Progress in Human Geography Garbage matters: Concepts ª ... · contextualize scholarship on waste within the broader discussion about the ‘rematerialization’ of geography and

Article

Garbage matters: Conceptsin new geographies of waste

Sarah A. MooreUniversity of Arizona, USA

AbstractIn this article, I critically review important concepts in new geographies of waste. I focus on both theconceptual frameworks that are used to examine issues concerning waste and the political possibilitiesproduced 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 – Icontextualize scholarship on waste within the broader discussion about the ‘rematerialization’ of geographyand social science. Understanding when, how, and why waste matters provides a fruitful lens for examiningcontemporary sociospatial processes.

Keywordsenvironment, garbage, materiality, nature society, waste

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)

So who or what is tickling the ticklish subject? The

answer, of course, is the object – however, which

object? (Zizek, 2006: 17)

Over the last decade, geographers studyingwaste have contributed to the emergence of asubstantive field in the social sciences. A grow-ing focus on waste in academic circuits coin-cides with new geographies of waste: a billion

dollar industry in hazardous waste trade;expanding interests in and uses of alternativepractices of waste management; large-scaledevelopment institutions’ investment in waste-related infrastructure in the developing world;increasing subnational transfers of municipalsolid waste; and growing piles of e-waste over-whelming local dumpsites, to name a few. Asmuch as people and places are connected byflows of commodities and goods, they are alsounited by flows of waste and remainders (Moore,2011). In this sense, garbage might indeed be ‘thepoem of our time’ (Ammons, 1993).

Perhaps because of this, waste has increas-ingly been used by researchers as a lens toexplore environmental politics (Gandy, 1994,

Corresponding author:University of Arizona, Harvill Box 2, Tucson, AZ 85721,USAEmail: [email protected]

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2002), urban history (Melosi, 1993, 2000;Miller, 2000; Sterner, 2008), social behavior(Barr et al., 2001; Strasser, 1999), social move-ments (Cresswell, 1996), capitalism (Clapp,2002; Gregson and Crang, 2010), modernity(Moore, 2009), risk (Bickerstaff and Simmons,2009), regulation (O’Neill, 2000), and govern-ance (Bulkeley and Askins, 2009; Davies,2008). These somewhat disparate literaturesdraw 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 interro-gate what waste is and how, why and to whom itmatters (Gregson and Crang, 2010). Such ques-tions, I argue, are central to recent attempts tothink through the political potentials of ‘morethan human geographies’ by examining, defin-ing, and animating the material. If, as GarthMyers claims, there is nothing more materialthan garbage, then the new geographies of wasteare well-positioned to contribute to theseefforts. Scholars of waste, after all, have alwaysbeen interested in the material – whether matterand materialism were construed as the ‘thing-ness’ of garbage, shit, or toxic waste (given orconstructed), the daily realities of managing orliving with waste, or the social relations andpolitical-economic processes concealed orrevealed in the waste itself. Rather, however,than proposing one concept or a synthesis ofseveral concepts as the resolution to the problemof understanding how, when, and to what endsmatter and the material are politically effective,I propose that, as an object of study, waste itselfmight best be thought of as a parallax object:‘that which objects, that which disturbs thesmooth running of things’ (Zizek, 2006: 17).The concepts deployed in new geographies ofwaste thus (at least implicitly) provide whatZizek 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 whichdisturbs or disrupts sociospatial norms. In orderto demonstrate the myriad ways that waste dis-turbs, I therefore abstract the concepts fromtheir roles as lenses in particular subfields, andfocus instead on how each concept relates to twoquestions: how is waste defined (as a positivityor negativity) and how is waste related to soci-ety (in a dualist or relational way; see Figure 1).

I further argue that the disturbances causedby waste and other such parallax objects mightprovide opportunities for what Isin calls‘[b]eing political’ – those ‘moment[s] when thenaturalness of the dominant virtues is called intoquestion and their arbitrariness revealed’ (Isin,2002: 275). Throughout the paper, therefore,I highlight the ways that attempts to understandwaste from multiple vantages are fruitful ave-nues for a politics of things (cf. Braun andWhatmore, 2010) that interrogates the moder-nist shibboleths of cleanliness, hygiene, andsanitation, and the often unjust and highlyexclusionary sociospatial orders producedthrough them (cf. Isin, 2002; Sibley, 1995;Stallybrass and White, 1986).

II Plotting conceptualizations ofwasteIn order to discuss how waste is conceptualized,I plot emerging literature on waste along twoaxes (Figure 1). The first axis (positivity-nega-tivity1) refers to the degree to which a givenapproach to waste argues for a specific natureor character of waste that is important. Is therean essential quality of waste itself (a positivity)that matters to how it is valued or devalued andin constraining or opening up its political poten-tial? On the one side – positivity – waste isimbued with meaning that may or may not bepregiven, but is located largely within the objectitself. In these conceptualizations, waste is oftenassumed to be a hazard (to environmental andpublic health) or a remainder of prior social,political, and economic processes. Concepts

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on this side of the axis, therefore, objectify andessentialize waste, though to varying degrees, asindicated by their relative position within eachquadrant. On the other side of the axis – negativ-ity – the meaning and value of waste are largelyindeterminable and escape or exceed easy cate-gorization. Concepts of waste that emphasizeits social, cultural, and spatial relativity arelocated on this side of the axis. The value ofwaste for thought and its political potentialon this side of the axis lies in the mobility of theconcept itself.

