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

Abstract

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.