This paper examines the early development of international waste governance from 1966 to 1976. As industrialised nations generated more waste due to urbanisation and changing consumption, international organisations faced pressure to respond. The World Health Organization led efforts by creating the International Reference Centre for Wastes Disposal (IRCWD) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute for Water Supply, Sewage Purification and Water Pollution Control (EAWAG) and the International Association for Public Cleansing (INTAPUC). The IRCWD aimed to centralise global waste management knowledge and coordination. However, institutional fragmentation, funding issues and differing views on whether waste was a technical or systemic issue hindered its success. While some saw waste as a symptom of flawed modernisation, most treated it as a technical problem requiring improved disposal methods. Competition from other organisations, WHO ambivalence, and reluctance to challenge economic systems weakened momentum. Ultimately, waste became a shared concern but was addressed in fragmented ways. The study shows how institutional and political factors, rather than environmental priorities, shaped early international waste policy.

‘Responsibility’ is the new buzzword in environmentalism and climate change discourse. Regarding the waste ‘crisis’ in particular, responsibility is understood as pertaining to individual actors, thus undermining the prevailing perception of an interconnected world. This article argues for a processual perspective on responsibility as entangled conditioning of life, which has the potential to embrace more-thanhuman politics of responsibility, that is crucial to facilitate an environmentally just transition ‘from the margins’. Exploring three sites of waste responsibility—in the form of responsibility politics, in the public sphere, and on haphazard city wastelands—the article examines different waste relationships that provoke multiple forms and notions of responsibility that respond to Cambodia’s recalcitrant and seemingly unmanageable waste situation. The revelation of responsibility as a processual and temporally diverse phenomenon permits the emergence of new forms of responsibility that contest the predominant notion of ‘waste responsibility’, which forms the basis of numerous waste reduction models worldwide. The local implementation of such programs universalizes and standardizes waste responsibilities as they are implemented in alignment with long-established ways of doing politics and waste fantasies. However, local waste pickers have already assumed a significant proportion of the responsibility for waste. By collecting and reselling waste on a daily basis, they enable a sovereignty-through-waste, which reclaims urban citizenship and promotes an environmentally just transition that resonates with the relationships waste undergoes in unruly sites, hinting at possible future politics.

This paper addresses the emergence of concern with hazardous wastes and the legal liabilities attached to them long before the first federal legislation in the U.S. explicitly using the term; a simultaneous search for marketable by-products during the first three quarters of the twentieth century as a means to decrease the volume of wastes while also diminishing the perceived threat; and the eventual adoption of a legal tactic that asserted absence of liability before formal federal definitions of hazardous wastes. Based on a review of industry and waste management literature, it exposes deliberate efforts on the part of major industry trade organizations to dampen public calls for litigation by making the case that wastes were manageable, recoverable, and non-threatening. These steps sought to offset potential disruptions to their operations by imposing additional costs on waste treatment. When federal legislation became a reality in the 1970s, defenders of industrial practices that created hundreds of hazardous waste sites made the arguments that hazardous properties of wastes were unknown at the time of their disposal. The litigation that swirled around the federal laws proved disruptive and reflect a issue delayed not eliminated.

Night soil collecting was practiced to different extents wherever urbanization developed. For example, Japan relied on human waste as fertilizer to the point it became a profitable business, while in most Western countries it was considered a necessary evil. What is the reason behind such different attitudes? In this paper, I apply David Inglis’ theory of a mode of excretion to premodern Japanese context in order to shed light on this phenomenon. First, informed by Mary Douglas, I propose slight alternations to the original theoretical framework of a mode of excretion so it emphasizes considerations of excreta in a culture’s cosmology. Next, I examine scatological content in the oldest chronicle of Japan: Kojiki. Based on the analysis, I conclude the Japanese traditional notion of defecation is non-binary—it includes both positive and negative understandings of excrement. Most importantly, the notion lacks moral stigmatization; excrement is not kegare. Then, I characterize how defecation was practiced. Contrary to present norms, it was conducted relatively out in the open, without strict regularization. I argue it was because the notion was not stigmatized, thus there was no need to be particularly embarrassed about the body’s excretory capacities. Finally, I conclude the holistic approach to the notion and practice of defecation in Japan’s traditional fecal habitus is the reason why human waste could be viewed as productive and not merely an object of disgust. Thus, because of this cultural encoding, traditional means of excretory disposal in Japan relied on night soil collection.

Hazardous waste began gaining public attention in industrialized countries in the 1970s, partly as a result of several scandals involving former waste sites. Early on, several international organizations (IOs), notably the EEC, NATO, OECD and WHO, addressed the issue in publications, surveys and the collection of data. Collectively, these initiatives addressed crucial questions regarding the definition, collection, transportation and disposal of hazardous waste. Above all, they provided space and subtle pressure for national authorities to gather information about a problem which, so far, had been all but ignored. These programs revealed the improvised nature of much policy-making at the time but also offered the opportunity to consider hazardous waste management within larger development pathways. The perspectives taken during discussions at IOs vacillated between pragmatic, simple collection of data and superficial searching for short-term management in terms of trying to get rid of the substances and more principled considerations of how to find long-term solutions for hazardous waste through comprehensive approaches that integrated all stages of production from produce planning to disposal. Thus, IOs did not prevent the increasing spread of toxic materials into the environment. But they may have mitigated its form and paved the way for alternative development planning in the long run.

Among the mix of motivations that inspire people to sell and shop at garage sales is the desire to prevent the disposal of still usable goods. Sales can be so effective for redistributing consumer goods and reducing waste that numerous municipalities, such as Sunnyvale, California and Sydney, Australia, promote their sales through a community-wide staging. Lengthy corridor sales in the U.S., like that held annually on Route 127 (the “World’s Longest Yard Sale”), serve the same function, drawing positive media attention and promoting civic pride. But unlike the mundane act of recycling used papers and cans at the curb, making goods available for reuse at garage sales is an action loaded with personal sentiment. Second-hand purchases are often imbued with “sticky” emotional orientations (Ahmed 2010) and reminiscences. This article therefore examines the garage sale as a site for redistributing goods with emotions and histories attached. Participants derive some small recompense in the form of money made, the acquisition of inexpensive goods, and the self-satisfaction associated with reducing waste, but shoppers and sellers are also allied in a tug of war against the landfill to claim the future of goods, especially the storied items adopted by shoppers. Beneath their goal of cleaning out the garage, garnering some extra cash, or obtaining a bargain, participants assert that the reuse of and care for still serviceable goods is meritorious and morally praiseworthy. In the process of reuse, they enhance their moral selves and perform a good deed, however minor, by preserving both the stories of these objects and the embattled earth.