The second axis, that of dualist-relational,describes the degree to which waste is defined

as separate from society. All of the literaturesdiscussed are interested in relationshipsbetween waste and society in one way oranother. Following work in nature-societyrelations (cf. Braun, 2008; Castree, 2003), Itherefore use the term dualist to denote concep-tualizations that explicitly or implicitly definewaste and society as separate spheres that acton or encounter one another in myriad ways. Forexample, waste is often posited as an externalityof certain sociospatial processes (particularlyproduction and consumption) that must be man-aged by society. On the other hand, relational,rather than dualist, concepts focus on mutually

Hazard

ResourceCommodity

ArchivePOSITIVE NEGATIVE

RELATIONAL

DUALIST

Manageable Object

FetishGovernable Object

Filth

RiskVital Actant

Abject

Out of Place

Disorder

I II

III IV

Figure 1. This is a schematic that highlights emerging literature on waste along two axes. The first axis (posi-tivity-negativity) refers to the degree to which a given approach to waste argues for a specific nature or char-acter 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 ratheras something that defies easy categorization. The second axis (dualist-relational) describes the degree towhich waste is defined as something that is separate from society. Concepts that fall above the axis tendto portray waste and somewhat distinct entities that come into contact with one another through socio-spatial processes. Concepts that fall below the axis view waste and society as mutually constitutive.

782 Progress in Human Geography 36(6)

constitutive, immanent, and emergent encountersbetween people and things.

At issue here are two basic questions aboutspace, things, people and their relatings. (1)Can objects be defined positively – by essen-tial characteristics inherent to them – or nega-tively – only in opposition to something else? (2)Do certain social processes pre-exist objects andsubjects or do objects and subjects, together, helpto constitute society and space (cf. Braun andWhatmore, 2010; Gregson and Crang, 2010;Latham and McCormack, 2004)? My purpose individing the literature along these two questionsis neither to provide a coherent definition orconcept of waste that all scholars should use(an unproductive exercise at any rate) nor toendorse one approach over another, but ratherto highlight how various and sometimes com-peting explicit and implicit notions of wasteunderlie attempts to revalue and reassess thepolitical potential of waste as a material partof everyday life.

While specific concepts are plotted and asso-ciated in the text with individual authors andarticles, it should be noted that many scholarsemploy more than one concept or frameworkin their research. Further, as is true in muchsocial science research, many of the authors dis-cussed are reflecting the views and opinions ofresearch subjects and their use of multiple con-cepts (e.g. Davies and O’Callaghan-Platt, 2008;Lepawsky and McNabb, 2010). Additionally,the concepts are unevenly divided among thequadrants, representing more and less devel-oped avenues of inquiry. The placement of eachconcept is a critical interpretive act on my partand my primary interest is not to emphasizethe fixed coordinates, but rather to highlight theconfluences, juxtapositions, and divergencesposed within the continuous knot of work thatdeploys these concepts. While this analyticalcut through the literature, then, necessarilydivides what in practice is indivisible, my hopeis that it does so in a productive way, as I believethat the myriad concepts deployed highlight the

richness, variation, and sheer volume of criticalinvestigations of waste and provide a model forthinking about the political potentials inherentin a geography of ‘things’.

III Conceptualizations inquadrant IIn quadrant I (Positivity/Dualist) is work that,on the whole, identifies waste as having a specificcharacteristic that defines it and as somethingthat is largely external to society. The preponder-ance of research on waste in geography hasexisted in quadrant 1 where waste is alternativelyviewed as ‘hazard’, ‘commodity’, ‘resource’,‘object of management’, or ‘archive’.

1 Waste as hazardGeographers and others have long been inter-ested in remedying the unjust distribution ofenvironmental and public health hazardsthroughout society by addressing the unevendisposal of hazardous and/or toxic materials,including human and animal waste, in low-income or minority neighborhoods (Bowenet al., 1995; Bullard, 1993; Jewitt, 2011) and thehistorical sociospatial processes that producemarginalized populations and that create andunevenly 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 ofwaste as hazard as a point of departure (e.g.Bjelland, 2006; Bourne, 2008; Buckinghamet al., 2005; Cutter and Solecki, 1996; Higgsand 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 positionswaste as a lens for studying the uneven inter-and intranational distributions of waste disposalfacilities and social movements, gender andracial politics, discourses of distributional

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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 asenvironmental pollution and habitat destruction(Holifield, 2009; Njeru, 2006). The political andregulatory successes of the environmental jus-tice movement in the United States speak to thesalience of this notion of waste in some, but notall, national contexts (Davies, 2006; Gottlieb,1993; Szasz, 1994).

