Calibrating an ordinary object: a case about cigarette butts

Abstract

This article explores the calibration of a particular and mundane object: cigarette butts. Based on five interviews conducted with members of IMEKO, a scientific-technological-based startup located in Valparaíso oriented to the revaluation and transformation of cigarette butts, I analyze calibration as a process oriented to the apprehension and epistemic formalization of this object, investigating, for this in the experimental practices, technical mediations and technological infrastructures invented to make this entity intelligible. Focusing on the cigarette butts and the calibration work carried out with them, it is finally concluded how this object operates in a kind of gap in the relationship between technology and the climate crisis, realizing that the need to overcome the climate crisis by transforming entities requires, first, technologies capable of commensurating these material objects.