Revisiting the experience of inconvenience and everyday life practices: the case of waste sorting

Abstract The growing waste volume is an acute issue on the circular economy agenda and consumers play a key role by sorting recyclable materials from residual waste. In the literature, the experience of inconvenience is recurrently identified as a main barrier to sorting. Modeling inconvenience as the effort required for sorting, these studies suggest adjustments to communication and material arrangements, making recycling easier. This article offers a reappraisal of the experience of inconvenience and its conditioning. Using ethnographic data, the analysis explores the incongruities between participants’ sayings and doings – their articulated agreement with sorting and reluctance to do so. Waste biographies indicate that instead of overt efforts implied in the performance of sorting, embodied perceptions of normal waste practice govern which performances of sorting are experienced as inconvenient. This pre-reflective structuring of perception is anchored in and maintained by the relation of waste practices to co-occurring practices. Proposing a conceptual distinction, this article suggests that waste practices are performed as “secondary practices” enabling “primary practices,” that orchestrate participants’ dispositions and their immediate discernments of what are dispensable and, thus, inconvenient performances of sorting. This perspective elaborates on the understanding of inconvenience and the transition inertia of everyday practices toward sustainability.