Rethinking the Affirmative Value, Politics and Materiality of Waste on the Urban Periphery

References to waste conjure up images of things being thrown away, which raises the questions: what is being thrown away, where and by whom, and which bodies are most exposed to the potential toxic residues of waste? Over the past two decades, scholars from across the disciplines have together contributed a rich repertoire of research and writing that highlights the material, discursive, relational, spatial, temporal and political registers of waste as it becomes increasingly clear that there is simply no ‘away’ involved in the throwing. To mention a few examples, Scanlan (2005) shows that, conceptually, ‘waste’ is a relatively arbitrary moment in the life of an object that signifies what is valued and, more notably, what is no longer valued. Others have argued that the contemporary phenomenon of ‘waste’, its accumulation and its flows, is an expression of the excesses of modernity’s unsustainable consumption (MacBride, 2011; Minter, 2014; Moore, 2009) that grew out of the post-war years in the second half of the 20th century (Strasser, 1999). As material decays, waste has come to be discursively associated with forms of disorder and filth (Douglas, 1966/1984). By extension, the labourers who handle household and municipal refuse may be simultaneously stigmatized and deemed vital to the functioning of cities (Gill, 2010; Nagle, 2013), as waste labour and the multiple stages of value involved in waste collection,