ABSTRACT

It is entirely uncontroversial to say that waste does not get a good press. Whilst millions of products and services of dubious provenance and utility are treated to extensive marketing campaigns in order to persuade consumers of their merits, there are no equivalents for the contents of your dustbin. At a common sense level, there is no surprise in this. Who, after all, might desire what you have discarded? What possible value could the ‘by-products’ of your life represent? Since it is you, the citizen, who has to pay to have the detritus carted or fl ushed away, is it not perverse to imagine that it might, after all, be the object of someone else’s desire or, at least, that there are values embedded within it? Put this way waste appears to represent not just the end of a useful life and the absence of value but a transition to negative value: the exact opposite of what the term ‘value’ is normally considered to mean. It is obvious, is it not, that no-one in their right mind would pay money in order to get rid of something that someone else wanted? But, as I will show throughout this book, what is commonsensically labeled as waste has many values and many qualities. It is not necessarily useless or worthless in itself and generating markets for its exchange, institutions for its regulation and industrial processes for its utilisation are, in many ways, hugely impressive social and technological achievements. They are, in short, central elements of how societies are constructed and a plausible defi nition of ‘society’ in this characterization would be: organized patterns of collective activity for managing waste.