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Human Geography
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Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste

Sarah A. Moore
Prog Hum Geogr published online 13 March 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0309132512437077
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Article

Garbage matters: Concepts

in new geographies of waste

Progress in Human Geography

120
The Author(s) 2011
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10.1177/0309132512437077
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Sarah A. Moore
University of Arizona, USA

Abstract
In this article, I critically review important concepts in new geographies of waste. I focus on both the
conceptual frameworks that are used to examine issues concerning waste and the political possibilities
produced by understanding waste differently. By plotting a range of concepts of waste along two axes
positive versus negative definitions of waste, and dualist versus relational concepts of waste and society I
contextualize scholarship on waste within the broader discussion about the rematerialization of geography
and social science. Understanding when, how, and why waste matters provides a fruitful lens for examining
contemporary sociospatial processes.
Keywords
environment, garbage, materiality, nature society, waste

So who or what is tickling the ticklish subject? The

answer, of course, is the object however, which
object? (Zizek, 2006: 17)

dollar industry in hazardous waste trade;

expanding interests in and uses of alternative
practices of waste management; large-scale
development institutions investment in wasterelated infrastructure in the developing world;
increasing subnational transfers of municipal
solid waste; and growing piles of e-waste overwhelming local dumpsites, to name a few. As
much as people and places are connected by
flows of commodities and goods, they are also
united by flows of waste and remainders (Moore,
2011). In this sense, garbage might indeed be the
poem of our time (Ammons, 1993).
Perhaps because of this, waste has increasingly been used by researchers as a lens to
explore environmental politics (Gandy, 1994,

Over the last decade, geographers studying

waste have contributed to the emergence of a
substantive field in the social sciences. A growing focus on waste in academic circuits coincides with new geographies of waste: a billion

Corresponding author:
University of Arizona, Harvill Box 2, Tucson, AZ 85721,
USA
Email: samoore@email.arizona.edu

I Introduction
garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and
creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation
to trashlessness, that is too far off and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic . . .
(Ammons, 1993)
After all, what is more material than garbage?
(Myers, 2005: x)

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Progress in Human Geography

2002), urban history (Melosi, 1993, 2000;

Miller, 2000; Sterner, 2008), social behavior
(Barr et al., 2001; Strasser, 1999), social movements (Cresswell, 1996), capitalism (Clapp,
2002; Gregson and Crang, 2010), modernity
(Moore, 2009), risk (Bickerstaff and Simmons,
2009), regulation (ONeill, 2000), and governance (Bulkeley and Askins, 2009; Davies,
2008). These somewhat disparate literatures
draw on a wide array of concepts of waste
(hazard, object of management, commodity,
resource, archive, filth, fetish, risk, disorder,
matter out of place, governable object, abject,
and actant). Through these diverse concepts,
new geographies of waste have begun to interrogate what waste is and how, why and to whom it
matters (Gregson and Crang, 2010). Such questions, I argue, are central to recent attempts to
think through the political potentials of more
than human geographies by examining, defining, and animating the material. If, as Garth
Myers claims, there is nothing more material
than garbage, then the new geographies of waste
are well-positioned to contribute to these
efforts. Scholars of waste, after all, have always
been interested in the material whether matter
and materialism were construed as the thingness of garbage, shit, or toxic waste (given or
constructed), the daily realities of managing or
living with waste, or the social relations and
political-economic processes concealed or
revealed in the waste itself. Rather, however,
than proposing one concept or a synthesis of
several concepts as the resolution to the problem
of understanding how, when, and to what ends
matter and the material are politically effective,
I propose that, as an object of study, waste itself
might best be thought of as a parallax object:
that which objects, that which disturbs the
smooth running of things (Zizek, 2006: 17).
The concepts deployed in new geographies of
waste thus (at least implicitly) provide what
Zizek calls a parallax view that centres waste,
whether because of its inherent qualities (risk,
hazard, filth), or because of its indeterminacy

(as out of place, disorder, abject), as that which

disturbs or disrupts sociospatial norms. In order
to demonstrate the myriad ways that waste disturbs, I therefore abstract the concepts from
their roles as lenses in particular subfields, and
focus instead on how each concept relates to two
questions: how is waste defined (as a positivity
or negativity) and how is waste related to society (in a dualist or relational way; see Figure 1).
I further argue that the disturbances caused
by waste and other such parallax objects might
provide opportunities for what Isin calls
[b]eing political those moment[s] when the
naturalness of the dominant virtues is called into
question and their arbitrariness revealed (Isin,
2002: 275). Throughout the paper, therefore,
I highlight the ways that attempts to understand
waste from multiple vantages are fruitful avenues for a politics of things (cf. Braun and
Whatmore, 2010) that interrogates the modernist shibboleths of cleanliness, hygiene, and
sanitation, and the often unjust and highly
exclusionary sociospatial orders produced
through them (cf. Isin, 2002; Sibley, 1995;
Stallybrass and White, 1986).

