ABSTRACT
Household waste and waste policies are high on the public agendas of wealthy countries around the globe – they have been important issues in the Western world at least since the 1960s. Waste is an interesting topic for socio-cultural analysis. It encompasses structures of production and consumption as well as resource exploitation, environmental pollution and social norms of valuation and de-valuation. This article resumes a comparative SKAD investigation into public waste discourses and policies in France and Germany covering the period from 1970 to 1995. With a focus on the practice of doing discourse research, it discusses the choice of research questions, the sampling and analysis of the data, the empirical results and their interpretation. It identifies two competing discourses in Germany and one hegemonic discourse in France, each involving rather different meaning-making devices. Therefore, the symbolic reality of waste mastery in both countries is shown to be considerably different: where the German discourses were stimulated by a protracted warning of an upcoming catastrophe, the hegemonic discourse on waste in France repeatedly performed an ever-failing but reassuring proclamation about civilisation’s victory over the threats of waste production.