Waste as hazard, therefore, focuses researchon ethical questions of the just distribution oftoxic materials throughout society and demandsintervention in terms of increased regulation ofthe disposal and production of such materials.Because there is at least an implicit concernwith the local effects of extra-local processes,the issue of scale arises, both for analysis and foractivism around environmental justice (cf.Kurtz, 2003; Towers, 2000; William, 1999).Scale becomes an obstacle to organizing oppo-sition to unjust distributions of waste, the pro-duction and disposal of which is often decidedoutside of local arenas. Indeed, as Bickerstaffand Agyeman (2009) note, for some authors the‘very concept of environmental injustice preci-pitates a politics of scale – since locally experi-enced sources of pollution are inevitably rootedin political-economic relations and processesdistributed across far-reaching spatial net-works’ (p. 784). In these cases, then, waste islargely external to the central processes thatconstitute society (political, spatial/scalar, cul-tural, economic). For some scholars, this dual-ist construction runs the risk of ‘overlayingsocial analyses on top of physical sciences,whilst preserving their domains of knowledge’(Gregson and Crang, 2010: 1027). On the otherhand, as Gregson and Crang argue, such workoften also addresses the specific noxious

qualities of substances, and therefore ‘bringsback the material properties of different formsof waste’ (p. 1027).

2 Waste as resourceReframing waste as a resource addresses part ofwhat is missed by thinking solely of waste ashazard. Waste as resource provides a view intosuch phenomena as: the impacts of formal recy-cling on the efficiency and sustainability ofmunicipal solid waste management (Chowdh-ury, 2009; Tsai, 2008); the behavioral determi-nants 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 materialsas a survival or livelihood strategy (Fahmi andSutton, 2006; Hayami et al., 2006; Huysman,1994; Jarman, 1997; Moreno-Sanchez and Mal-donado, 2006; Rouse, 2006); cooperative orother organizational formations among scaven-gers (Castillo Berthier, 1990, 2003; Dall’Ag-nol and Fernandes, 2007; Nzeadibe, 2009);the integration of informal recycling systemswith formal waste management (Gutberlet,2008; Ngo, 2001; Sicular, 1992); and the usesof animal and/or human waste as a fertilizer(Harris, 1998; Janssen and Oenema, 2008;Matless, 2001). These disparate literatureshave in common an emphasis on the myriadways that disposed items can be recovered byre-entering formal cycles of economic produc-tion or reused in informal systems.

In Recovering Resources – Recycling Citi-zenship: Urban Poverty Reduction in LatinAmerica, for example, Jutta Gutberlet (2008)demonstrates the necessity of reconceptualizingwaste as a resource and the implications of sucha reconceptualization for understanding urbandevelopment in poor metropolitan areas of Bra-zil. While waste scavengers make significantcontributions to the economies of such areas,the informal settlements in which many of thescavengers live are affected by the negative


health and environmental consequences ofindustrial society. Valuing waste as a resource,Gutberlet argues, can limit the marginalizationof people who make their livelihoods throughinformally collecting it, while reforming wastemanagement in terms of efficiency andenvironmental responsibility. For many scholarsinterested in scavenging and recycling, oneimportant issue is to redeem the value of waste,either by reintegrating it with the production sys-tem somehow, or by recognizing the use value ofcertain objects. Work in formal recycling oftenfocuses on the important issue of how to achieveenvironmental sustainability by using recycledmaterials as production inputs; research onscavenging and informal recycling, on the otherhand, tends to emphasize redemption of wastedobjects and labor power through formalization.While these constructions of waste sometimescentre the economic as the dominant and mostimportant generator of value (both of objects andof holders of labor power), viewing waste asresource also allows researchers to ‘demonstratethe material and social consequences of one typeof waste material metamorphosing into anotheras it traverses the circuits of production, distribu-tion, consumption, reclamation, and ’annihila-tion’’ (Gille, 2010: 1050). In an investigation ofthe international trade in electronic waste (e-waste), for example, Lepawsky and McNabb(2010) argue that ‘e-waste qua waste does notalways represent the extinguishing of value’ andthat such materials do not follow a ‘one-waytransformation of value-to-waste along a linearchain 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 valuethrough an international division of labor where

geography ‘plays a determining role’ in thetransformation of what is waste in one placeinto what is value elsewhere (p. 190). Such workis distinguished by the way that labor aroundthe object ‘is constitutive of broader social geo-graphies of belonging and marginalization’(p. 190). Understanding such processes, there-fore, is key to a politics of inclusion.

3 Waste as (non-Marxian) commodityIn contrast to the concepts above, the notion ofwaste as a commodity provides understandingsof the patterns and processes involved in tradingwaste (both hazardous and solid), particularlybetween nations (O’Neill, 2000). Much workin this area is concerned with waste as a hazardto public and environmental health, but it alsopositions waste as a good to be traded and/orregulated through market mechanisms. In suchwork, waste is given value by its re-entry intothe processes of production and through circuitsof exchange (cf. Berglund and Soderholm,2003; van Beukering and Bouman, 2001). Here,the logics of international environmental eco-nomics sometimes prevails; suggesting that ina ‘first-best’ world of equal trade relationships,international trade in hazardous waste could bebeneficial to all countries involved (Rauscher,2005).2 The large and growing amount ofe-waste being traded is a particular concern fornew geographies of waste as a commodity (Shin-kuma and Huong, 2009; Shinkuma and Managi,2010).