II Plotting conceptualizations of
waste
In order to discuss how waste is conceptualized,
I plot emerging literature on waste along two
axes (Figure 1). The first axis (positivity-negativity1) refers to the degree to which a given
approach to waste argues for a specific nature
or character of waste that is important. Is there
an essential quality of waste itself (a positivity)
that matters to how it is valued or devalued and
in constraining or opening up its political potential? On the one side positivity waste is
imbued with meaning that may or may not be
pregiven, but is located largely within the object
itself. In these conceptualizations, waste is often
assumed to be a hazard (to environmental and
public health) or a remainder of prior social,
political, and economic processes. Concepts

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Moore

II
DUALIST

Hazard
Manageable Object
Commodity

Resource
Out of Place
Disorder

Archive

POSITIVE

NEGATIVE
Governable Object

Fetish
Filth

Abject
Risk
Vital Actant

RELATIONAL
III

IV

Figure 1. This is a schematic that highlights emerging literature on waste along two axes. The first axis (positivity-negativity) refers to the degree to which a given approach to waste argues for a specific nature or character of waste that is important. On the left side of the axis are concepts that imbue waste with a specific,
unique quality. On the right are concepts that do not define waste as having a specific meaning, but rather
as something that defies easy categorization. The second axis (dualist-relational) describes the degree to
which waste is defined as something that is separate from society. Concepts that fall above the axis tend
to portray waste and somewhat distinct entities that come into contact with one another through sociospatial processes. Concepts that fall below the axis view waste and society as mutually constitutive.

on this side of the axis, therefore, objectify and

essentialize waste, though to varying degrees, as
indicated by their relative position within each
quadrant. On the other side of the axis negativity the meaning and value of waste are largely
indeterminable and escape or exceed easy categorization. Concepts of waste that emphasize
its social, cultural, and spatial relativity are
located on this side of the axis. The value of
waste for thought and its political potential
on this side of the axis lies in the mobility of the
concept itself.
The second axis, that of dualist-relational,
describes the degree to which waste is defined

as separate from society. All of the literatures

discussed are interested in relationships
between waste and society in one way or
another. Following work in nature-society
relations (cf. Braun, 2008; Castree, 2003), I
therefore use the term dualist to denote conceptualizations that explicitly or implicitly define
waste and society as separate spheres that act
on or encounter one another in myriad ways. For
example, waste is often posited as an externality
of certain sociospatial processes (particularly
production and consumption) that must be managed by society. On the other hand, relational,
rather than dualist, concepts focus on mutually

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Progress in Human Geography

constitutive, immanent, and emergent encounters

between people and things.
At issue here are two basic questions about
space, things, people and their relatings. (1)
Can objects be defined positively by essential characteristics inherent to them or negatively only in opposition to something else? (2)
Do certain social processes pre-exist objects and
subjects or do objects and subjects, together, help
to constitute society and space (cf. Braun and
Whatmore, 2010; Gregson and Crang, 2010;
Latham and McCormack, 2004)? My purpose in
dividing the literature along these two questions
is neither to provide a coherent definition or
concept of waste that all scholars should use
(an unproductive exercise at any rate) nor to
endorse one approach over another, but rather
to highlight how various and sometimes competing explicit and implicit notions of waste
underlie attempts to revalue and reassess the
political potential of waste as a material part
of everyday life.
While specific concepts are plotted and associated in the text with individual authors and
articles, it should be noted that many scholars
employ more than one concept or framework
in their research. Further, as is true in much
social science research, many of the authors discussed are reflecting the views and opinions of
research subjects and their use of multiple concepts (e.g. Davies and OCallaghan-Platt, 2008;
Lepawsky and McNabb, 2010). Additionally,
the concepts are unevenly divided among the
quadrants, representing more and less developed avenues of inquiry. The placement of each
concept is a critical interpretive act on my part
and my primary interest is not to emphasize
the fixed coordinates, but rather to highlight the
confluences, juxtapositions, and divergences
posed within the continuous knot of work that
deploys these concepts. While this analytical
cut through the literature, then, necessarily
divides what in practice is indivisible, my hope
is that it does so in a productive way, as I believe
that the myriad concepts deployed highlight the

richness, variation, and sheer volume of critical

investigations of waste and provide a model for
thinking about the political potentials inherent
in a geography of things.

III Conceptualizations in
quadrant I
In quadrant I (Positivity/Dualist) is work that,
on the whole, identifies waste as having a specific
characteristic that defines it and as something
that is largely external to society. The preponderance of research on waste in geography has
existed in quadrant 1 where waste is alternatively
viewed as hazard, commodity, resource,
object of management, or archive.

1 Waste as hazard
Geographers and others have long been interested in remedying the unjust distribution of
environmental and public health hazards
throughout society by addressing the uneven
disposal of hazardous and/or toxic materials,
including human and animal waste, in lowincome or minority neighborhoods (Bowen
et al., 1995; Bullard, 1993; Jewitt, 2011) and the
historical sociospatial processes that produce
marginalized populations and that create and
unevenly distribute environmental risks (cf.
Heiman, 1996; Pulido, 2000; Pulido et al.,
1996). While varied in approach and analysis,
such research has in common a definition of
waste as hazard as a point of departure (e.g.
Bjelland, 2006; Bourne, 2008; Buckingham
et al., 2005; Cutter and Solecki, 1996; Higgs
and Langford, 2009; Holifield, 2001;
Ishiyama, 2003; Kurtz, 2005, 2007; Maantay,
2006; Petts, 2005; Watson and Bulkeley,
2005; Wolsink and Devilee, 2009).
The concept of waste as hazard positions
waste as a lens for studying the uneven interand intranational distributions of waste disposal
facilities and social movements, gender and
racial politics, discourses of distributional

