schaffer_4s_abstract


 * It's our waste, too! Waste management from the fringe **

While the U.S. waste stream poses a variety of threats to environment and human health, it is managed to a point of near-invisibility by municipal collection and private haulers. In response to this unseen effluvium, recycling advocates, nonprofit compost organizations, and some dedicated waste managers (among others) are working to render waste visible—and manipulable. In this case study, a group of waste activists working on implementing a food-scraps composting program in upstate New York are generating new knowledge about the production of waste; forging partnerships between citizens, nonprofits, private haulers and municipal government; and designing a new sociotechnical system composed of compost heaps, disposal practices, social organizations and list-serves that stewards waste locally, through decentralized networks of waste producers and compost users. I examine this counter-system as it emerges at the fringes of environmental governance through participant action research and interviews with advocates and officials. I articulate the counter-hegemonic imaginaries of waste governance put forward by the advocates, describing the waste debate as an object conflict over the goals of waste management (Hess, 2004). In doing so, I ask whether the waste stewardship model they embrace is actually “from the fringe” or a reframing of waste politics received from the “usual suspects” of waste management. This paper links work on science and social movements with questions about the commodification and invisibility of waste that are central to the emergent field of discard studies, investigating the agency of non-professionals in the process of reframing waste problems and finding new solutions.