Making waste management public (or falling back to sleep)

Creating careful circularities: Community composting in New York City

While matters of food waste and soil have become vital research arenas, compost remains the Cinderella of human geographical enquiry. In response, this paper brings compost to the centre of debates at the intersection of diverse economies and circular economy. In particular, the concept of community composting and the care involved in such practices is used to offset and problematise the technoscientific bias in circular economy discourses. Extending feminist perspectives on care in soil studies, this paper focuses on the careful circularities that are realised through community composting in New York City. This case study provides not only a material space for examining community composting but also a unique opportunity to consider the colliding worlds of worth that operate in and around urban sustainability transitions to zero waste. Drawing empirical insights from interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this paper argues for a sensitisation of circular economy policy and research to matters of care and diverse economies as a means to better understand motivations, justifications, and outcomes of efforts to reorient food systems onto more sustainable pathways. We argue that privileging care in this way helps to shift focus away from dominant narratives of "scaling-up" towards sustainability to a more relational perspective that sees transformation in connecting, deepening, and even scaling-down. This means attending to the micro as well as macro transformations needed to enact the required sustainability transitions.

Waste Pickers and Their Practices of Insurgency and Environmental Stewardship

Informed by different grassroots learning and educational practices engaged in waste management, and drawing from the concepts of insurgent citizenship and environmental stewardship, we examine the role of waste picker organizations and movements in creating new pathways towards more sustainable environmental waste governance. Two case studies (Argentina and Brazil) demonstrate how waste pickers inform and educate the general public and raise the awareness of socio-environmental questions related to waste management. Different educational practices are used as strategies to confront citizens with their waste: to see waste as a consumption problem, resource, and income source. Our paper draws on grassroots learning (social movement learning and insurgent learning) and education (stewardship) aimed at the transformation of waste practices. We argue that waste pickers play an important role in knowledge production promoting recycling, in landfilling less and recovering more resources. We conclude that waste pickers act as insurgent citizens and also are environmental stewards.

Waste as scats: For an organizational engagement with waste

This article coins the term ‘scatolic’ to suggest a new way for organizations to think about and engage with waste. Scatolic engagement draws on Reno’s analogy of waste as scats and of scats as signs for enabling interspecies communication. This analogy stresses the impossibility for waste producers to dissociate themselves from their waste and emphasizes the contingent, multiple, and transient value of waste. Correspondingly, the article suggests that organizations grow a semiotic competence at reading waste and develop a sense of responsibility for materials. Adopting a scatolic approach to waste is featured as a way for organizations to deal with waste in the Anthropocene.

Empowerment and the ecological determinants of health: three critical capacities for practitioners

Human agency or the expression of intentionality towards some form of betterment has long occupied human imagination and creativity. The ways in which we express such aspirations are fundamentally informed by our beliefs about the nature of reality, meanings of human well-being and progress, and the ways in which our social locations shape our interests. Within Western health-promoting discourse and practice, such processes have largely been expressed through the construct of empowerment. To date, like health, much empowerment practice has been implicitly rooted in Cartesianism, has tended towards anthropocentrism and in cases where it has engaged with environmental issues, has mirrored environmentalism's focus on externalities and objectivity. These tendencies coupled with the increasing complexity of global, ecological, human well-being issues call empowerment practitioners to integrate new kinds of capacities more suited to addressing the ecological determinants of health. Drawing in part on the author's empowerment research over more than a decade, this article distinguishes between a range of epistemological perspectives underlying contemporary empowerment practices while fore-grounding the concepts of place-based agency and social-ecological resilience. These constructs in turn form the basis for three capacities considered critical for practitioners addressing human-ecological well-being.

Waste and Waste Management

Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning or a merely technical problem for sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology and marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as for critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to document the many ways that our wastes are not only our problem, but become entangled with the lives of nonhuman creatures and the future of the planet we share.