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Moore

and/or procedural justice that accompany them

(e.g. Adamson et al., 2002; Agyeman, 2002;
Agyeman and Evans, 2004; Bjelland, 2006;
Bullard, 1993; Davies, 2006; Di Chiro,
1998; Fischer, 1995; Girdner and Smith, 2002;
Harvey, 1996; Heiman, 1996; Holifield,
2001; Ishiyama, 2003; Kurtz, 2007; Newman,
1992; Pulido, 2000; Szasz, 1994), as well as
environmental pollution and habitat destruction
(Holifield, 2009; Njeru, 2006). The political and
regulatory successes of the environmental justice movement in the United States speak to the
salience of this notion of waste in some, but not
all, national contexts (Davies, 2006; Gottlieb,
1993; Szasz, 1994).
Waste as hazard, therefore, focuses research
on ethical questions of the just distribution of
toxic materials throughout society and demands
intervention in terms of increased regulation of
the disposal and production of such materials.
Because there is at least an implicit concern
with the local effects of extra-local processes,
the issue of scale arises, both for analysis and for
activism around environmental justice (cf.
Kurtz, 2003; Towers, 2000; William, 1999).
Scale becomes an obstacle to organizing opposition to unjust distributions of waste, the production and disposal of which is often decided
outside of local arenas. Indeed, as Bickerstaff
and Agyeman (2009) note, for some authors the
very concept of environmental injustice precipitates a politics of scale since locally experienced sources of pollution are inevitably rooted
in political-economic relations and processes
distributed across far-reaching spatial networks (p. 784). In these cases, then, waste is
largely external to the central processes that
constitute society (political, spatial/scalar, cultural, economic). For some scholars, this dualist construction runs the risk of overlaying
social analyses on top of physical sciences,
whilst preserving their domains of knowledge
(Gregson and Crang, 2010: 1027). On the other
hand, as Gregson and Crang argue, such work
often also addresses the specific noxious

qualities of substances, and therefore brings

back the material properties of different forms
of waste (p. 1027).

2 Waste as resource
Reframing waste as a resource addresses part of
what is missed by thinking solely of waste as
hazard. Waste as resource provides a view into
such phenomena as: the impacts of formal recycling on the efficiency and sustainability of
municipal solid waste management (Chowdhury, 2009; Tsai, 2008); the behavioral determinants of participation in recycling (Ackerman,
1997; Barr, 2004, 2006; Barr and Gilg, 2006;
Ewing, 2001); informal recycling, scavenging,
and waste-picking and the recovery of materials
as a survival or livelihood strategy (Fahmi and
Sutton, 2006; Hayami et al., 2006; Huysman,
1994; Jarman, 1997; Moreno-Sanchez and Maldonado, 2006; Rouse, 2006); cooperative or
other organizational formations among scavengers (Castillo Berthier, 1990, 2003; DallAgnol and Fernandes, 2007; Nzeadibe, 2009);
the integration of informal recycling systems
with formal waste management (Gutberlet,
2008; Ngo, 2001; Sicular, 1992); and the uses
of animal and/or human waste as a fertilizer
(Harris, 1998; Janssen and Oenema, 2008;
Matless, 2001). These disparate literatures
have in common an emphasis on the myriad
ways that disposed items can be recovered by
re-entering formal cycles of economic production or reused in informal systems.
In Recovering Resources Recycling Citizenship: Urban Poverty Reduction in Latin
America, for example, Jutta Gutberlet (2008)
demonstrates the necessity of reconceptualizing
waste as a resource and the implications of such
a reconceptualization for understanding urban
development in poor metropolitan areas of Brazil. While waste scavengers make significant
contributions to the economies of such areas,
the informal settlements in which many of the
scavengers live are affected by the negative

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Progress in Human Geography

health and environmental consequences of

industrial society. Valuing waste as a resource,
Gutberlet argues, can limit the marginalization
of people who make their livelihoods through
informally collecting it, while reforming waste
management in terms of efficiency and
environmental responsibility. For many scholars
interested in scavenging and recycling, one
important issue is to redeem the value of waste,
either by reintegrating it with the production system somehow, or by recognizing the use value of
certain objects. Work in formal recycling often
focuses on the important issue of how to achieve
environmental sustainability by using recycled
materials as production inputs; research on
scavenging and informal recycling, on the other
hand, tends to emphasize redemption of wasted
objects and labor power through formalization.
While these constructions of waste sometimes
centre the economic as the dominant and most
important generator of value (both of objects and
of holders of labor power), viewing waste as
resource also allows researchers to demonstrate
the material and social consequences of one type
of waste material metamorphosing into another
as it traverses the circuits of production, distribution, consumption, reclamation, and annihilation (Gille, 2010: 1050). In an investigation of
the international trade in electronic waste (ewaste), for example, Lepawsky and McNabb
(2010) argue that e-waste qua waste does not
always represent the extinguishing of value and
that such materials do not follow a one-way
transformation of value-to-waste along a linear
chain of production-consumption-disposal (p.
186) Further:
E-waste flows are neither linear nor easily construed
as simply cyclical in form . . . What these scenarios
suggest is a need to more carefully conceptualize the
transubstantiation of waste electronics into value
through highly contingent processes linking different
geographies. (Lepawsky and McNabb, 2010: 186)

Here, waste may be transformed into value

through an international division of labor where

geography plays a determining role in the

transformation of what is waste in one place
into what is value elsewhere (p. 190). Such work
is distinguished by the way that labor around
the object is constitutive of broader social geographies of belonging and marginalization
(p. 190). Understanding such processes, therefore, is key to a politics of inclusion.

