Reuse value : economies and philosophies of durability

What do reusable packaging schemes suggest logistically and philosophically? These schemes are on the rise with the current frenzy for the circular economy. They take different forms, but the ones I’m interested in here involve online home delivery shopping platforms that replace single use packaging with durable returnable containers. These reusable containers are effectively leased to the consumer. Once the goods are consumed, the containers are picked up, industrially cleaned, refilled, and put back into circulation. These schemes have already attracted a familiar cluster of descriptors: zero waste, circularity, precycling, reverse logistics, upstream innovation. But none of these terms seem to capture the force and complexity of reuse. They offer explanations of key arrangements and an implicit valorisation of them, but they don’t reckon with reuse as a particular manifestation of circulation and durability. They don’t acknowledge how the container, designed for continual refilling, has the potential to reconfigure food packaging as a potent economic and ecological actant rather than a massive environmental burden. The questions I am concerned with in this commentary include: how does reuse provoke particular forms of economisation and practices of value? How can we conceptualise ‘reuse’ as a distinct category of value? ‘Use value’ has an intellectual history, thanks to Marx (1990), but is there such a thing as reuse value? And, if so, how is it done? What sorts of arrangements, devices and calculations are needed in order to make reuse both the organising logic and ethical framework of a market? More critically, how does reuse disrupt relations between waste, economy and ecology in generative ways? We know that it makes trouble for linearity or the ethos of ‘make, use, waste’ but how does reuse become a sociotechnical and political force? In my research, reuse provokes a significant revision of the ontological status and agency of packaging and its importance in circulation and exchange. The critical issue is: does a shift to reusable packaging, and the logistics they require, foreground how market devices cannot be reduced to their utility for capital accumulation?