How the waste management system’s materialised normativity influences engagement in sustainable waste practices.

ABSTRACT

Household waste sorting is crucial to ensure the recirculation of resources and reduce emissions resulting from the extraction of virgin materials. Based on ethnographic data, this paper aims to explore how participants’ engagement in sorting is influenced in part by the materiality of the waste management system, finding that information about new dumpsters, as well as the appearance of these dumpsters themselves, largely sufficed for households to appropriate new categories of recyclables into their everyday waste practices. However, participants only sort portions of their waste some of the time. Thus, by expounding on the infrastructure’s implicit signalling of normal and acceptable sorting standards, the paper evinces how the system not only enables sorting but simultaneously contributes to sustaining waste practices’ current deficient standards. It explores how extending the existing infrastructure for sorting with indoor arrangements can enhance participants’ engagement in sorting. Furthermore, the paper underscores how material arrangements make practices possible and influence everyday understandings of normality, which are vital for policymakers and systems planners to consider in new infrastructural designs.

KEYWORDS:

• Household waste sorting
• infrastructure
• social norms
• circular economy
• practice theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ’black’ is how this family and other Vejlensers’ reference the bin for residuals. The name refers to the colour of the bags the municipality used to distribute.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Innovation Fund Denmark under grant [#8053-00216B].

Notes on contributors

Lina Katan

Lina Katan is an industrial ph.d., also holding a BA and an MA in Sociology. She has specialised in sustainability research and qualitative methods. For four years she has engrossed herself in waste studies while also working as a consultant in the waste management sector.