Recycling reconsidered: the present failure and future promise of environmental action in the United States by S MacBride; MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012, 312 pages, £18.95 hardback (US $27.00) ISBN 9780 262016001 The symbolic nature of the unwanted and discarded by-products of the social organisation of people have long been recognised, ever since British social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) enticingly suggested "dirt as matter out of place" (page 36). It is all the more surprising, then, to still find pockets of social science reluctant to fully engage with waste and its disposal as issues of central concern to societies. Fortunately, human geography and environmental sociology are two social science subdisciplines that have embraced waste and its disposal as social problems requiring remedy. It is within this context that Samantha MacBride's new book Recycling Reconsidered emerges, which represents both a timely and an important scholarly attempt to draw our attention to the less than glamorous aspects of the production- consumption cycle that tends to receive much less attention than it perhaps deserves. The aim of MacBride's book is to turn a critical eye on recycling as a ubiquitous environmental behaviour that most people—in developed societies at least—take for granted and who usually assume is a good thing to happen. In doing so, she shows us that, despite advances since the 1970s in recycling performance in the United States, the goals of recycling have not been met because the majority of waste continues to be either burnt or buried in the ground. This failure is attributed to the success of the manufacturing sector intentionally preventing alternative, but more sustainable, forms of waste management from being implemented. More controversially, she also argues that the green social movement has been complicit in this because it is engaged in activities that seek to convince individuals of their responsibilities to lead more sustainable lifestyles and produce 'zero' waste. In pointing out where the process of recycling has failed to deliver on its promises, MacBride offers an alternative vision based on ecological citizenship. This is taken to mean "the range of options, strategies, actions, and communications that people concerned about resource depletion, pollution, ecosystemic disruption, health risks, and inequality globally and locally should feel free to engage in" (page 218), which is framed in terms of sustainability and environmental justice debates. MacBride's methods of study combined longitudinal statistical data on waste quality and quantity with socially constructed data on how waste is being expressed in public discourse and public policy. For both strands of research a variety of data published by primary sources were collected and analysed. These included: newspapers and trade journals, reports from government and nongovernment agencies, the archives of grassroots organisations, and legislation at various governance levels. The tools of investigation should therefore impress even the most discerning of research methods enthusiast. The substantive material is presented in five empirical chapters, which MacBride skilfully uses to illustrate the "tensions and struggle around solid-waste problems, involving groups in industry, civil society, and government" (page 15). With each chapter forming a historical case