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This paper investigates why the culling of corvids in Northern Cyprus continues despite it being recognised by those that do it as ineffective. Participant observation, semi-structured interviews and archival research were conducted with a range of people involved in the management and practice of culling. The analysis shows that the introduction of the ruined landscape narrative to Cyprus during the era of British colonialism established a division between civilized and uncivilized, clean, and dirty behaviours amongst nonhuman animals. This relationship has been carried through into contemporary wildlife management by organisations involved in hunting who seek to maintain a clean hunting landscape through culling. However, it is argued here that this culling is futile and there is a disconnect between the effectiveness of the management of the landscape and what hunters are witnessing during hunting. Nonetheless, it continues because the cleaning of corvids as administratively recorded waste demonstrates the organisations’ and their administrative medium’s power and control over the landscape.

This editorial introduces the special collection ‘Dirty Places, Geographies of Waste’.

The city of Patras, Greece, is a major station of contemporary refugee routes from Asia to Europe. Consequently, the city port frequently becomes a battleground between police and refugees trying to board the ships to Italy. Between 1999 and 2009, in a seaside area of the city, a large makeshift camp (of ~4000 inhabitants) was created by the refugees. Τhis small ‘town’ had a square, streets and even a ‘mosque’. The building materials were found in waste from all over the city. With the garbage of the city being the only source of materials for the refugees, (both for building and eating), a social debate started in the local media. Is it legal or illegal for rubbish to be used in this way? To whom does the garbage ‘belong’? Are the refugees ‘waste people’? Should the police organize a “clean sweep” operation to pick them up? Ιn this work, we analyze the geographical origin and spread of the waste sources to the camp. Through photographic analysis and geographic documentation, we identify the main categories of garbage used in the refugee camp. Furthermore, we attempt to analyze the public ideological debate on the concept of ‘waste’. Ιn 2009, an arson burned down the refugee camp and the ruins were removed as rubbish. However, before the camp was destroyed, the concept of waste in the public debate had been extended in such a way that even some people, the refugees, were included.

Night soil collecting was practiced to different extents wherever urbanization developed. For example, Japan relied on human waste as fertilizer to the point it became a profitable business, while in most Western countries it was considered a necessary evil. What is the reason behind such different attitudes? In this paper, I apply David Inglis’ theory of a mode of excretion to premodern Japanese context in order to shed light on this phenomenon. First, informed by Mary Douglas, I propose slight alternations to the original theoretical framework of a mode of excretion so it emphasizes considerations of excreta in a culture’s cosmology. Next, I examine scatological content in the oldest chronicle of Japan: 'Kojiki'. Based on the analysis, I conclude the Japanese traditional notion of defecation is non-binary—it includes both positive and negative understandings of excrement. Most importantly, the notion lacks moral stigmatization; excrement is not kegare. Then, I characterize how defecation was practiced. Contrary to present norms, it was conducted relatively out in the open, without strict regularization. I argue it was because the notion was not stigmatized, thus there was no need to be particularly embarrassed about the body’s excretory capacities. Finally, I conclude the holistic approach to the notion and practice of defecation in Japan’s traditional fecal habitus is the reason why human waste could be viewed as productive and not merely an object of disgust. Thus, because of this cultural encoding, traditional means of excretory disposal in Japan relied on night soil collection.

The efficient and sanitary management of infectious waste is an essential part of the humanitarian response to any disaster, including the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, in many contexts within the Global South, waste management systems are poorly equipped to handle these waste streams during periods of normalcy, let alone during times of crisis. The purpose of this article is draw attention to a number of existing inequalities that define infectious waste management practices globally, with a critical eye to how they constrain poorer nations’ ability to respond and manage their own Covid-19 outbreaks. In particular, the work draws on the authors’ extensive research, experience, and activism at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, to understand how waste management practices will inform and react to mitigation efforts and to propose a number of practical steps that can be achieved in the short-term, as well as towards long-term structural transformation. Ultimately, this conversation is meant to contribute to a more inclusive and critical waste management studies discourse.

