene.
Global Municipal waste, Bn tonnes by decade. Source: UNEP, 2024, copyright but reproduced under stated allowable use.
A two-dimensional depiction of goods and services has also been picked up by Degrowth specialists – In a (2025) article on post-growth, this is described as referring “to societies that do not pursue GDP growth as an objective, and which are able to meet human needs in an equitable way without growth.”
But purposeful deconstruction of waste as a component of growth continues to be left out as a growing factor in the production; waste nonetheless is a major constituent of growth, maybe the only constant in growth.
Gille (2010) points out that “waste derives from the “assumption that the economy is constituted by the production and exchange of intended things”, but in a global economy waste is increasingly an inevitable consequence of global supply chains, exploitative contracts and uncontrolled resource exploitation. If a theoretical economy relies on the exchange of intended things, a profitable economy relies on the waste produced by the production, distribution and sale of those things.
Growth is still accepted in the self-referential hagiography of institutional, orthodox economics; growth is goods and services. Some growth, however, such as waste battery disposal and recycling in Nigeria, is simply invisibilized from GDP. Nigeria produces 110,000 tonnes1 of used lead-acid batteries a year and it recycles some 200,000-250,0002 in a dangerous trade that escapes GDP figures – the global trade in lead-acid batteries is expected to grow from US$ 79.9 billion (2021) to about US$ 115.1 billion in 20303.
Food, e-waste, batteries, clothes and growing quantities of waste from every consumer good are overwhelmingly generated by the wealthier countries, NOT because the wealthy recipients can’t do without them, but because global mass consumption is being accelerated by the vast TNCs which profit from each sector, a phenomenon known as ‘growth’. Growth depends on increasing waste, increased profit depends on accelerating waste.
Wealthy countries are by far the largest generators of waste and by far the largest dispersers of their own waste through global networks and dumping, from plastic in the oceans, to clothing in the Atacama in Chile, to lead-acid batteries in Nigeria.
Growth accelerates from and profits from waste, and globalization accelerates, profits from and disperses waste on a global basis.
Researchers on degrowth emphasize a set of sources which must act as critical limiters on growth (Demaria et al, 2013). These are 1) Ecology, seeing living systems as having value in themselves; 2) An anti-utilitarian critique of development, the “hegemonic imaginary of both development and utilitarianism” (2013: 196); 3) Arguments re the meaning of life in modern societies; 4) A bioeconomic critique of resource availability and limits on use; 5) Calls for a ’deeper democracy’, especially regarding limits to growth; and 6) Justice, given the tendency of current processes of growth to worsen inequality. But the problem with these premises is that they tend to cope with growth as a given, accepted thing, rather than analysing the systemic waste that creates growth.
This author began a systemic, geo-political and philosophical analysis of waste in 2013 by beginning with food waste (Cloke, 2013:
“The total food waste by consumers in industrialized countries (222 million tons) is almost equal to the entire food production in sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons). Whereas consumers in Europe waste an estimated 95–115 kilograms of food per year, in sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia the per capita waste is only 6–11 kilograms per year (USDA and US-EPA, 1999, v, 4).”
The amount of food wasted has very little to do with population size, if not per capita wealth – the richer consumption zones are, the more waste they produce, growth and waste which have little/nothing to do with quality of life.
By 2024 the US wasted some 30-40% of the national food supply4 – the UNEP (2024) Food Waste Index Report states that “US$1 trillion worth of food is wasted each year (World Bank 2020). This represents more than one-third of all the food that is produced globally, using over a quarter (28 per cent) of the world’s agricultural area (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2013).” It needs to be stated over and over again however, that these levels of waste are made inevitable by the global production systems designed to cheapen food production, not by accidents of technology or lack of investment. These same systems also waste the labour, water, energy and resources needed to produce that waste food, which have their own production chains.
Waste-based (vastogenic) growth is a profitable global spider’s web of human and resource atrocity:
“The global reality, however, is that an increasing percentage of a rapidly increasing global food supply is being wasted (along with the resources it takes to produce, transport, and sell that food), in a major part because the way in which the world’s corporatized global food regimes have developed makes it profitable to do so (Cloke, 2016: 103).”
It is only by conducting this kind of pathological analysis of systemic growth that researchers can understand how “worldwide adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and adolescent obesity has quadrupled” and “in 2024, 35 million children under the age of 5 were overweight” (Ritchie, 2024), whilst at the same time (globally) in 2021 “half of child deaths were linked to nutritional deficiencies.” Understanding the gross deformities in the system of food production growth leads inevitably to the conclusion that growth has nothing to do with satisfying hunger and leading to a healthy diet.