While they have different foci, work thatposits waste as a simple commodity that canbe exchanged to create wealth and economicgrowth in and among countries has some simila-rities with work that constructs waste asresource. In these accounts waste is often posi-tively identified as a hazard, but is also con-ceived as a commodity with a market value,which provides incentives for the developmentof a multi-billion-dollar industry in waste trade.For geographers and others critical of the

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dominance of market logics and the unevenflows of waste they might produce, the primarypolitical tool to address potential problemswith the distribution of hazardous materials isregulation at the local, national, and interna-tional levels (Ibitz, 2009; O’Neill, 2000; Sonaket al., 2008).

4 Waste as manageable objectOther scholars conceptualize waste as anobject to be managed and governed at differentscales. This is apparent in work that discussesvarious facets of municipal solid waste manage-ment (MSWM) in megacities (Ehlers, 2009;Kopfmuller et al., 2009), in comparative cases(Zhang et al., 2010), in EU New Member Stateslike Greece (Lasaridi, 2009), and in the contextof new regulations such as producer responsibil-ity (Deutz, 2009). Questions that arise from thisview of waste often involve the implications ofwaste management for urban sustainability(Ehlers, 2009; Kopfmuller et al., 2009), theeffects of supra-local regulation on municipalwaste management, issues of privatization(Samson, 2010), the efficacy of community-based waste management (CBWM) (Pariseauet al., 2006, 2008) and, in more recent work,(urban) governance (Bhuiyan, 2010; Boyle,2003; Bulkeley et al., 2007; Davies, 2009; Daviesand O’Callaghan-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 interactionsbetween state and non-state actors that producepolicies and influence the sociospatial extentof formal and informal waste managementsystems. Bulkeley et al. (2007), for example,propose an approach that highlights variousmodes of governance around the collection,transportation, and disposal of waste. Here,depending on various rationalities and strategiesof governance, there are alternative ways ofmanaging waste which imply more or less

community and/or state control. Rather thanfocus on barriers to inter- and intrastate cooper-ation in municipal solid waste management,then, Bulkeley et al. propose the idea of ‘modesof governance’ as ‘an alternative analyticalperspective . . . through which to explore thedynamic sociotechnical contexts within whichthe policies and practices of municipal waste arebeing shaped’ (Bulkeley et al., 2007: 2752).

Anna Davies, in The Geographies ofGarbage Governance (2008), also informs hercomparative account of waste management inNew Zealand and Ireland with a governanceapproach that she argues highlights ‘the institu-tions, structures and actors involved in theprocess of governing’ (p. 36). Similarly, GarthMyers uses a comparative governance approachto study sustainable development in Dar esSalaam, Lusaka, and Zanzibar. This comparisonallows him to argue that there is no necessarytrajectory toward either inclusive governanceor more efficient garbage management in theseplaces (Myers, 2005).

As Gregson and Crang argue (2010), whileBulkeley et al., Davies, and other scholars ofwaste management draw on Foucault’s notionof governmentality (see also section VI(1)below), the focus in each of these cases is ongovernance and waste management: waste assuch is not interrogated, but rather a givenobject of municipal management. In this way,waste tends to be construed positively as anunexamined remainder – an object that existsin space – and that is somewhat external to soci-ety. As a manageable object, waste is open totechnical and, in the case of some governanceliterature, institutional solutions.

5 Waste as archiveIn contrast to the above, waste as archive is asource of knowledge about contemporary geo-graphies of production, consumption, and wastemanagement practices. To garbologists, likeRathje and Murphy (2001: 4), landfills are


‘lodes of information that may, when mined andinterpreted, produce valuable insights – insightsnot into the nature of some past society, ofcourse, but into the nature of our own’.

Garbage, refuse, and waste, in this case, arepositively identified as the remainders of every-day life, as artifacts of material culture thatreveal specific social and cultural behaviorsthrough their presence or absence. These poten-tialities of waste are extended by the work ofPatricia Yaeger, who draws on 20th-centuryAmerican fiction to argue that trash can becomean ‘archive or instrument of historical reinscrip-tion’, particularly for marginalized groups need-ing to recoup social presence (Yaeger, 2003:109). Here discarded objects are poignant remin-ders of the previously existing social relationsfrom which they were expelled. In other words,‘history is no longer a trash heap we are tryingto escape, but a trash heap that reeks: a mess witha message’ (p. 114). Thus, waste is a record ofprevious and contemporary social relationshipsand carries a message that society should heed.Wasted objects tell stories about contemporaryculture from the margins, the left behind.

Conceptualizing waste as either artifact orarchive highlights the value of waste for illumi-nating both marginalized histories and the contra-dictions of contemporary consumer culture. Thedistinctions made in garbology, between mentaland material realities, cultural forms and thematerial record, make waste largely external tosociety, as remainder, reminder, and cautionarytale (cf. section V(1) below). While waste herehas the potential to reveal the contradictions ofconsumer society, the political implications ofthis ‘revealing’ are unclear. As an external remin-der of wasteful consumer practices and exclusion-ary social processes, could not waste simply beonce again displaced, removed, forgotten?

