CFP: Recycling in the Cold War Era: Capitalist and Socialist Waste Regimes. Berlin 09.07.2026 - 10.07.2026, Deadline 01.12.2025
Throughout most of human history, waste and its reuse have played a central role in economic activity. During the Cold War, rivalry between the Eastern and Western blocs extended beyond the arms race and ideological confrontation. Competition for economic and technological supremacy also encompassed waste recycling—shaping resource flows, production and consumption systems, and later, environmental protection. In both capitalist and socialist economies, recycling was integral to resource governance, embedded in efforts toward efficiency, self-sufficiency, modernization, and international leadership.
While waste studies have grown rapidly, they have focused more on discarding than on recycling and related issues such as reprocessing waste into recyclates and integrating them into production flows. This conference will therefore explore waste recycling during the Cold War in greater detail. It will examine the actors, practices, and material streams of recycling in both socialist and capitalist regimes, addressing questions such as: What differences and similarities can be identified in actors, materials, practices, technologies, or symbolic meanings? Was recycling driven by ideological confrontation, or was it more often a pragmatic response to shortages, technological challenges, or environmental concerns? What regional specifics can be observed? How did different regimes influence or learn from one another? And in what cases did asymmetrical waste trade between blocs shape recycling schemes?
To date, Anglophone research remains fragmented, often focusing on single waste types or individual countries. The most comprehensive study of recycling in the Cold War context is Zsuzsa Gille’s work on the Hungarian waste regime (2007). More recent research has explored entanglements between East and West Germany (Lange 2020; Stuck & Weber 2025). Studies on national programs include plastics in Poland (Kijeński & Polaczek 2005), France (Dufour 2023), and Norway (Haavard B. A. 2024); paper or glass in the Netherlands, Germany, and Hungary (Oldenziel & Veenis 2013; Weber 2021; Pal 2023); and metals in the United States (Zimring 2005). Yet many regions remain underrepresented, and comparative analysis of recycling practices and technologies across—and within—blocs is still lacking.
Existing work has shown how waste symbolized industrial crisis and became a site for of civic engagement and environmental activism (Park 2004; Westermann 2013; Boyce 2013) But it remains unclear how Cold War recycling reflected and shaped civic culture, ideology, and policy in different systems. The symbolic meaning of waste—how it shifted under political, economic, and cultural pressures, and how it shaped understandings of modernity, progress, efficiency and responsibility—also remains underexplored.
In sum, scholarship offers only a fragmented picture of socialist and capitalist recycling practices during the Cold War. What is missing is a broader understanding of how recycling models were formed, developed, and interacted across historical contexts - including continuities, ruptures, and their impact on global and regional material flows. This also applies to the role of different actors in shaping these practices and to the changing symbolic meanings of waste within the bipolar world order.
The two-day, international workshop, organized by Tatiana Perga and Heike Weber, thus aims to bring together different perspectives on recycling in the Cold War era.
Our keynote speaker is Zsuzsa Gille with the report “Recycling in the Socialocene.”
Papers should engage with the following topics:
1. Institutions and Recycling Systems
We invite analyses of how institutional mechanisms for waste recycling developed in both Eastern and Western bloc countries. This includes the roles of private businesses, state bodies, ministries, municipalities, parties, and NGOs in shaping and enforcing recycling policies. Particular attention may be given to legal frameworks, planned and market-based instruments, international agreements, and institutional transformations during periods of reform and crisis.
2. Economic Systems, Technologies, and Innovations
We seek papers on how different economic systems influenced recycling principles, technology choices, and investments in infrastructure. Comparisons of strategies and technological solutions that stimulated innovation and efficient resource use in contexts of scarcity, competition, and ideological mobilization are especially welcome. Relevant aspects include R&D, economic incentives, patents, technology transfer, international cooperation, and informal economies.
3. (Trans)national Material Flows and Recycling Infrastructures
We aim to examine the emergence of recycling infrastructures, networks, and logistics, and their role in exchange and interaction between socialist and capitalist regimes. This perspective highlights both cooperation and competition in global and regional recycling histories, as well as the role of material flows as hidden diplomacy across the Cold War divide. Shadow economies, black markets, and informal recycling networks will also be considered.
4. Actors, Knowledge, and Their Networks
We want to explore the diversity of actors involved in recycling processes: state and municipal authorities, businesses, industrial enterprises, corporations, trade unions, schools and households, the military and prisons, institutions for the disabled cooperatives, international organizations, individual waste collectors, and more. We are interested in how these groups engaged with recycling—whether voluntarily, under compulsion, ideologically, or economically motivated—and how their participation shaped perceptions of responsibility, labour, scarcity, profit, and modernization.
5. Environmental Discourses, Knowledge, Risks
We welcome contributions on how waste and recycling were conceptualized environmentally in socialist and capitalist countries. Were elements of environmental knowledge and concern about waste present as early as the 1950s or 1960s, and how were they framed? This theme also addresses how the environmental consequences of waste production and accumulation entered public debate, science, education, and activism. Focus may be placed on perception of risks in the 1970s-1980s, the rise of environmental consciousness, the role of scientific expertise, transnational exchanges of knowledge, and conflicts over waste and its politicization.
We welcome contributions from economics, technology studies, sociology, history, political science, and related disciplines.
The workshop will be held at TU Berlin on the 9th – 10th of July 2026.
We will apply for funding to cover travel and accommodation.
Papers (6,000-8,000 words) are due by June 1st to be pre-circulated before the workshop. Each presenter will give a 10-minute presentation, followed by a discussion. We aim to publish the papers as a special issue of the journal.
Proposals should include an abstract (max. 300 words) and a one-page CV.
The deadline for sending proposals is the 1st of December 2025, with notification of acceptance by mid-December.
Please send proposals to tetiana.perga@tu-berlin.de.
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