Global food supply growth is entirely related to over-producing for high-income zones of consumption, at the cost of under-producing for low-income zones of production – food waste is the dynamic reality of this. Equally, as in the UK, the growth of transport and TV networks, domestic food storage technologies and the massive spread of retail networks combined to boost waste:
“The take-off phase for mass food consumerism doubles food waste from 1939 to 1976, but the biggest increase in food/waste takes place when car, TV, fridge, freezer and road networks plus the spread of supermarket networks combine to produce a veritable explosion in throughput of food/waste materials.”
(Cloke, 2020).
The taste for waste
It would be impossible to develop a meaningful history of the richer nations on earth without assessing the primordial worship of personal consumption, and growth through consumption.
From Adam Smith’s famous “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production” in The Wealth of Nations (1776) to Bernays’ work in turning PR into a cattle prod for consumers in ‘Public Relations’ (1945), growth through unthinking consumption grew into the norm. Consumption was the sovereign right of the individuals, but large groups of individuals could be persuaded to consume more of desired products at a faster rate, irrespective of utility.
As one example, there are estimated to be 16 billion smart phones in existence, maybe twice the number of people in the global population – up to 1/3 in the EU are not used, but in 2022 5.3 billion phones were thrown away5, mainly as a result of marketing new products.
Bernays pointed out in his 1928 book ‘Propaganda’: “Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained—that is if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity.” Consumption must increase, and with it the amount of waste it produces. From Windows to the iPhone, size, shape and functionality may increase or decrease but the rate of exchange accelerates and the price increases.
As increasingly powerful conglomerates sought to accelerate consumption throughout the last half of the 20th century and communication with the consumer through TV and radio made for intimate contact, so accelerating consumer appetite creation became the big thing. This explicit connection between waste and growth was openly discussed in post-war PR and marketing literature:
“We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.” (Lebow, 1955)
But none of this discussion on the ‘progressive’ nature of accelerated growth allowed any mention of that menacing, ever-going, shadowy giant, waste.
Neither does it mention the key roles of envy, dissatisfaction and depression in propelling consumer growth. From Charles Kettering’s 1929 article ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied’ to Tim Jackson’s 2021 article ‘Broken promises—the engine of consumerism’6, it is openly stressed that “The success of consumer society lies not in meeting our needs but in its spectacular ability to repeatedly disappoint us”. Growth is based on the planned psychological failure of consumption and expanded efforts to re-create it.
How will Degrowth cope with this dependency of the human psyche on failed consumption?
Waste is increasingly invisible and unstoppable
The figures on the toxic relationship between consumption and waste can be hard to find – the vast industries of PR, marketing, management consultancy and advertising really don’t want to draw attention to them.
Neither do they want public attention drawn to the failure of attempts to encourage more consumption, attempts which themselves create more waste. Every year, these combined industries are involved in the global rollout of greater than 30,000 new products – 95% of these fail7. “75% of consumer packaged-goods and retail products fail to earn even $7.5 million in their first year”8, and the list of massive product failure goes on and on. Think of how much water and energy, how many resources, how much production ability and how many labour hours are lost in this planned failure.
Stromberg (2013) pointed out that online shopping substantially increased waste, from the mid-1990s onwards. The increase in both consumption and waste here coincide directly with the first secure online transaction in 1994, the launch of Amazon and E-bay platforms in 1995 and the dramatic expansion of broadband/online access beginning in 2000. According to the Economist, between 2018 and 2050 global waste production will nearly double, as a result of increased access to online consumption mechanisms in lower-income countries and potential increases in household income there9.
The convenience of online consumption (24/7 shopping; product choice; price variation; convenience; home delivery; product reviews; personalized shopping; accessibility) has also substantially increased waste in wealthier zones and countries. Not only that, but countries with a higher per capita GDP waste more – wealth plus online shopping equals far more waste!
WASTE GENERATION – ACTUAL AND MODEL PREDICTION
Source: Kaza, Shrikanth and Chaudhary, 2021, (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO license (CC BY 3.0 IGO) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo “you are free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt this work, including for commercial purposes”).
