The Creation of a European Market for Ship Recycling

This paper looks at recycling in general and ship dismantling in particular as an economic activity, contextualising it in debates about economization and marketization. It maintains that recycling is an economic activity which extends the boundaries of markets, by internalizing objects formerly externalized such as wastes. Taking European countries ship dismantling and recycling industry as its empirical focus, the paper aims at discussing how recycling connects to wider debates about the constitution of markets, and shows the importance of accounting and performance management devices as market devices to the economization of recycling. This paper addresses recycling as an economic activity distributed across commodity markets in secondary materials investigates the following research focus: How do valuations evolve in the marketization process? What is the role of accounting devices in the translation process? This paper shows that, in materials recovery, measurement is a critical activity due to the problems in defining the values involved. This makes recycling difficult to stabilize as an economic activity. The consequences are considerable: notably, the possibility of economic failure can threaten the viability of the recycling industry, with considerable impacts on the economy of companies due to the high societal pressure.