The aim of this article is to address the question: Why companies which produce or use pellets made from recycled plastics choose a strategic invisibility for their activities. The recycling of plastics is a process spread over an extended recycling supply chain. The negative stigma associated with recycled plastic in Indonesia is directed away from the factories towards the waste-pickers, junk-dealers and grinders who work the waste manually from which the recycled plastic is selected. Their remoteness from the source not only allows the factories to shake off the opprobrium of working with waste, they can also distance themselves from what goes on earlier in the supply chain. They are not held accountable for possible environmental or social mismanagement in the sorting of plastic waste. The factories, nevertheless, manage to maintain control over this supply chain by setting standards for the materials they accept. The factories have the power to declare which supplier is up to standard and which is not, and have the alternative of opting for virgin plastic made from mineral oil, which keeps prices of recycled plastic low. This conspicuous invisibility is convenient for all involved in the recycling industry in the short run, but more openness would be better for all sides.

While the circular economy (CE) is discussed in the global North as an innovative approach to waste management, the idea of circular resource flows has long been central in the work of waste pickers all over the world. They work independently or in groups, collecting, classifying, and reinserting a wide range of discarded materials into the economy. These grassroots initiatives have accumulated valuable knowledge and offer innovative perspectives on handling waste, informed and framed by their everyday experiences. Yet their efforts are hardly recognized as contributions to the circular economy, nor are most of the services they provide remunerated. Despite their precarious working and living conditions, waste pickers provide a specialized workforce, proven to be efficient in the reclamation of discarded and wasted materials, in reverse logistics such as extended producer responsibility (EPR) and service contracts involving municipalities and industries. With some exceptions, the organization of human labour that underpins the circular flows of matter and energy is an absent analytical dimension in most of the literature in this field. The dominant CE concept focuses primarily on environmental and ecological sustainability outcomes but lacks attention to social sustainability and livelihood aspects. Our paper bridges this gap in the literature by discussing results of qualitative research conducted in the metropolitan regions of São Paulo, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2017 and 2018, illustrating how waste picker organizations provide selective waste collection services to communities and businesses and thus contribute to resource recovery and social inclusion, at the heart of the CE.

This paper addresses the emergence of concern with hazardous wastes and the legal liabilities attached to them long before the first federal legislation in the U.S. explicitly using the term; a simultaneous search for marketable by-products during the first three quarters of the twentieth century as a means to decrease the volume of wastes while also diminishing the perceived threat; and the eventual adoption of a legal tactic that asserted absence of liability before formal federal definitions of hazardous wastes. Based on a review of industry and waste management literature, it exposes deliberate efforts on the part of major industry trade organizations to dampen public calls for litigation by making the case that wastes were manageable, recoverable, and non-threatening. These steps sought to offset potential disruptions to their operations by imposing additional costs on waste treatment. When federal legislation became a reality in the 1970s, defenders of industrial practices that created hundreds of hazardous waste sites made the arguments that hazardous properties of wastes were unknown at the time of their disposal. The litigation that swirled around the federal laws proved disruptive and reflect a issue delayed not eliminated.

This Editorial introduces the special collection ‘Development of Waste – Development as Waste’.

This article examines the concept of ‘circular economy’ by looking at its effects on recycling activities in China, in particular through the lens of e-waste or DEEE (discarded electrical and electronic equipment). It focuses on a case study of the recent changes in the globally notorious DEEE recycling hub of Guiyu since plans for the construction of a ‘circular economy industrial park’ unfolded. Drawing on fieldwork carried out by the authors annually since 2012, the article points to the highly disruptive character of changes operated by the Chinese state in the name of increased circularity. After more than two decades of severe pollution, environmental betterment in Guiyu was long overdue. But it came at a high price: a marked business slowdown that forced the majority of workshops to close down. As activities and discards started concentrating in the park, so did profits in the hands of the local elite. This leads us to argue that the circular economy in China, which is ostensibly about improving resource efficiency, can in practice have more to do with controlling who benefits economically from recycling activities.