Within global supply chains, a multiplicity of contractual and technical stipulations demanded by powerful corporate purchasers and suppliers increase waste. Payment terms including unilateral contract changes by purchasers; retailer product quality standards deterring small producers; slotting allowances and pay-to-stay fees to retailers for new products; product take-back clauses allowing retailers to return product to suppliers once a residual shelf-life has been reached; category management to suit the sales strategies of retailers, the list of devolving costs outside the supply chain increases waste (Cloke, 2020). If take-back clauses return a mass of goods to suppliers on a shelf-life basis, what will the suppliers do, except dump the returned goods?
Systemic waste, planned obsolescence and practical degrowth
After Brooks Stevens set out the term “planned obsolescence” (as a mechanism to promote growth) into common use in 1954, it has become synonymous with waste – In 1960, Packard and McKibben were outlining “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals”.
The wave of trans-nationalization of corporations that began in the 1950s (based on cost reduction. access to resources, competitive advantage and mergers and acquisitions), encouraged by political and financial services developments, led to an exponential growth in waste in the blink of an historical eye – “Roughly one third of all materials that have been extracted or discarded since 1900 have been mobilized between 2002 and 2015 only.” (Krausmann et al, 2018).
In the face of this profligacy, practical ideas for degrowth policies include scaling down harmful industries, ending planned obsolescence, cutting advertising, shifting to usership, money creation, co-operative models, income and wealth equality and fossil fuel non-Proliferation10. All of these sound like reasonable policies and, with political will to accomplish them, they are accomplishable. But they are literally flying in the face of the massive financial and political will-power of an overwhelmingly powerful global elite which has all the weapons.
Bernays’ ideas of the necessity for increased production and Lebow’s destructive ideas for consumption are not theories, they literally drive the global capitalist machine and all levels of political power take this increased consumption as primordial, a basic human right.
Before any practical degrowth policies can be implemented, the fundamental reality of growth and increase have to be challenged as concepts and policies at the very root. But this devious, diabolical ‘reality’ is cunning, greedy and has more disguises than can be imagined – the most important of which are that growth and increase are invisible, unstoppable, inevitable and that terminating them is outside human reality:
“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”
“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
Sources (end note references follow the alphabetical list)
Cloke, J., (2013) Empires of waste and the food security meme. Geography Compass, 7(9), pp.622-636.
Cloke, J., 2016. Food security and food waste. Peter Jackson· Walter EL Spiess, 99.
Demaria, F., Schneider, F., Sekulova, F. and Martinez-Alier, J., (2013) What is degrowth? From an activist slogan to a social movement. Environmental values, 22(2), pp.191-215.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2013). Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources: Summary Report. Rome. http://www.fao.org/3/i3347e/i3347e.pdf.
International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) (2024). Global waste management outlook 2024: Beyond an age of waste: Turning rubbish into a resource.
Kallis, Giorgos et al. (2025) Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries, The Lancet Planetary Health, Volume 9, Issue 1.
Kaza, S., Shrikanth, S. and Chaudhary, S., 2021. More growth, less garbage.
Krausmann, F., Lauk, C., Haas, W. and Dominik Wiedenhofer, (2018) From resource extraction to outflows of wastes and emissions: The socioeconomic metabolism of the global economy, 1900–2015. Global Environmental Change Volume 52: 131-140.
Lebow, Victor (1955) Price Competition in 1955, Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955.
Packard, V. and McKibben, B., 1960. The waste makers.
Ritchie, H. (2024) – “Half of all child deaths are linked to malnutrition” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/half-child-deaths-linked-malnutrition.
Roser, M. (2021) – “What is economic growth? And why is it so important?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-economic-growth.
Stromberg, J. (2013) “When will we hit peak garbage?”, The Smithsonian magazine, accessed 28/8/25 at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-will-we-hit-peak-garbage-7074398/
The Business Research Company (2025) Waste And Recycling Global Market Report 2025. Accessed 9/7/25 at https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/waste-and-recycling-global-market-report
United Nations Environment Programme (2024). Global Waste Management Outlook 2024: Beyond an age of waste – Turning rubbish into a resource. Nairobi. Accessed 15/9/25 at https://wedocs.unep.org/20.500.11822/44939
USDA and US-EPA. (1999). Waste not, want not: feeding the hungry and reducing solid waste through food recovery. USDA/EPA document EPA 530-R-99-040. Accessed 2/6/25 at https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/tiff2png.cgi/1000170R.PNG?-r+75+-g+7+D%3A%5CZYFILES%5CINDEX%20DATA%5C95THRU99%5CTIFF%5C00001192%5C1000170R.TIF
World Bank (2020). Addressing Food Loss and Waste: A Global Problem with Local Solutions. Washington, D.C. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34521
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