Materiality and Waste: Inorganic Vitality in a Networked World

At a first level, the papers in this theme issue provide a contribution to the diversity and vitality of current waste scholarship.At another level they are a means to moving waste scholarship to a fuller engagement with materiality.i Our starting point here is a paradox.Waste is intrinsically, profoundly, a matter of materiality and yet -notwithstanding a sustained engagement with materiality in certain areas of the social sciences of late -much of what is most readily identified as waste research remains staunchly immaterial.Just as much as societies have sought to distance themselves from and hide their wastes for fear of contamination, so academia has been shy of the stuff of waste.Predominantly, social science work identifies waste in terms of waste management; a move which ensures that waste is defined by, and discussed in terms of, 'disposal' technologies, or -more correctly -waste treatments, and their connection to policy.The stuff of waste therefore is translated into treatment technologies -principally the established ones of incineration and landfill but also emergent technologies such as anaerobic digestion.Or, it is reconfigured as resource recovery, that is, as recycling, re-use and re-manufacturing.Thence, for the most part, it is translated into metrics -tonnes and targets.To modify Zygmant Bauman's paraphrasing of Marx, with waste all that is solid (or indeed liquid) tends to melt, if not into air, into the register of the categorical.Further, the radical separation of waste as material and matter from a policy world of tonnes and targets inscribes itself into clear academic divisions of labour.Hence, waste in the social