Based on the acknowledgment of the materiality of recyclable materials, and therefore of their condition of actants in the recycling market, this paper proposes a materially contextualised account of waste pickers’ marginalisation in Brazil, departing from the extant literature on the topic. Drawing on a mixture of interviews and participant observation data collected during six months of fieldwork using the follow-the-thing approach, it explores the case of ‘rubbish PET’, (i.e., PET—polyethylene terephthalate) bottles dyed in colours other than green or blue to which there is currently no recycling market. The afterlife journey of discarded PET bottles provides the background for a discussion around the capacity of pigments to assert themselves, endangering and defying human efforts to transform discarded PET bottles into resources again. Through the reactions they elicit from those aiming to control their disruptiveness, pigments come to encapsulate the interests of powerful actors and are then transformed into tokens that transmit and reaffirm their hegemony throughout the PET recycling chain, therefore becoming implicated in political processes that contribute to waste pickers’ socioeconomic deprivation.

At first glance there may seem to be no clear connections between two of humanity’s most pressing problems: environmental waste and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In fact, as we posit in this paper, there is an inevitable convergence across these medical and environmental domains that hinge on social and economic inequalities. Such intersections have not been given nearly enough emphasis. Here we offer a series of considerations regarding the potential nexus of environmental pollution, waste-work, poverty and the decreasing viability of antimicrobials. We suggest that AMR and environmental pollution will fundamentally shape one another over the course of the coming decades, with differential impacts across socio-economic divides. More perniciously, the coalescing of waste, environmental pollution and reduced potency of pharmaceutical infection management will in turn likely escalate cultural prejudices around hygiene, ‘untouchability’, exclusion and privilege. That is, this nexus of waste and bacterial risk will polarise and divide communities, disproportionately affecting poorer communities. This paper is intended to chart an agenda for the study of this increasingly critical site of bacterial-human-environmental relations. It does so by examining the cycle of infection, risk and vulnerability amongst the most disadvantaged sections of the population in India.

As Hong Kong’s landfills are expected to reach saturated conditions by 2020, the city can no longer rely on landfilling alone as the sole solution for waste treatment in the long term. Drawing on five months of archival research at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Public Records Office (PRO) in 2016 as well as 17 months of fieldwork conducted between 2012, 2013 and 2016, this article provides a much-needed overview of why sustainable waste management has always been such a challenge for Hong Kong. Focusing on the city’s dependence on landfills and its failure to integrate alternative waste management technologies, namely incineration, into its current waste management regime, we explicate Hong Kong’s waste management predicaments from the 1950s to the present day. Through a historical lens, we argue that Hong Kong’s waste problems have a historical root and that they are unlikely to be resolved unless the government is willing to learn from its past mistakes and adopt a much more proactive approach in the near future.

Large amounts of waste are produced when old furniture is routinely replaced with new as a result of relocations and reorganizations in both the private and the public sector. This article is an anthropological study of reuse interior design, an emerging field of interior design that seeks to enhance sustainability in homes and work spaces through using existing furniture and materials. Redesigners interact with materials not only to explore what they offer 'within' the design concept but also how they may 'affect' that concept. Recent theoretical debates within posthumanism and new materialism illuminate how human and non-human forces together co-produce socio-material outcomes. This perspective is here brought into productive conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ work on the science of the concrete, where he outlines a method for producing new knowledge about the world based on available resources. Building on this conversation, the article argues that the redesigners’ work–assisting existing materials and things in their continuous becoming and turning them into new designs–can be seen as a ‘design of the concrete’. This has wider implications for current debates about the transition into circular economy where recycling, rather than reuse and repair, plays an important role. However, recycling tends to reduce used things simply to their material constituents, depriving them of important social, cultural, and material values. The redesigners’ studio represents a space in which used things and materials are creatively repaired, redesigned or upcycled to be used for new purposes rather than being reduced in material recovery and recycling schemes.

