The article analyses the early stages of wastepaper collection in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1920s and early 1930s, with a focus on the key actors and their conflicting interests. The significance of makulatura is considered in the context of its economic, political and ideological importance in the early Soviet Union. Special attention is given to mass mobilisation campaigns and wastepaper collection in housing cooperatives. The desperate struggle of archival institutions to preserve their documentary heritage is highlighted. The article also reveals the role of administrative resources as a tool of directive planning, used to lobby the interests of specific companies. It demonstrates how the organisational flaws in the state wastepaper collection system contributed to the development of the black market, where wastepaper flows were redirected through unofficial channels. The article argues that speculators were the only ones to make substantial economic profits, while the state primarily derived political and ideological benefits.

Amidst a period marked by growing volumes of nuclear waste and ongoing discussions regarding its management, technologies that utilise natural materials for containment are gaining prominence. This article takes a historical view of Russian nuclear waste management practices with a focus on the role of clay as a natural material for containing nuclear waste. In particular, it explores the use of clay in multi-barrier technology, highlighting its dual role as a protective layer and a resource for managing nuclear safety risks. The siting of the liquid nuclear waste disposal at the Ignalina NPP site in Lithuania (1976–1980) and of solid nuclear waste disposal at Leningrad NPP in Sosnovy Bor, Russia (2013–2018) are the main foci of this article. These cases contribute to understanding nuclear waste disposal siting in the USSR and modern Russia and enable analysis of nuclear waste discourses describing the sites’ geology as a static or dynamic environment within active or passive safety systems.

Gender differences in the work of female and male waste pickers have often been overlooked. In this article we want to show that for waste pickers in Indonesia there are remarkable similarities between female and male waste pickers. At first sight, there is practically no division of tasks between female and male waste pickers. Nevertheless, the domestic chores of women, gendered differences in stigmatisation, and possible societal expectations about the compatibility of waste picking with femininity do seriously hamper their work as waste pickers. A better understanding of how waste picking is done is important because the activity is one step in recycle chains in the Global South. The article also warns against the generic use of the term ‘waste picker’ without carefully distinguishing between their different roles in the municipal waste management assemblage.

Integrating circular economy into solid waste management is challenging for the local government authorities in Bangladesh, though its necessity is well recognised. The absence of household waste segregation in overcrowded urban areas is an obstacle for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of reduced waste generation by 2030. This research in Khulna city found that recyclable and reusable products are separated informally by grassroots people in seven stages, instead of a source. Relevant stakeholders and grassroots people working at different level of solid waste governance were interviewed to find out the current status. The thematic analysis reveals that policy gaps, limited budgets, inadequate facilities, social constraints, behavioural inertia, non-engagement of private organisations and insufficient community participation are significant challenges to circular economy transition. Stakeholders have proposed a series of actions, beginning with proper policy formulation, followed by facility provision, awareness building and enforcement in the event of excessive public ignorance.

This paper seeks to redress the over-emphasis on state-driven circular policies in public and academic discourses by attending to two physical community-based freecycling markets at the emerging frontiers of circular waste/resource management in Singapore. Freecycling markets that close short reuse loops are a counterpoint to policies that close long recycling loops. Drawing primarily on empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that freecycling markets exemplify a sustainable materialist movement concerned about the sustainability of material resources vis-à-vis the closing/shortening of material circularity loops. This is achieved through the reconfiguration of (a) material flows and (b) material relations. The redirection of unwanted but reusable household objects away from the incinerator and towards potential reusers animates a shift from a linear to circular material flow. We contend that this redirection of material resources for reuse is augmented by rescue and recirculation, which are relatively neglected within the scholarship on circular R-behaviours. Additionally, freecycling markets seek to transform material relations by encouraging care and stewardship, instead of use and disposal. Crucially, we highlight how freecycling markets may be plagued with material constraints that render them not-so-sustainable-and-scalable, thereby shedding light on the practical limits of sustainable materialist action. Taken together, this paper extends the scholarship on circular economies by bringing work on sustainable materialism into a productive dialogue with that on circular activisms and R-behaviours.