IV Concepts in quadrant IIWhile the preponderance of work on waste ingeography and other social sciences has

traditionally identified waste positively, partic-ularly as hazard, resource or commodity, otherconcepts of waste are emerging as shown inFigure 1. Examples of this are found in quadrant2 where conceptualizations of waste leantoward negative definitions of waste, but, likethose ideas in quadrant 1, also view waste aslargely external to society. Here, waste is notgiven any specific meaning based on a physicalcharacteristic internal to the object itself, but isdefined by its inability to be categorized neatly.Waste is depicted as ‘out of place’ or ‘disorder’following Mary Douglas’s (2004) famousformulation. While there are only two basicconcepts listed in this quadrant, both are impor-tant to new geographies of waste, particularlyas they relate to questions of power and identityas they are mapped onto certain spaces and bod-ies (Hawkins, 2006; Riley, 2008).

1 Waste as disorder and matter out of placeMany scholars interested in the relationshipbetween waste management, development, andthe history of colonialism have drawn on theconcept of waste as ‘out of place’, in conjunc-tion with Cresswell’s notion of transgression(Cresswell, 1996), to argue that notions of wastehave played an important part in excludingcertain groups of people from specific social,political, and physical spaces (Hill, 2006;Moore, 2009; Sundberg, 2008). For example,Juanita Sundberg argues that remnants left byundocumented migrants on the border betweenArizona and Mexico produce evidence ofborder-crossers as ‘out of place’ litterers whocan be clearly distinguished from legitimateAmericans. In examining debates over the ‘bor-der environment’ produced by NAFTA, SarahHill also uses Douglas’s observations about dirtand disorder to argue that ‘what the media pre-sented along the USA-Mexico border during1991–1994 was an extreme portrait of ‘‘‘matterout of place’’ implicitly borne by the movementof people out of place: Mexican immigrants’

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(Hill, 2006: 779). She goes on to explain that,while many United States citizens fearedindustrial pollution specifically, ‘it is impossi-ble to dismiss the associations drawn betweenself-soiling Mexicans, mired in their ownexcrement, and the larger projection of theexpanding border, seeping like a swamped sep-tic system’s drainage field across the greaterAmerican landscape’ (p. 793).

In another context, Hetherington builds onDouglas’s description of waste as matter outof place to analyse disposal and draw attention‘to the spatiality of disorder and the subsequentordering acts that aim to correct disorder’(Hetherington, 2004: 162). Rather than beingabout waste, per se, disposal is about placingand is therefore a fundamentally spatial prac-tice. As such, the process of disposing of wastebecomes ‘thoroughly constitutive of social andindeed ethical activity’ (p. 158).

Also concerned with issues of disposal, Riley(2008: 80), following Douglas, argues that‘[p]ositioning waste (matter out of place) asdangerous and threatening can be seen as centralto both contemporary and wartime recyclingefforts’. In comparing contemporary recyclingprojects in the UK with those in place during theSecond World War, Riley uses Douglas’s inter-pretation of waste as matter out of place tohighlight the commonalities and differences incrisis narratives surrounding waste. Three mainpoints of crisis are discussed, all of which havein common a limit on the symbolic and physicalelimination of waste: (1) landfills that play therole of hiding waste from society become pointsof contention through their secondary effects(methane gas production that contributes to glo-bal warming, for example); (2) contests overwaste disposal siting highlight a problematicproximity to waste for certain communities,both physically and metaphorically; and (3)landfill siting becomes increasingly proble-matic 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 insociety. Because dirt, waste, and other sourcesof pollution are culturally determined and iden-tified by their tendency to transgress categories,they prompt strong social sanctions that excludecertain practices and groups of people deemedas unclean, to produce sociospatial order. Here,then, waste is a fundamentally geographicalproblem (Engler, 2004; Hetherington, 2004).

This notion of waste as out of place makesit potentially transgressive and disruptive. Ifwaste is ‘out of place’, it challenges the norma-tive assumption that it should be out of sight andraises concerns about the usual practices of dis-tancing it from particular places (Moore, 2008).While such work makes it clear that waste asmatter out of place could have the politicalpotential to challenge existing social orders, itoften relies on an implicit separation betweensociety and objects. In Douglas’s work, thereliance on the realm of the symbolic and its(sometimes muddied) opposition to the real(Hetherington, 2004), separates signifying prac-tices (the purview of society) from materialcharacteristics of objects seen to merely existhere or there. For many scholars interested inwaste, such as those discussed in section Vbelow, this misses the ‘real stuff of waste’(Gregson and Crang, 2010).

V Quadrant 3Concepts of waste that propose a more or lessessential character of waste that is internallyrelated to society are located in quadrant 3. Thisincludes work that proposes waste as filthy, dis-gusting material whose affective qualities makeit imperative that it be removed from sight/smell.For many authors, this need to get rid of waste isgenerative of social practice and space.

1 Waste as filthAs Hawkins and Muecke argue, ‘waste cantouch the most visceral registers of the self – itcan trigger responses and affects that remind


us of the body’s intensities and multiplicities’(Hawkins and Muecke, 2003: xiv). Here, thesignificance of waste often lies in its inherentlyrepugnant nature. It is positively identified asfilthy, disgusting matter that has the ability tomove people to act.