Using the case of Sweden, this article examines the growing sector of reuse and second-hand activities from the perspective of how people express and practice their relationships to objects that they acquire from second-hand markets. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in flea markets, second-hand shops, homes and recycling depots, it explores how people relate to and handle goods which, instead of becoming waste, enter new life cycles through reuse. It suggests that buying, using and passing on certain kinds of second-hand things involves particular forms of affection and ‘serial’ care for the objects as things-in-motion. At the same time, part of the attraction of these objects is how they enable the practising of a particular kind of subjectivity: that of an informed, moral and caring consumer. Part of such reuse subjectivity is the capacity to form close bonds with, and care for objects, but also to untie these bonds in order to carefully and responsibly let go of them. The article suggests that paying attention to the affective orientation and disposition that form part of such consumer subjectivity may provide keys to understanding what drives second-hand consumption and the accelerated circulation of goods it may entail. Offering an opportunity to examine assumptions of reuse and circulation as inherently ‘sustainable’, it also provides perspectives on practices of care.

The concept of the circular economy has taken off, gaining momentum along with concerns about resource depletion, waste, and the impending ‘end of cheap nature’ (Moore 2014). Environmentalists and industrialists alike have promoted the benefits of reuse as a means toward improved efficiency and reduced resource pressure. Some have called for a new ‘culture of reuse’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Stokes et al. 2014). It is in this context that we explore repair, resale, and reuse as practices with deep historical precedent and contemporary continuity. Are there lessons to be learned from places that are already home to circular economies and strong cultures of reuse? And are there dangers inherent in a stronger, more formalized reuse sector? This paper draws on an historical and ethnographic analysis of vibrant reuse practices in the rural northeastern state of Maine. While there is a popular tendency to explain Maine’s persistent reuse practices as a response to economic and geographic marginality, our empirical observations suggest that these explanations do not adequately capture the complexity of reuse markets, discount the power of human agency and sense of place, and preclude important lessons for reuse policy in other contexts. Insights from Maine suggest that any effort to promote reuse would benefit from looking beyond purely economic rationales to attend to matters of place, sociality, and market relationality.

Among the mix of motivations that inspire people to sell and shop at garage sales is the desire to prevent the disposal of still usable goods. Sales can be so effective for redistributing consumer goods and reducing waste that numerous municipalities, such as Sunnyvale, California and Sydney, Australia, promote their sales through a community-wide staging. Lengthy corridor sales in the U.S., like that held annually on Route 127 (the “World’s Longest Yard Sale”), serve the same function, drawing positive media attention and promoting civic pride. But unlike the mundane act of recycling used papers and cans at the curb, making goods available for reuse at garage sales is an action loaded with personal sentiment. Second-hand purchases are often imbued with “sticky” emotional orientations (Ahmed 2010) and reminiscences. This article therefore examines the garage sale as a site for redistributing goods with emotions and histories attached. Participants derive some small recompense in the form of money made, the acquisition of inexpensive goods, and the self-satisfaction associated with reducing waste, but shoppers and sellers are also allied in a tug of war against the landfill to claim the future of goods, especially the storied items adopted by shoppers. Beneath their goal of cleaning out the garage, garnering some extra cash, or obtaining a bargain, participants assert that the reuse of and care for still serviceable goods is meritorious and morally praiseworthy. In the process of reuse, they enhance their moral selves and perform a good deed, however minor, by preserving both the stories of these objects and the embattled earth.

