Waste studies is a new and vibrant academic field. In the last couple decades, not only has the number of publications whose central concern is waste from a not strictly technical perspective exploded but there are now two open-source journals dedicated to this scholarship. The older one is Discard Studies, an online collection of mostly shorter pieces written from a critical, activist perspective, and the more recent and more traditionally scholarly journal is the Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Various disciplinary encyclopedias and annual reviews have also published ambitious summary and programmatic articles on waste research. Anthropology, sociology, geography, and interdisciplinary journals have all dedicated special issues to various waste-related topics in the last decade. A handbook on waste studies could be said to be overdue.
Our goal in this introduction is not to define the field, certainly not in a way that would canonize it, and thus draw exclusionary boundaries around it. Rather we aim to give an account of the many areas of inquiry that arguably constitute the field. Three principles have guided our efforts to create this volume and in writing this introduction. First, we think of these areas as in a dialogic relationship with each another, informing and building on one another. Therefore, while it is certainly possible and helpful to describe origin points, the transformations and the disciplinary connections of the field, our way of doing so is guided by this relational understanding of waste studies. Another principle guiding our introduction is a critical theoretical perspective, that is, we aim to focus on the implicit and explicit potential of the field to provide a critical lens on society. Finally, we understand this field in pragmatic terms. This means that rather than imposing what we think waste studies should do, we are presenting it as a dynamic assemblage of strategies and practices that waste studies scholars are employing. This latter point is what informs the structure of the Handbook and which gathers the chapters into three sections. Each section responds to a different question:
In what follows, we will provide an overview of the history of the field, noting in particular the empirical themes, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies utilized. In the process, we will point out distinctions from other related fields. Third, we will summarize how the contributions in the volume answer the three guiding questions above. And finally, we will suggest research directions for the future.
A history of waste studies
Etymologically the word âwasteâ has origins in the Latin vastus, which denotes unoccupied, uncultivated, void, and immense, and Sanskrit for wanting or deficient. Yet, waste defies easy definition. We may know it when we see it (or smell it), but defining what waste is universally is not possible. Waste is always situated. It is waste for some individual or groupânot necessarily only human ones (Reno 2014)âin some place at some time. One way to illustrate the situated character of waste is to recall that all aerobic life is sustained by oxygen, including human life, and depends for its existence on the continual renewal of that gas by photosynthesizing plants as a metabolic excreta crucial to generating the atmosphere on which aerobic lives depend (Volk 2004). Humans and other animal life in a certain practical sense dwell at the bottom of an atmospheric ocean of gas excreted by other life without which they would perish. At the same time, this example of the situatedness of waste is somewhat misleading since waste is also infused with a vast range of values that are at once moral, ethical, even spiritual, not to mention political and economic as well. Waste can be as cosmological as it can be mundane. Waste provokes art, philosophical thought, and concrete measures to avoid, disperse, dilute, reworkâin short, to manageâit.
Arguably, the emergence of the field that sometimes goes by the name âwaste studiesâ has no single point of origin in time or place. Somewhat like the materials that often form the empirical foci of its practitionersâgarbage, trash, litter, and other forms of cast-offsâwaste studies is a mixed assemblage that nucleates around questions, methods, and cases.
The history of the field we sketch out below is partial and situated. It is inflected by our own training, upbringing, and social location. We restrict ourselves to mostly Anglophone texts, which as such tend to be by authors from the Global North. Our review then is open in some ways but closed in others. A further limitation is our immersion in the social sciences. This means that our reading of the waste studies field will overemphasize the contribution of anthropology, geography, sociology, political economy, and environmental studies; and the humanities here will mostly be represented by history, only briefly mentioning philosophy, and cultural studies. While this is in part the result of our positionality, it is also informed by the more influential role the social sciences and history have played in the formation and development of waste studies. Neither we, nor any of the contributors to this volume, are practicing engineers or policy makers. This is not a text about the professional concerns of waste management, although this handbook may also be of interest (we hope) to professional waste managers with those kinds of backgrounds.
Today, the growing collection of scholars who identify with a field recognizable as âwaste studiesâ tend to reference a few key early texts as informing their inquiry and as providing concepts and arguments with which they intend to be in conversation with. No other classical text has received more attention than anthropologist Mary Douglasâ definition of dirt. Some directly import her understanding of dirt as matter out of place into their inquiries of waste issues, while some others note that dirt is not waste, and worry that equating the two unnecessarily limits our view of waste, trash and garbage as something polluting. While, as Liboiron in this volume argues, Douglasâ goal wasnât so much to theorize dirt or waste, but rather demonstrating how power operates through creating clear boundaries around cleanliness and order, Douglasâ conceptualization has exerted a strong influence on waste studies. In what is virtually a defining axiom, waste scholars all accept that waste is socially constructed or, to put it another way, that waste is not, but it is made. What this making implies for different authors however varies greatly. For some, as in another classical text by Thompson (1979), waste is the opposite of value, and since value is certainly suspended in a cultural matrix, and different registers of valuation, arguably waste too is in the eye of the beholder. The proverb âone man's waste is another's treasureâ might serve as an approximate vernacular equivalent (and one doesnât have to endorse its gendering while acknowledging its prevalence as a frequently invoked saying).