3 Waste as (non-Marxian) commodity

In contrast to the concepts above, the notion of
waste as a commodity provides understandings
of the patterns and processes involved in trading
waste (both hazardous and solid), particularly
between nations (ONeill, 2000). Much work
in this area is concerned with waste as a hazard
to public and environmental health, but it also
positions waste as a good to be traded and/or
regulated through market mechanisms. In such
work, waste is given value by its re-entry into
the processes of production and through circuits
of exchange (cf. Berglund and Soderholm,
2003; van Beukering and Bouman, 2001). Here,
the logics of international environmental economics sometimes prevails; suggesting that in
a first-best world of equal trade relationships,
international trade in hazardous waste could be
beneficial to all countries involved (Rauscher,
2005).2 The large and growing amount of
e-waste being traded is a particular concern for
new geographies of waste as a commodity (Shinkuma and Huong, 2009; Shinkuma and Managi,
2010).
While they have different foci, work that
posits waste as a simple commodity that can
be exchanged to create wealth and economic
growth in and among countries has some similarities with work that constructs waste as
resource. In these accounts waste is often positively identified as a hazard, but is also conceived as a commodity with a market value,
which provides incentives for the development
of a multi-billion-dollar industry in waste trade.
For geographers and others critical of the

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Moore

dominance of market logics and the uneven

flows of waste they might produce, the primary
political tool to address potential problems
with the distribution of hazardous materials is
regulation at the local, national, and international levels (Ibitz, 2009; ONeill, 2000; Sonak
et al., 2008).

4 Waste as manageable object

Other scholars conceptualize waste as an
object to be managed and governed at different
scales. This is apparent in work that discusses
various facets of municipal solid waste management (MSWM) in megacities (Ehlers, 2009;
Kopfmuller et al., 2009), in comparative cases
(Zhang et al., 2010), in EU New Member States
like Greece (Lasaridi, 2009), and in the context
of new regulations such as producer responsibility (Deutz, 2009). Questions that arise from this
view of waste often involve the implications of
waste management for urban sustainability
(Ehlers, 2009; Kopfmuller et al., 2009), the
effects of supra-local regulation on municipal
waste management, issues of privatization
(Samson, 2010), the efficacy of communitybased waste management (CBWM) (Pariseau
et al., 2006, 2008) and, in more recent work,
(urban) governance (Bhuiyan, 2010; Boyle,
2003; Bulkeley et al., 2007; Davies, 2009; Davies
and OCallaghan-Platt, 2008; Davoudi, 2009;
Eden et al., 2006; Forsyth, 2005; Oosterveer,
2009; Van Horen, 2004).
Governance, of course, has many definitions,
but primarily highlights the interactions
between state and non-state actors that produce
policies and influence the sociospatial extent
of formal and informal waste management
systems. Bulkeley et al. (2007), for example,
propose an approach that highlights various
modes of governance around the collection,
transportation, and disposal of waste. Here,
depending on various rationalities and strategies
of governance, there are alternative ways of
managing waste which imply more or less

community and/or state control. Rather than

focus on barriers to inter- and intrastate cooperation in municipal solid waste management,
then, Bulkeley et al. propose the idea of modes
of governance as an alternative analytical
perspective . . . through which to explore the
dynamic sociotechnical contexts within which
the policies and practices of municipal waste are
being shaped (Bulkeley et al., 2007: 2752).
Anna Davies, in The Geographies of
Garbage Governance (2008), also informs her
comparative account of waste management in
New Zealand and Ireland with a governance
approach that she argues highlights the institutions, structures and actors involved in the
process of governing (p. 36). Similarly, Garth
Myers uses a comparative governance approach
to study sustainable development in Dar es
Salaam, Lusaka, and Zanzibar. This comparison
allows him to argue that there is no necessary
trajectory toward either inclusive governance
or more efficient garbage management in these
places (Myers, 2005).
As Gregson and Crang argue (2010), while
Bulkeley et al., Davies, and other scholars of
waste management draw on Foucaults notion
of governmentality (see also section VI(1)
below), the focus in each of these cases is on
governance and waste management: waste as
such is not interrogated, but rather a given
object of municipal management. In this way,
waste tends to be construed positively as an
unexamined remainder an object that exists
in space and that is somewhat external to society. As a manageable object, waste is open to
technical and, in the case of some governance
literature, institutional solutions.

5 Waste as archive
In contrast to the above, waste as archive is a
source of knowledge about contemporary geographies of production, consumption, and waste
management practices. To garbologists, like
Rathje and Murphy (2001: 4), landfills are

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Progress in Human Geography

lodes of information that may, when mined and

interpreted, produce valuable insights insights
not into the nature of some past society, of
course, but into the nature of our own.
Garbage, refuse, and waste, in this case, are
positively identified as the remainders of everyday life, as artifacts of material culture that
reveal specific social and cultural behaviors
through their presence or absence. These potentialities of waste are extended by the work of
Patricia Yaeger, who draws on 20th-century
American fiction to argue that trash can become
an archive or instrument of historical reinscription, particularly for marginalized groups needing to recoup social presence (Yaeger, 2003:
109). Here discarded objects are poignant reminders of the previously existing social relations
from which they were expelled. In other words,
history is no longer a trash heap we are trying
to escape, but a trash heap that reeks: a mess with
a message (p. 114). Thus, waste is a record of
previous and contemporary social relationships
and carries a message that society should heed.
Wasted objects tell stories about contemporary
culture from the margins, the left behind.
Conceptualizing waste as either artifact or
archive highlights the value of waste for illuminating both marginalized histories and the contradictions of contemporary consumer culture. The
distinctions made in garbology, between mental
and material realities, cultural forms and the
material record, make waste largely external to
society, as remainder, reminder, and cautionary
tale (cf. section V(1) below). While waste here
has the potential to reveal the contradictions of
consumer society, the political implications of
this revealing are unclear. As an external reminder of wasteful consumer practices and exclusionary social processes, could not waste simply be
once again displaced, removed, forgotten?