Organic waste is both a refuse and a resource. Focusing on household waste in a city in Western Switzerland, this study examines the practices of waste segregation in relation to the city’s (organic) waste management system. Based on qualitative research with diverse households and experts in waste management, we use social practice theory to discuss the meanings and materiality of household organic waste segregation. We show how more or less visible meanings, tied up with material arrangements, can be either enablers or deterrents for such forms of waste management. The article argues that certain aspects of the waste system could be rendered more visible, such as the proper labelling of collection bins, while less visibility could be given to certain meanings around waste segregation, such as the financial cost of not sorting. We also discuss how organic waste sorting, as a practice, contests the dominant understandings of change based on technological efficiency, economic benefits, and individual changes. More collective forms of change are needed, working at the level of social contexts and materiality, to further support organic waste sorting.

This article, based on previously unexplored archival documents, examines the recycling of rags in the early Soviet Union, using the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) as a case study. Within the context of the early Soviet waste regime, the characteristics of the Ukrainian rag market, its key participants, the challenges they encountered, and the strategies they devised in a republic with limited textile waste are investigated. The article asserts that in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1920s, the paper industry emerged as the primary consumer of rags. Consequently, the secondary utilization of rags in this sector should be regarded as the authorities’ endeavor to extensively utilize substitutes in light of the limited reserves of cellulose and timber in the republic. Rags were also an important export resource, driven more by ideological reasons than purely economic ones. The article demonstrates the specificities of waste management policies during the New Economic Policy period, characterized by the authorities’ directive methods of regulating the market, attributable to the strategic significance of this type of raw material for Soviet enterprises. It contends that the transition to a centralized waste collection model in the early 1930s was a natural outcome of the implementation of the planned economy. However, intense competition for various waste materials, particularly rags, contributed to this transition.

Despite official bans, public criticism and concern over pollution, plastics are widely used in Buddhist material culture in the Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim. Using the framework of the seven bowls of water offerings, undertaken every morning to the Buddhas and deities in domestic shrine rooms, and ethnographic observations, as a way to frame discussions of changing material culture, I will interrogate how plastics are used and waste is re-purposed in Sikkimese interdimensional engagements in offerings to the deities and spirits. I will argue that plastics continue to be seen as efficacious and generative for Buddhist communities due to their ability to be re-purposed and recycled, acting as exemplars of skillful means that allow for Buddhist communities to exercise their own agency in determining the efficacy of material culture and the making of new futures. This paper engages with scholarship from anthropologists and Buddhist studies scholars on Buddhist materiality, plastic, and waste studies to consider the malleability of plastics, even when they are not malleable, and demonstrate how this malleability generates positive and creative engagements across dimensions that allow for nuanced and complex responses to the anxieties people have about plastic waste in the Himalayas.

The burial of radioactive waste in deep geological repositories has gradually imposed itself since the 1980s in various countries. Considered more stable, safe, and responsible than storage above ground, this solution is seen as a way of keeping the waste out of human reach, and of freeing oneself of the obligation to monitor repositories. However, it soon became clear that the idea of relying on the relative stability of deep geological repositories for the safe disposal of nuclear waste to remove it from the ‘all too human’ risks associated with history’s turbulences, has produced new uncertainties, and raised new questions, given the multi-millennial time scales involved. This article presents a study of the strategies adopted by the actors in charge of radioactive waste management in the face of the temporal constraints imposed by the length of their radioactive life. More specifically, it is intended to question the representations of temporality that allow the designers of these projects to assume their responsibilities by transmitting information and warnings towards to an extremely distant future, to recipients who are not easily representable and for whom they already have a responsibility even though they do not yet exist.


 My paper describes and interprets the life of people in the streets of Paris from March 2020 to April 2023. In the critical discourse analysis tradition, I contrast different perspectives to make sense of the situation: my observations from home and from the streets, the media coverage and official archives that deal with the ‘public problems’ of homelessness, migrants, Roma families, and the use of public space. I also compare different periods of time when the rules are different. I observe how the analyses of the situation vary depending on one’s perspective, on the period of time and on the importance of categories such as home and waste as references. One key question for me is how to use the notion of ‘being out of place’ for people who live in the street. To do so, I reflect on the role of words, pictures and images: they reflect what I see in situ when I take the pictures but most of the pictures, I am shown tend to illustrate categories rather than situations. I reflect on the fact that what I see is not what I am shown and how it affects my relations with people who live in the street.