Waste Safari XMass : a visual narrative with single-use plastics

Time to Reopen the Bin! Waste and discard research has over the past few decades become a lively field of research within the social sciences and the humanities (Gille and Lepawsky 2022; Ek and Johansson 2020). Within these broad fields, the diverse, complex embodiments of waste have been increasingly recognized. Waste has been approached in the form of rubbish and pollution, but also in terms of organic, industrial, construction, mining residues, and as the by-product of activities so diverse as to include fast fashion and military operations. Furthermore, it has been understood as waste-management practices and technologies, from highly efficient industrial systems, community-based waste-management systems to greenhouse-gas emission capturing, and from material perspectives related to value-chain management. At the same time, waste management is seen as generating soil, air and water pollution and harm, and, depending on the system in place, as reproducing existing injustices and unsustainability. Defining waste and organizing waste knowledges are littered with assumptions and framings attached with a myriad of norms, behaviours, infrastructures, politics, power dynamics, inequalities, and the permeant reminder of the crisis our planet faces in the Anthropocene, which Corvellec (2019) has called “the age of waste.” Despite welcomed advances in the field, continued examinations and ongoing encounters are required in order to make sense of the economies, livelihoods, lifestyles, consumption patterns, social movements, infrastructures, epistemologies, and materialities that shape urban, peri-urban and rural spaces, and which are in turn shaped by the organizing of waste (or lack thereof).