Hawkins explores this further in an essay onshit and the politics of drains (see also sectionVI(1) below):

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 judg-

ments. 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 treat-

ment works’? . . . Is that what the triumph of sanita-

tion means, the hint of shit in a gentle coastal

breeze? (Hawkins, 2003: 40)

Waste, in this account, is imbued with anddefined by the profound ability to disgust andto enrol other social actors in its elimination,giving it an important role in the constitutionof society and space. The disgust and revulsionprovoked by waste become powerful politicalforces: ‘This is the political possibility of affectas a response where different becomings mightemerge – without such responses there can beno ethics of responsibility’ (Hawkins andMuecke, 2003: xiv).

2 Waste as riskWhile waste as hazard (section III(1) above)posits waste as external to society and full ofmeaning, waste as risk nuances this by emphasiz-ing the cultural and historical specificity ofrisks and people’s responses to them (Bickerstaffand Simmons, 2009; cf. Chilvers, 2008; Davis,2005; Murray, 2009). A primary focus ofinvestigation in work on waste as risk is the rela-tionship between objects, technology, expertknowledge, and local understandings (Eden etal., 2006; Wakefield and Elliott, 2003). Accord-ingly, there is an attendant focus on risk

management on the part of local planners aswell as state and national agencies (Baxter andGreenlaw, 2005; Holifield, 2004; Wolsink andDevilee, 2009). There is also an emphasis on theperceptions of risks posed by waste to differentpopulations, producing what Parkhill et al.(2009: 40) call a ‘dilemmatic view of risk: bothas an ontologically manifest threat and as shapedby culture and social experience’.

Waste as risk has in common with waste ashazard an emphasis on danger and toxicity, butbecause of its focus on ‘socially constructed andproduced ‘‘quasi-subjects’’’ or on waste as a‘powerful uncontrollable ‘‘actor’’ that delegiti-mates and destabilizes state institutions withresponsibilities for pollution control, in particu-lar, and public safety, in general’ (Beck, 1999:150), it posits a more emergent relationshipbetween society and waste. Waste as risk alsofocuses less attention than ‘waste as filth’ on thephysical reaction that one might have to wasteand instead, focuses on the processes of moderni-zation through which society has created a num-ber of quasi-objects beyond its technological andpolitical control. This, in turn, causes a crisis oflegitimacy for the institutions expected to controlthese environmental bads. As garbage and otherrisks go rogue, they present the capacity to under-mine existing political and management institu-tions and their related sociospatial orders.

3 Waste as fetishThere is a growing literature on consumptionthat examines waste as the intersection of thehousehold and the public economies (Bulkeleyand Askins, 2009; Bulkeley and Gregson,2009; Gregson, 2009; Lane et al., 2009). Thisresearch often begins with the fundamentalnotion that waste is a fetishized commodity;it has a use and exchange value, but it alsoobscures the social relationships behind itsproduction and circulation. As fetish, wasteembodies the social relations of its production,but obscures these as it becomes an object

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through which surplus value circulates. To thinkof waste as fetish is to propose that wastedobjects contain, and thus have the power toreveal, the uneven political and economic rela-tions of capitalist production. In this way, wastepresents friction for the smooth operation ofcapitalism across space (Gregson and Crang,2010). Waste as fetish provides a counterpointto work that describes waste as simple commod-ity that is circulated through systems ofexchange. Gregson et al.’s (2010) discussionof ships, for example, makes it clear that theurge to follow objects in the social sciences hasgenerally traced items up the value chain andignored how things come apart and deteriorate.Further, they argue that ‘even objects as durableas this 30 year old ship, eventually start to comeapart, economically and physically, symboli-cally and socially’. This means that the objectis ‘but a temporary moment in an endless pro-cess of assembling materials, a partial stabiliza-tion and a fragile accomplishment that is alwaysinexorably becoming something else, some-where else’ (p. 853). It becomes a limiting factorto the continued economic growth necessary tothe perpetuation of capitalist relations. While thisview of waste shares much with new politicalecologies of nature and, as such, no longer viewsthe non-human (object) as distinctly separatefrom human society (Braun, 2008), it sometimespositions objects as products of previously exist-ing economic processes. It is unclear, here, if andhow waste can avoid a spatial fix (Harvey, 2006)that continues to distance and alienate it frommany sectors of society and render it inert as apolitical object. Remedying problems withwaste, therefore, requires that political action‘address[es] the broader forces that make wastedistancing a normal and accepted pattern ofeveryday industrial life’ (Clapp, 2002: 159).

VI Quadrant IVIn this final quadrant is work that pays lessattention to a specific quality inherent to waste

itself, but that sees it as a constitutive elementin contemporary sociospatial relations and eco-nomic processes. Here, waste is the (often)unvalued and indefinable other that is expelledby society in order to shore up individual andsocietal borders. This includes notions of wasteas governable object, waste as abject, and wasteas actant. Some of the work in this area hasmuch in common with the work of Douglas(section IV), but the relationship between soci-ety and waste is less dualistic.