IV Concepts in quadrant II
While the preponderance of work on waste in
geography and other social sciences has

traditionally identified waste positively, particularly as hazard, resource or commodity, other

concepts of waste are emerging as shown in
Figure 1. Examples of this are found in quadrant
2 where conceptualizations of waste lean
toward negative definitions of waste, but, like
those ideas in quadrant 1, also view waste as
largely external to society. Here, waste is not
given any specific meaning based on a physical
characteristic internal to the object itself, but is
defined by its inability to be categorized neatly.
Waste is depicted as out of place or disorder
following Mary Douglass (2004) famous
formulation. While there are only two basic
concepts listed in this quadrant, both are important to new geographies of waste, particularly
as they relate to questions of power and identity
as they are mapped onto certain spaces and bodies (Hawkins, 2006; Riley, 2008).

1 Waste as disorder and matter out of place

Many scholars interested in the relationship
between waste management, development, and
the history of colonialism have drawn on the
concept of waste as out of place, in conjunction with Cresswells notion of transgression
(Cresswell, 1996), to argue that notions of waste
have played an important part in excluding
certain groups of people from specific social,
political, and physical spaces (Hill, 2006;
Moore, 2009; Sundberg, 2008). For example,
Juanita Sundberg argues that remnants left by
undocumented migrants on the border between
Arizona and Mexico produce evidence of
border-crossers as out of place litterers who
can be clearly distinguished from legitimate
Americans. In examining debates over the border environment produced by NAFTA, Sarah
Hill also uses Douglass observations about dirt
and disorder to argue that what the media presented along the USA-Mexico border during
19911994 was an extreme portrait of matter
out of place implicitly borne by the movement
of people out of place: Mexican immigrants

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Moore

(Hill, 2006: 779). She goes on to explain that,

while many United States citizens feared
industrial pollution specifically, it is impossible to dismiss the associations drawn between
self-soiling Mexicans, mired in their own
excrement, and the larger projection of the
expanding border, seeping like a swamped septic systems drainage field across the greater
American landscape (p. 793).
In another context, Hetherington builds on
Douglass description of waste as matter out
of place to analyse disposal and draw attention
to the spatiality of disorder and the subsequent
ordering acts that aim to correct disorder
(Hetherington, 2004: 162). Rather than being
about waste, per se, disposal is about placing
and is therefore a fundamentally spatial practice. As such, the process of disposing of waste
becomes thoroughly constitutive of social and
indeed ethical activity (p. 158).
Also concerned with issues of disposal, Riley
(2008: 80), following Douglas, argues that
[p]ositioning waste (matter out of place) as
dangerous and threatening can be seen as central
to both contemporary and wartime recycling
efforts. In comparing contemporary recycling
projects in the UK with those in place during the
Second World War, Riley uses Douglass interpretation of waste as matter out of place to
highlight the commonalities and differences in
crisis narratives surrounding waste. Three main
points of crisis are discussed, all of which have
in common a limit on the symbolic and physical
elimination of waste: (1) landfills that play the
role of hiding waste from society become points
of contention through their secondary effects
(methane gas production that contributes to global warming, for example); (2) contests over
waste disposal siting highlight a problematic
proximity to waste for certain communities,
both physically and metaphorically; and (3)
landfill siting becomes increasingly problematic as appropriate sites are exhausted.
In quadrant 2, waste is not clearly defined;
rather, it is its resistance to categorization that

is crucial to the political potential of waste in

society. Because dirt, waste, and other sources
of pollution are culturally determined and identified by their tendency to transgress categories,
they prompt strong social sanctions that exclude
certain practices and groups of people deemed
as unclean, to produce sociospatial order. Here,
then, waste is a fundamentally geographical
problem (Engler, 2004; Hetherington, 2004).
This notion of waste as out of place makes
it potentially transgressive and disruptive. If
waste is out of place, it challenges the normative assumption that it should be out of sight and
raises concerns about the usual practices of distancing it from particular places (Moore, 2008).
While such work makes it clear that waste as
matter out of place could have the political
potential to challenge existing social orders, it
often relies on an implicit separation between
society and objects. In Douglass work, the
reliance on the realm of the symbolic and its
(sometimes muddied) opposition to the real
(Hetherington, 2004), separates signifying practices (the purview of society) from material
characteristics of objects seen to merely exist
here or there. For many scholars interested in
waste, such as those discussed in section V
below, this misses the real stuff of waste
(Gregson and Crang, 2010).

V Quadrant 3
Concepts of waste that propose a more or less
essential character of waste that is internally
related to society are located in quadrant 3. This
includes work that proposes waste as filthy, disgusting material whose affective qualities make
it imperative that it be removed from sight/smell.
For many authors, this need to get rid of waste is
generative of social practice and space.

