Clay Extraction and Asbestos Landfilling

This article investigates the transformation of Belgium’s Rupel region from a globally significant centre of clay extraction and brick production into an extensive landscape of landfills of global toxic waste during the 1970s and 1980s. It foregrounds landfilling as a constitutive yet underexamined dimension of architectural and construction material cycles. By taking the landfill itself as a methodological lieu de départ, the study reconstructs how abandoned clay pits—generated by the collapse of the post-war brick industry—were rapidly repurposed as receptacles for diverse and often hazardous waste streams, including fly ash, phosphogypsum, household refuse, and asbestos-cement.

Situated at the intersection of political ecology, environmental history, and theories of planetary urbanization, the article conceptualizes these sites as “operational landscapes” that underpin urbanization not only through extraction and production, but also through waste absorption. The Rupel case reveals how local landscapes became embedded within global circuits of material metabolism (Stoffwechsel), exemplifying processes of unequal ecological exchange whereby the environmental burdens of industrial modernity were spatially displaced and concentrated.

Central to the analysis is the role of grassroots environmental activism, particularly the Action Group for the Rupel Region (ALR) and the Bond Beter Leefmilieu (BBL), whose archival records provide a critical lens on the socio-ecological consequences of landfilling. Through practices such as counter-mapping (“Dump Trail,” “Asbestos Route”), public mobilization, and the strategic deployment of scientific expertise, ALR reframed waste from a technical issue into a matter of environmental justice and democratic accountability. With regard to asbestos-cement, their interventions were instrumental in exposing the inadequacies of regulatory frameworks, particularly the narrow focus on occupational exposure that obscured the diffuse environmental risks. The article thus traces a shift in the understanding of asbestos toxicity from workplace hazard to distributed environmental condition, and from human-centred risk to a more-than-human ecological concern. By highlighting the persistence and mobility of toxic substances across soils, waters, and living organisms, it positions landfills as critical zones in which the long-term, multispecies effects of architectural material flows become legible.

Ultimately, the paper argues that architecture is deeply implicated not only in extractive processes but also in the generation and dispersal of waste, calling for a reconceptualization of the discipline through the lens of urban metabolism and environmental justice. By foregrounding the landfill as a key site of inquiry, it advances a materially grounded understanding of (planetary) urbanization and opens new avenues for integrating ecological accountability into architectural thought and practice.