1 Waste as governable objectAs briefly discussed in section III(5) many newgeographies of waste draw on Foucault’s idea ofgovernmentality. While the examples in III(5)use governmentality mostly to complement agovernance approach that does not, as its mainfocus, interrogate how waste becomes an objectof management, work in quadrant 4 exploresthis aspect more fully. It does so by focusingmore on the creation of waste as a governableobject, as part of a complex of things and peoplethrough which the state operates, directly andindirectly. Here, careful attention is brought tothe way that waste became a distinct object forstate management and means of controlling cer-tain populations through scientific theories ofdisease and contagion. This view of waste paysless attention to the material properties ofthings; rather, it focuses on how waste comesto be understood and categorized.3 In doing soit positions waste as constitutive of sociospatialrelations. The case for such a governmentalityapproach to waste has been made by urban his-torians and planners who effectively argue thatwaste imprints itself on the city, in part throughthe urban services designed to manage it. In TheSanitary City, Melosi (2000: 14) argues that ser-vice delivery ‘often blends so invisibly into theurban landscape; it is part of what we expect acity to be’. While allowing for the importanceof ‘economic forces’ in processes of urbaniza-tion in the United States, Melosi emphasizes the


need for infrastructure. Critically, appropriateinfrastructure to manage waste varies throughtime, however, not only because of technologi-cal 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 tim-

ing of their implementation and in determining

their form . . . In other words, public health the-

ories, 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: 14–15)

Addressing specifically the issue of waste as agovernable object, Melosi (2000: 227) arguesthat ‘[r]efuse . . . came into the public conscious-ness significantly during the late nineteenth cen-tury and raised several uncomfortable questionsabout health, aesthetics, and the quality ofurban life’.

A different aspect of governmentality ishighlighted in History of Shit, where DominiqueLaporte (2000: 56) proclaims: ‘Surely, the Stateis the Sewer’. He argues that the state as keeperof the Freudian triad ‘cleanliness, order, beauty’extends its power by institutionalizing sanita-tion and hygienic practices. The more completethe institutionalization, the more totalitarianthe state. Waste, as governable object, helps tocreate the power it becomes subject to. GayHawkins draws heavily on Laporte and Foucaultfor her argument about the politics of shit. Clar-ifying what she believes to be one of Foucault’scritical 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 spe-

cific labour of the negative initiated complex rela-

tions 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 andthrough which state power operates, then theextension of the sewer and other sanitary sys-tems represents, not a teleological unfolding ofmodern technologies, but rather the emergenceof certain power/knowledges that, howeverimperfectly, discipline modern subjects andproduce modern spaces. The politicalpossibilities inherent in viewing waste this wayare based on a rejection of the metaphysics ofpresence that argues that waste ‘just is’. Thecategory of waste itself can be deconstructedand the institutional relationships that consti-tute and are constituted by it undermined byfinding different ways of understanding, using,and valuing waste.

2 Waste as actantIn contrast to the above, researchers who focuson waste as an actant largely reject a govern-mentality framework as too focused on episte-mological concerns and ignorant of theontological status of the thing itself. In theirreview article on waste and policy, Gregson andCrang (2010) argue that waste can be viewed as ahybrid in the Latourian sense. It operates itsinfluence through networking with human andnon-human others. Focusing on industrialwastes, they argue that waste is a ‘vital inorganicactant in a thoroughly networked world’. Thisapproach accounts for the material properties ofwaste while eschewing, at least in part, the onto-logical stability of non-human others.

Gregson and Crang follow Bennett (2004:349), who uses the term ‘thing-power material-ism’ to propose a ‘speculative onto-story’ ofhow the non-human flows around and throughhumans. As part of an assemblage, waste in thisaccount becomes thoroughly constitutive of thesocionatural order including such importantgeographic phenomena as scale (Bickerstaffand Agyeman, 2009). As part of an immanentplane of becomings, waste actively constructsnetworks of agencement, shaping the material

Moore 791

world and socionatural relations. As Gille(2010: 1050) argues, here, ‘waste itself – its pro-duction, its consumption, its circulation, andmetamorphosis – is constitutive of society’. Pro-posing the term ‘waste regime’, Gille arguesthat it is possible to maintain an analytical dis-tinction between micro- and macro-levels,while rejecting certain types of abstractionthat ignore the concrete characteristics ofwaste. Rather than something that movesacross pre-existing spatial scales, then, wasteis, along with other actors, constitutive ofthem. These dynamic regimes have three inter-related components that must be analysed:production of waste; representation of waste;and the politics of waste. Here, the politics ofwaste comprises questions about the existenceand nature of public discourses about waste,policy tools to deal with waste, the peopleenrolled in dealing with waste, and the goalsof political instruments that define and man-age the waste/non-waste divide. This broadnotion of the politics of waste implies a num-ber of points of intervention at different levelsof practice and analysis.