1 Waste as filth
As Hawkins and Muecke argue, waste can
touch the most visceral registers of the self it
can trigger responses and affects that remind

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us of the bodys intensities and multiplicities

(Hawkins and Muecke, 2003: xiv). Here, the
significance of waste often lies in its inherently
repugnant nature. It is positively identified as
filthy, disgusting matter that has the ability to
move people to act.
Hawkins explores this further in an essay on
shit and the politics of drains (see also section
VI(1) below):

Waste, in this account, is imbued with and

defined by the profound ability to disgust and
to enrol other social actors in its elimination,
giving it an important role in the constitution
of society and space. The disgust and revulsion
provoked by waste become powerful political
forces: This is the political possibility of affect
as a response where different becomings might
emerge without such responses there can be
no ethics of responsibility (Hawkins and
Muecke, 2003: xiv).

management on the part of local planners as

well as state and national agencies (Baxter and
Greenlaw, 2005; Holifield, 2004; Wolsink and
Devilee, 2009). There is also an emphasis on the
perceptions of risks posed by waste to different
populations, producing what Parkhill et al.
(2009: 40) call a dilemmatic view of risk: both
as an ontologically manifest threat and as shaped
by culture and social experience.
Waste as risk has in common with waste as
hazard an emphasis on danger and toxicity, but
because of its focus on socially constructed and
produced quasi-subjects or on waste as a
powerful uncontrollable actor that delegitimates and destabilizes state institutions with
responsibilities for pollution control, in particular, and public safety, in general (Beck, 1999:
150), it posits a more emergent relationship
between society and waste. Waste as risk also
focuses less attention than waste as filth on the
physical reaction that one might have to waste
and instead, focuses on the processes of modernization through which society has created a number of quasi-objects beyond its technological and
political control. This, in turn, causes a crisis of
legitimacy for the institutions expected to control
these environmental bads. As garbage and other
risks go rogue, they present the capacity to undermine existing political and management institutions and their related sociospatial orders.

2 Waste as risk

3 Waste as fetish

While waste as hazard (section III(1) above)

posits waste as external to society and full of
meaning, waste as risk nuances this by emphasizing the cultural and historical specificity of
risks and peoples responses to them (Bickerstaff
and Simmons, 2009; cf. Chilvers, 2008; Davis,
2005; Murray, 2009). A primary focus of
investigation in work on waste as risk is the relationship between objects, technology, expert
knowledge, and local understandings (Eden et
al., 2006; Wakefield and Elliott, 2003). Accordingly, there is an attendant focus on risk

There is a growing literature on consumption

that examines waste as the intersection of the
household and the public economies (Bulkeley
and Askins, 2009; Bulkeley and Gregson,
2009; Gregson, 2009; Lane et al., 2009). This
research often begins with the fundamental
notion that waste is a fetishized commodity;
it has a use and exchange value, but it also
obscures the social relationships behind its
production and circulation. As fetish, waste
embodies the social relations of its production,
but obscures these as it becomes an object

The force of disgust throws out the desire for action,

a feeling based in both the body and culture, in
instinctual and everyday ethical and political judgments. Gut reactions are part of what counts as
environmental awareness, part of all those angry
questions: what kind of science and bureaucratic
reason could turn the beach into a sewerage treatment works? . . . Is that what the triumph of sanitation means, the hint of shit in a gentle coastal
breeze? (Hawkins, 2003: 40)

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through which surplus value circulates. To think

of waste as fetish is to propose that wasted
objects contain, and thus have the power to
reveal, the uneven political and economic relations of capitalist production. In this way, waste
presents friction for the smooth operation of
capitalism across space (Gregson and Crang,
2010). Waste as fetish provides a counterpoint
to work that describes waste as simple commodity that is circulated through systems of
exchange. Gregson et al.s (2010) discussion
of ships, for example, makes it clear that the
urge to follow objects in the social sciences has
generally traced items up the value chain and
ignored how things come apart and deteriorate.
Further, they argue that even objects as durable
as this 30 year old ship, eventually start to come
apart, economically and physically, symbolically and socially. This means that the object
is but a temporary moment in an endless process of assembling materials, a partial stabilization and a fragile accomplishment that is always
inexorably becoming something else, somewhere else (p. 853). It becomes a limiting factor
to the continued economic growth necessary to
the perpetuation of capitalist relations. While this
view of waste shares much with new political
ecologies of nature and, as such, no longer views
the non-human (object) as distinctly separate
from human society (Braun, 2008), it sometimes
positions objects as products of previously existing economic processes. It is unclear, here, if and
how waste can avoid a spatial fix (Harvey, 2006)
that continues to distance and alienate it from
many sectors of society and render it inert as a
political object. Remedying problems with
waste, therefore, requires that political action
address[es] the broader forces that make waste
distancing a normal and accepted pattern of
everyday industrial life (Clapp, 2002: 159).

VI Quadrant IV
In this final quadrant is work that pays less
attention to a specific quality inherent to waste

itself, but that sees it as a constitutive element

in contemporary sociospatial relations and economic processes. Here, waste is the (often)
unvalued and indefinable other that is expelled
by society in order to shore up individual and
societal borders. This includes notions of waste
as governable object, waste as abject, and waste
as actant. Some of the work in this area has
much in common with the work of Douglas
(section IV), but the relationship between society and waste is less dualistic.

1 Waste as governable object

As briefly discussed in section III(5) many new
geographies of waste draw on Foucaults idea of
governmentality. While the examples in III(5)
use governmentality mostly to complement a
governance approach that does not, as its main
focus, interrogate how waste becomes an object
of management, work in quadrant 4 explores
this aspect more fully. It does so by focusing
more on the creation of waste as a governable
object, as part of a complex of things and people
through which the state operates, directly and
indirectly. Here, careful attention is brought to
the way that waste became a distinct object for
state management and means of controlling certain populations through scientific theories of
disease and contagion. This view of waste pays
less attention to the material properties of
things; rather, it focuses on how waste comes
to be understood and categorized.3 In doing so
it positions waste as constitutive of sociospatial
relations. The case for such a governmentality
approach to waste has been made by urban historians and planners who effectively argue that
waste imprints itself on the city, in part through
the urban services designed to manage it. In The
Sanitary City, Melosi (2000: 14) argues that service delivery often blends so invisibly into the
urban landscape; it is part of what we expect a
city to be. While allowing for the importance
of economic forces in processes of urbanization in the United States, Melosi emphasizes the

