Clean and Profitable: Entangling Valuations in Environmental Entrepreneurship

International audienceIn public debates on climate change, environmental and economic value are often seen as standing in contradiction. This chapter examines regulatory and entrepreneurial attempts to reconcile environmental and economic value by turning polluting substances into matters of worth. Our case focuses on animal slurry in agriculture – a hybrid valuation object which produces both ammonia emissions in the atmosphere and fertilizer for the farm’s crops. Following the implementation of regulation aiming to reduce ammonia emissions from livestock farming, entrepreneurs have introduced new technologies to clean and thus valorize slurry; the construction of a market for such “clean” technologies has in turn raised the issue of how their value can be demonstrated and measured. We analyze the valuation work performed by regulators (the Danish Environmental Protection Agency) and entrepreneurs (a start-up that developed a solution for cleaning slurry), and contrast different modes of reconciling environmental and economic value