For others, the social construction of waste extends beyond the realm of value, most notably to the materiality of waste. These authors demonstrate not only that waste can slide along a wide spectrum of utility/value and uselessness/lack of value, and in multiple directions to boot, but its material composition is also socially determined with significant implications for what materials are treated as waste by different social actors. Indeed, the evaluation of the matter constituting discarded objects changes historically (Strasser 1999).
As is clear from this brief overview of the most-cited origins of waste studies, the key animating question for the classics has been âwhat is waste?â It is not so much that later studies ignored this question (for useful conceptual frameworks see Sarah Moore (2012) and Reno (2018)) but started demonstrating what this definition matters for. What is at stake in defining waste in one way or another? K. A. Gourlay (1992) started this line of inquiry by critiquing common policy definitions of waste as discarded material, because as he argued, it immediately allowed the shift to technocratic concerns about waste management. Not only do these definitions give the impression that waste is already managed, thus, not really a problem, but shortcut analysis that would allow social scrutiny into who decides, and based on what considerations, the material composition of wastes that pose so much environmental and social trouble. Following Gourlay, as several scholars did in defining waste not as material discarded but as material we failed to use (for whatever reason) provided the first major critical impulse for waste studies, in as much as asking about the making of waste or the practices of wasting, allowed for scrutinizing social agency and social inequalities around waste issues.
From here, the scholarship proceeded in two distinct directions. In the United States, much informed by a new social movement, environmental justice became the main lens through which waste became a subject for the social sciences. The movement took off in the 1980s by protesting the siting of hazardous waste facilities (incinerators and landfills) near minority neighborhoods. Key authors in this tradition are Szasz and Meuser (1997), Bullard (1990), Brook (1998), Pellow and Brulle (2005).
In Western Europe, where the social sciences had already been much more attuned to consumption, practices of wasting in households and thrift shopping became the next influential area of study. Consumer waste studies tend to reach back to a different origin, not social movements and political economy, as in the United States, but one that has been influential in the consumption scholarship, namely the classical work by Thorstein Veblen (2007 (1899)). His concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste in the service of demonstrating one's distinction (Varul 2006) are to this day, the most influential. Another influential classic is Vance Packard's (1960) Waste Makers. Packard demonstrated how obsolescence is built in the design of consumer goods, which serves as a major factor in ringing in a throw-away society. European scholarship has been especially critical of âblaming the consumerâ (see on this Evans 2012, 2014); OâBrien (2007) but has contributed relatively little to an analysis of corporate practices that limit individualsâ choices in what and how much to discard. That task has mostly been undertaken in some studies of food waste (Stuart 2009; Bloom 2011; Alexander, Gregson and Gille 2013) and to a lesser extent of repair (Graham and Thrift 2007; Graziano and Trogal 2017; Persaud, Lepawsky and Liboiron 2019). Nicky Gregson's (2007) study of UK households, and Peter Evansâ (2014) work on food waste carefully dissected the practices and social and familial relationships that inform what and how households throw away. Using research subjectsâ journals and other qualitative methods, they demonstrate that there are more social, cultural, and economic determinants of the composition and quantity of household wastes than corporate-dictated choices, whether in materiality or portion sizing.
Simultaneously, the field science, technology and society (STS) on both continents started focusing on a specific waste materials and waste treatment technologies. Myra Hird's work on landfills (2013, 2016, 2017) and more recently on waste and Canadian settler colonialism (Hird 2021); Alexander and Reno's (2014) research on anaerobic digesters; Liborion's studies of marine plastics (2021), pollution, and colonialism (Liboiron 2021a); and Gabrielle Hecht's (2014, 2018) historical studies of mining waste and nuclear waste are the most influential. Waste has become a central concern for scholars around the same time as STS shifted from science-as-culture paradigm (a wonderful example of which in waste studies is Kuletz 1998) to one that engages with wastes not only in the cultural register but also in the material one, interrogating particular waste matters for their nonhuman agency (Hird 2012; Muecke 2009). While materiality has never been absent from STS, with the appearance of various novel theories in the late 20th century, such as postructuralism, including feminist/performative theories of the body, Actor Network Theory (which is probably better thought of as a method of inquiry), new materialism, including feminist materialism, it was now possible not only to draw out in concrete terms how nonhumans constrained, tweaked, or enabled human action, but also, in more theoretical terms, how modernist conceptions of human and social agency need to be modified. This new materialist approach also did away with our old assumptions about a static biological surface on which society inscribes itself and thus has been particularly useful for demonstrating the indeterminacy of material transformations and waste technologies most notably in the work of Myra Hird and Joshua Reno. Here, to the extent that politics or power relations are part of the analysis, they tend to be manifest and prove most consequential at the micro-level, while also hinting at policy implications, for example, for how to treat organic wastes. Social institutions that have a capacity to act at a distance are usually captured as dangerously simplifying and hiding the uncertainties and fluidities of these material metamorphoses. Gabrielle Hecht's research, while also documenting unexpected geological and chemical transformations, in contrast, foregrounds the ways in which global, colonial, and racial inequalities are exploited and reinforced by the governance of nuclear technology at multiple social scales. Max Liboiron (2017, 2021) is also most concerned with the practices and structures of governing the science of pollution. Their many collaborative projects aim at developing open-access and affordable technological tools to...