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need for infrastructure. Critically, appropriate

infrastructure to manage waste varies through
time, however, not only because of technological change, but because:
[s]anitary services . . . are linked inextricably to
prevailing public health and ecological theories and
practices, which have played a large part in the timing of their implementation and in determining
their form . . . In other words, public health theories, such as the miasmatic or filth theory and
the bacteriological theory of disease or ecological
ideas informed the decisions made about the type
and extent of sanitary service to be used. (Melosi,
2000: 1415)

Addressing specifically the issue of waste as a

governable object, Melosi (2000: 227) argues
that [r]efuse . . . came into the public consciousness significantly during the late nineteenth century and raised several uncomfortable questions
about health, aesthetics, and the quality of
urban life.
A different aspect of governmentality is
highlighted in History of Shit, where Dominique
Laporte (2000: 56) proclaims: Surely, the State
is the Sewer. He argues that the state as keeper
of the Freudian triad cleanliness, order, beauty
extends its power by institutionalizing sanitation and hygienic practices. The more complete
the institutionalization, the more totalitarian
the state. Waste, as governable object, helps to
create the power it becomes subject to. Gay
Hawkins draws heavily on Laporte and Foucault
for her argument about the politics of shit. Clarifying what she believes to be one of Foucaults
critical points about biopower, Hawkins argues:
For Foucault relations of bio-power depend not on
the mere removal and evasion of the negative, but
on its active exploitation . . . This historically specific labour of the negative initiated complex relations between said and unsaid, public and private,
pure and impure, and it was fundamental to the
organization of relations of bio-power. And just as
sex became subject to a multiplicity of discourses
and networks of power in the making of a modern
social body, so too did shit. (Hawkins, 2003: 43)

If waste historically becomes an object over and

through which state power operates, then the
extension of the sewer and other sanitary systems represents, not a teleological unfolding of
modern technologies, but rather the emergence
of certain power/knowledges that, however
imperfectly, discipline modern subjects and
produce modern spaces. The political
possibilities inherent in viewing waste this way
are based on a rejection of the metaphysics of
presence that argues that waste just is. The
category of waste itself can be deconstructed
and the institutional relationships that constitute and are constituted by it undermined by
finding different ways of understanding, using,
and valuing waste.

2 Waste as actant
In contrast to the above, researchers who focus
on waste as an actant largely reject a governmentality framework as too focused on epistemological concerns and ignorant of the
ontological status of the thing itself. In their
review article on waste and policy, Gregson and
Crang (2010) argue that waste can be viewed as a
hybrid in the Latourian sense. It operates its
influence through networking with human and
non-human others. Focusing on industrial
wastes, they argue that waste is a vital inorganic
actant in a thoroughly networked world. This
approach accounts for the material properties of
waste while eschewing, at least in part, the ontological stability of non-human others.
Gregson and Crang follow Bennett (2004:
349), who uses the term thing-power materialism to propose a speculative onto-story of
how the non-human flows around and through
humans. As part of an assemblage, waste in this
account becomes thoroughly constitutive of the
socionatural order including such important
geographic phenomena as scale (Bickerstaff
and Agyeman, 2009). As part of an immanent
plane of becomings, waste actively constructs
networks of agencement, shaping the material

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world and socionatural relations. As Gille

(2010: 1050) argues, here, waste itself its production, its consumption, its circulation, and
metamorphosis is constitutive of society. Proposing the term waste regime, Gille argues
that it is possible to maintain an analytical distinction between micro- and macro-levels,
while rejecting certain types of abstraction
that ignore the concrete characteristics of
waste. Rather than something that moves
across pre-existing spatial scales, then, waste
is, along with other actors, constitutive of
them. These dynamic regimes have three interrelated components that must be analysed:
production of waste; representation of waste;
and the politics of waste. Here, the politics of
waste comprises questions about the existence
and nature of public discourses about waste,
policy tools to deal with waste, the people
enrolled in dealing with waste, and the goals
of political instruments that define and manage the waste/non-waste divide. This broad
notion of the politics of waste implies a number of points of intervention at different levels
of practice and analysis.
Also drawing on Bennett, Jennifer Gabrys
(2009) conceptualizes waste as spill that
which exceeds the capacity of sinks to absorb
them. She further argues that such spills might
evoke disruptive geographies with political
implications: Spilling over, rather than cleaning up, is a figure that is as much political as
it is ecological (Gabrys, 2009: 680). Waste
can escape and exceed, not just our categories
for it, but also the physical limits and boundaries imposed on it, and is given capacity to act
on society in interesting and surprising ways.4