Also drawing on Bennett, Jennifer Gabrys(2009) conceptualizes waste as spill – thatwhich exceeds the capacity of sinks to absorbthem. She further argues that such spills mightevoke disruptive geographies with politicalimplications: ‘Spilling over, rather than clean-ing up, is a figure that is as much political asit is ecological’ (Gabrys, 2009: 680). Wastecan escape and exceed, not just our categoriesfor it, but also the physical limits and bound-aries imposed on it, and is given capacity to acton society in interesting and surprising ways.4

3 Waste as abjectThe third concept in quadrant 4, waste asabject, is also concerned with the boundaries,both created and exceeded by waste. Wastehere is thoroughly constitutive of subjectswho must expel it in order to survive. Waste

as abject posits waste as something that isexpelled from the social body in order toshore up the boundaries that divide thatwhich belongs from that which does not.Drawn from the work of Julia Kristeva, wasteas abject does not have any necessary, posi-tive meaning as ‘the abject has only onequality of the object – that of being opposedto the I’ (Kristeva, 1982: 1).

The abject is created not through identifica-tion, but rather through its always incompleteexclusion. It therefore ‘threatens one’s own andclean self, which is the underpinning of anyorganization constituted by exclusions andhierarchies’ (Kristeva, 1982: 65). The abject,in other words, is the result of the ‘weaknessof the prohibition’ necessary to constitute thesocial order (p. 64). The relationship betweenpure and impure here differs from Douglas’sformulation in that, rather than resulting fromor merely perpetuating symbolic orders thatdifferentiate acceptable and unacceptable per-sons and practices, it is constitutive of them.Waste as the abject has no essential character-istic, but creates society through its expulsion(Scanlan, 2005).

In human geography, there has been aneffort to use the concept of abjection to explainsocial processes (Popke, 2001; Sibley, 1995).For example, in Geographies of Exclusion,Sibley (1995) argues that the exclusionary prac-tices that seek to establish the (always porous)boundaries between clean and dirty (self andother) often reinforce the physical marginaliza-tion of some groups from urban space as withthe ragpickers of Paris. In the case of waste asabject, processes of expelling wasted objects,places, and people are essential to the produc-tion of modern spaces and citizens (Moore,2008, 2009). Because abjection is alwaysincomplete, waste constantly threatens to desta-bilize sanitary spaces and subjects. This opensthe possibility for a politics of manifestation(Moore, 2008) where the public secret of wasteis fully exposed.


VII Conclusion: waste material,disturbance and politicsIn this article, I have mapped the ways that newgeographies of waste are proliferating withinthe social sciences by tracing the literaturethrough more and less developed avenues ofinquiry. My main goal was to highlight someof the convergences and divergences of the con-cepts used in social science work on waste interms of their value for understanding andenacting politics around waste. These wereemphasized through reference to Figure 1,which illustrates heuristically how each conceptdefines what waste is (the axis positivity-nega-tivity) and why, how, and to whom it matters(dualist-relational). By cutting through theliterature in this manner I have framed theseconcepts in terms of two questions core todebates over the political potential of the mate-rial in social science: first, can objects bedefined positively or negatively; and, second,do certain social processes pre-exist objects andsubjects or do objects and subjects, together,help to constitute society and space (cf. Braunand Whatmore, 2010; Gregson and Crang,2010; Latham and McCormack, 2004)? By plot-ting conceptualizations of waste along theseaxes, I highlighted the ways that different viewsof what waste is, as material, are productive ofmany forms of scholarship that have the poten-tial to disturb certain taken-for-granted ideasabout value, politics, and the sociospatial ordermore generally.

I proposed in the first section that wastemight be thought of as parallax object – assomething that ‘disturbs the smooth running ofthings’. Whether viewed as hazard or risk, fetishor commodity, abject or affect, waste, therefore,evokes conversations about development, jus-tice, sustainability, and progress. It offers oppor-tunities for scholars to engage in ‘being political’by undermining the modern shibboleths of clean-liness, order, sanitation, and hygiene integral tomany exclusionary sociospatial arrangements.

I view the concepts discussed as largely comple-mentary in their attention to the kinds of politicshistorically enabled by keeping waste out of site,enforcing order, and the implementation of sani-tation and hygienization policies globally. Fur-ther, because work on waste in geography andsocial science, based on all of these concepts, isgrowing, I think it is less useful to identify a bestor preferred trajectory than to highlight the workthat each concept can do.

Synthesis or reduction of these concepts isless productive than revelling in the parallaxgap between concepts of waste where opportu-nities to ‘disturb the smooth running of things’abound. Revelling in this gap calls for continuedintra- and interdisciplinary engagement thattakes as its starting point not a specific conceptor definition of waste, but rather the way thatthis parallax object escapes and exceeds any oneperspective. While such efforts are sometimeshindered by (sub)disciplinary concerns andtraining, as well as institutional interests, takingseriously 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 toforge cooperative research, because, after all,‘what else deflects us from the errors of our illu-sionary 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 anyfunding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-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 (inher-

ent) characteristics in waste versus those that do not.

Moore 793

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 manufactur-

ing processes. This is the case in many developing

countries where natural resources are scarce or non-

existent’ (US EPA, 1998).

3. The United Nations defines MSW as ‘waste originating

from: households, commerce and trade, small busi-

nesses, office buildings and institutions (schools, hospi-

tals, 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 clean-

ing services (street sweepings, the content of litter con-

tainers, 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 environ-

ment’ (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 agree-

ments to be regulated as hazardous waste.

4. Here, though, I share Braun’s 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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