CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Czeglédi, Alexandra |
|---|---|
| Title | When the red mud cleans capitalism by accident Scientific researches on the bauxite residue and its utilisation in Hungary |
| Summary | It has almost been 10 years that the eco-social disaster of the red mud spill occurred in North-Western Hungary, near Ajka in 2010 on 4th of October. Since then, fish scientists, bioengineers, chemical engineers and bauxite technologists are jointly arguing for various possible forms of valorisation of the bauxite residue on the global market as a potential technoscientific solution for industrial waste management. This direction is the industrial waste research have been blossoming since the Hungarian red mud accident. This thesis, explores the way in which recently emerged scientific labour and knowledge production develop potential technoscientific processes in order to reuse the bauxite residue, in public imagination better known as red mud. To recycle the red sludge in a diversified way, alumina industry players prefer to categorise it as by-product rather than industrial waste. What is at stake in the growing red mud research is the classification of the matter as by-products which allows companies to treat the bauxite residue as a marketable product rather than a potentially harmful waste. In this thesis, I offer an ontologically flat analysis which looks at the matter’s molecular interactions. By this, I show how unexpected entanglements of the red mud with other organic matters and living beings, such as water, soil microbes, earth worms and fishes, reveals myriad biochemical interactions which can be both deadly and beneficial for living-organisms in nature. However, as the red mud is also the repository of valuable components such as the rare earth element, such as scandium, it became locus of global competition between the EU and China. I argue that the case of the red mud demonstrates that recognising agency of microscopic elements in nature is twofold: it fosters a self-cleaning nature argument which might not think about latency in an invisible chemical infrastructure, and it contributes to further economic value extraction in global capitalist production under the disguise of zero-waste economy. |
| Supervisor | Jean-Louis Fabiani |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/czegledi_alexandra.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University