The interdisciplinary Electronic Life Histories Project integrates behavioral archaeology, engineering, anthropology, art, material culture, and science and technology studies to employ a life history model, community-based research and creative engagement to address the making of electronic waste. Focused in the Greater Lafayette area of Indiana, which is home to a major university, this project examines the entanglements among people, electronics and waste-making. Specifically, this paper focuses on a significant interstitial stage between reuse and discard. We consider the stories and meanings affixed to electronic objects once they have entered people’s homes, and the complex lives they have before they are discarded, reused, or repurposed. We find ‘closet fill’ or junk drawers of electronic devices, bits, bytes and peripherals are often unintentional collections that are situationally valued through a constellation of factors that include emotional attachments, technological obsolescence, imagined use-value, as well as discrepancies between perceived value and market value. While the problem of closet fill has been discussed by scholars, how electronics enter this interstitial stage, why they remain and what motivates movement out of this part of the life history of objects have not been closely examined. We suggest a life history approach can make these interstitial phases visible in a way that illuminates the key factors in keeping electronics versus discarding. As opposed to descriptions of waste as disorderly, abject, or disgusting, our work shows that objects at the interstices of wasting practices embody, represent, and express many meanings to participants socially, spatially, and structurally.

The reimagination and revaluation of discarded goods, through repair and reuse is, for many, a quotidian and mundane element of everyday life. These practices are the historical precedent and continue to be the stuff of common sense for a significant portion of human society. And yet, reuse, repair and other elements of a ‘circular economy’ have recently emerged as a significant focus in environmental and economic policy. Proponents claim that reuse practices represent a potentially radical alternative to mainstream consumer culture and a form of carework that generates new social possibilities and personal affects. This essay explores the myriad dimensions of reuse as care, relational practice and as consumer alternative by examining these practices in their social context, lived experience and as embedded within larger political and economic structures of capitalist accumulation and abandonment. We argue that the study of reuse, in old and new forms, takes on added political significance in an era of environmental and economic crises, especially as a critical part of state-based approaches toward the circular economy that attempt to appropriate carework in new forms of value generation.

The situation of on-site recycling at landfills in Malaysia was investigated. Although Malaysia’s per capita GDP is three times that of Indonesia, waste picking at landfills is still economically feasible. The reason for this is that in Indonesia, the main recovered item is plastic bags as more valuable items are removed before the waste arrives to the landfill, while in Malaysia items such as PET bottles and metal cans are abundant in landfills, thus the waste pickers can earn a higher income. The authorities should make active efforts in supporting recycling at more upstream of the material flow so that recovering of materials at landfills will be unnecessary.

An Arendtian approach to waste is offered which suggests that three common senses of waste refer to products of labor, work, and action, as explained in The Human Condition (1958). The paper offers examples of ecological, utilitarian and moral-political senses of waste, and argues that they are not incommensurable, but form part of a continuum with respect to their relative freedom from constraint. For this reason, different senses of waste offer distinct political dimensions for waste scholars that relate to boundaries between the human/non-human and critiques of oppression and injustice more broadly.

Joshua Reno’s article is an inspiring call-out to Discard Studies. I thank him for the provocation and hope he takes my response in the spirit of a friendly polemic between fellow travelers in waste studies—which is what we are.

This article seeks to illuminate the field of social and material relations that generated and were generated by the Vitasoy milk bottle. When Vitasoy began making and selling soybean milk in 1940, the materiality of the milk bottle underscored and participated in assembling producers and consumers in both productive and problematic ways. The milk bottle was a material instantiation of a pattern of desires closely associated with global modernity that gestured beyond the geographical specificity of Hong Kong to an idealized community of rational, health-minded milk drinkers. As a marker of hygienic modernity and a badge of humanitarian relief and nutritional activism, the milk bottle conveyed seemingly universal ideals about health and fitness and materially affirmed the new idea that soybean milk was a dairy substitute. How the Vitasoy milk bottle could perform such functions requires disentangling the multiple lines of influence, local and global, that helped make the milk bottle meaningful.

The special theme of Worldwide Waste Journal that interrogates the social, economic, political, cultural and aesthetic aspects of packaging, in its contemporary and historical dimensions.