ABSTRACT
Climate change may be viewed as the biggest current environmental challenge and policy problem, but it is a symptom of a wider problem of unsustainable development. 1 The overproduction of waste is a consequence of the unsustainable economic growth of the United Kingdom (UK) since the industrial revolution:
The production of waste rather than goods is the main indication of abundance, affluence and social pre-eminence: ‘waste even appears ultimately as the essential function, the extra degree of expenditure, superfluity, the ritual uselessness of “expenditure for nothing” becoming the sites of production of value, difference and meanings on both the individual and the social level’. 2
