UCL Laws hosts Waste Law Workshop 2023

(Photo credit: Emma Blackman) 

The Waste Law Reading Group’s workshop was on the theme of Preventing the ‘Wasting’ of Waste’. The group, which was founded in September 2021 by Dr Allison Lindner (Lecturer in Law at UCL Laws), aims to foster community among early career researchers who specialise in waste law and promote the study of waste law to both research and taught students.

On the afternoon of 4 July, an open hybrid panel of presentations given by PhD researchers and taught students took place in the Moot Court. The Dean of UCL Laws, Professor Eloise Scotford, offered opening remarks at the beginning of the panel before Dr Luka Štrubelj (Research Fellow of Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford) took over as Chair.

(Photo credit: Katrien Steenmans) 

The presentations highlighted the linkages between waste law as a growing and nascent field of study, and other aspects of law. In this case, criminal law, property law, international law, EU Law, and circular economy law, indicative of the strength, character and malleability of waste law to intersect with other areas of law.

Garance Thomas (PhD student at SciencesPo Law School in Paris) delivered a presentation on how ideas from Bruno Latour can help us to think creatively about waste as a legal category in her paper entitled, ‘How to do things with Bruno Latour: a proposal for waste law’.

Leonora Kleppa Stærfeldt (PhD Student in the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen) delivered a presentation on the findings from her recent fieldwork in Ghana on the relationship between transnational environmental crime and e-waste flows from the Global North to Ghana in her paper entitled, ‘Transnational Environmental Crime and the Regulation of E-waste Flows through a Legal Infrastructure Lens’.

Mikołaj Szafrański (PhD student at LSE Law School) encouraged the group to think about how ecodesign regulations can help to achieve the circular economy in his paper entitled, ‘Twinned legal scripts of planned obsolescence’.

Manvi Kishore (student at St Joseph’s College of Law in Bengalaru, India) joined online to speak about liability for multinational enterprises in the context of the transboundary shipment of hazardous waste in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in her paper, co-written with Arnold Stanley and entitled, ‘The Need for Liability Regimes in Least Developed Countries – Has the Basel Convention made an impact on the role of MNCs in Transboundary Shipment of Hazardous Waste?’.

In closed sessions, six academic waste lawyers discussed each other’s waste law papers in preparation for a journal Special Issue on Waste Law. They followed the Harvard IGLP Approach to Presenting and Offering Feedback at Writing Workshops to comment on each other’s papers. The wider group, which included Dr Luka Štrubelj, Dr Feja Lesniewska (Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Transitions and Environmental Law at the University of Surrey), Dr Katrien Steenmans (postdoc at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen), Dr Carrie Bradshaw (Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds), Garance Thomas, Mikołaj Szafrański, Leonora Kleppa Stærfeldt and Dr Allison Lindner, also discussed future plans for the WLRG.

This event concludes the end of year activities for the WLRG in 2022-2023. If you would like to engage with the work of the Reading Group, please contact allison.lindner@ucl.ac.uk.