3 Waste as abject
The third concept in quadrant 4, waste as
abject, is also concerned with the boundaries,
both created and exceeded by waste. Waste
here is thoroughly constitutive of subjects
who must expel it in order to survive. Waste

as abject posits waste as something that is

expelled from the social body in order to
shore up the boundaries that divide that
which belongs from that which does not.
Drawn from the work of Julia Kristeva, waste
as abject does not have any necessary, positive meaning as the abject has only one
quality of the object that of being opposed
to the I (Kristeva, 1982: 1).
The abject is created not through identification, but rather through its always incomplete
exclusion. It therefore threatens ones own and
clean self, which is the underpinning of any
organization constituted by exclusions and
hierarchies (Kristeva, 1982: 65). The abject,
in other words, is the result of the weakness
of the prohibition necessary to constitute the
social order (p. 64). The relationship between
pure and impure here differs from Douglass
formulation in that, rather than resulting from
or merely perpetuating symbolic orders that
differentiate acceptable and unacceptable persons and practices, it is constitutive of them.
Waste as the abject has no essential characteristic, but creates society through its expulsion
(Scanlan, 2005).
In human geography, there has been an
effort to use the concept of abjection to explain
social processes (Popke, 2001; Sibley, 1995).
For example, in Geographies of Exclusion,
Sibley (1995) argues that the exclusionary practices that seek to establish the (always porous)
boundaries between clean and dirty (self and
other) often reinforce the physical marginalization of some groups from urban space as with
the ragpickers of Paris. In the case of waste as
abject, processes of expelling wasted objects,
places, and people are essential to the production of modern spaces and citizens (Moore,
2008, 2009). Because abjection is always
incomplete, waste constantly threatens to destabilize sanitary spaces and subjects. This opens
the possibility for a politics of manifestation
(Moore, 2008) where the public secret of waste
is fully exposed.

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VII Conclusion: waste material,

disturbance and politics
In this article, I have mapped the ways that new
geographies of waste are proliferating within
the social sciences by tracing the literature
through more and less developed avenues of
inquiry. My main goal was to highlight some
of the convergences and divergences of the concepts used in social science work on waste in
terms of their value for understanding and
enacting politics around waste. These were
emphasized through reference to Figure 1,
which illustrates heuristically how each concept
defines what waste is (the axis positivity-negativity) and why, how, and to whom it matters
(dualist-relational). By cutting through the
literature in this manner I have framed these
concepts in terms of two questions core to
debates over the political potential of the material in social science: first, can objects be
defined positively or negatively; and, second,
do certain social processes pre-exist objects and
subjects or do objects and subjects, together,
help to constitute society and space (cf. Braun
and Whatmore, 2010; Gregson and Crang,
2010; Latham and McCormack, 2004)? By plotting conceptualizations of waste along these
axes, I highlighted the ways that different views
of what waste is, as material, are productive of
many forms of scholarship that have the potential to disturb certain taken-for-granted ideas
about value, politics, and the sociospatial order
more generally.
I proposed in the first section that waste
might be thought of as parallax object as
something that disturbs the smooth running of
things. Whether viewed as hazard or risk, fetish
or commodity, abject or affect, waste, therefore,
evokes conversations about development, justice, sustainability, and progress. It offers opportunities for scholars to engage in being political
by undermining the modern shibboleths of cleanliness, order, sanitation, and hygiene integral to
many exclusionary sociospatial arrangements.

I view the concepts discussed as largely complementary in their attention to the kinds of politics
historically enabled by keeping waste out of site,
enforcing order, and the implementation of sanitation and hygienization policies globally. Further, because work on waste in geography and
social science, based on all of these concepts, is
growing, I think it is less useful to identify a best
or preferred trajectory than to highlight the work
that each concept can do.
Synthesis or reduction of these concepts is
less productive than revelling in the parallax
gap between concepts of waste where opportunities to disturb the smooth running of things
abound. Revelling in this gap calls for continued
intra- and interdisciplinary engagement that
takes as its starting point not a specific concept
or definition of waste, but rather the way that
this parallax object escapes and exceeds any one
perspective. While such efforts are sometimes
hindered by (sub)disciplinary concerns and
training, as well as institutional interests, taking
seriously how waste constitutes researchers
desires for less exclusionary (and polluting)
sociospatial orders despite methodological,
epistemological, and even ontological divides
is a crucial starting point for collaboration.
Garbage is, then, not only the poem of our time,
but also an exemplary object through which to
forge cooperative research, because, after all,
what else deflects us from the errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation to trashlessness,
that is too far off and, anyway, unimaginable,
unrealistic (Ammons, 1993).
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or notfor-profit sectors.

Notes
1. This should not be considered a normative distinction
between waste as good and waste as bad. Rather, it is a
distinction between concepts that rely on specific (inherent) characteristics in waste versus those that do not.

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2. Such logic is also found in statements by the United

States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA)
who argues that one reason to export hazardous waste
is that, in some cases, hazardous wastes constitute
raw material inputs into industrial and manufacturing processes. This is the case in many developing
countries where natural resources are scarce or nonexistent (US EPA, 1998).
3. The United Nations defines MSW as waste originating
from: households, commerce and trade, small businesses, office buildings and institutions (schools, hospitals, government buildings). This includes bulky
waste (e.g. white goods, old furniture, mattresses) and
waste from selected municipal services, e.g. waste from
park and garden maintenance, waste from street cleaning services (street sweepings, the content of litter containers, market cleansing waste), if managed as waste
(UN, 2009a). This definition highlights the importance
of the social context in deciding what is and what is not
garbage: waste is what is managed as waste. Hazardous
waste, in contrast, can be broadly defined as waste that,
owing to its toxic, infectious, radioactive or flammable
properties poses an actual or potential hazard to the
health of humans, other living organisms, or the environment (UN, 2009b). This is also a broad definition, and
one that leaves much room for debate over what should
and should not be regulated as hazardous waste. For that
reason, most waste must be listed in specific annexes
according to national or international laws and agreements to be regulated as hazardous waste.
4. Here, though, I share Brauns worry over a new
romance of matter in the new vitalism where we are
constantly told that objects are ontologically unstable
without learning much about how organization occurs
(Braun, (2008).

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