Vol. 1 No. 1 (2018)
Research

What is Waste?

PDF XML
  • Josh Reno
Josh Reno
Binghamton University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/wwwj.9

Published 2018-07-09

Keywords

  • waste,
  • Arendt,
  • freedom,
  • ontology,
  • semiotics

How to Cite

Reno, J. (2018). What is Waste?. Worldwide Waste, 1(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.5334/wwwj.9

Copyright (c) 2018 The Author(s)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

An Arendtian approach to waste is offered which suggests that three common senses of waste refer to products of labor, work, and action, as explained in The Human Condition (1958). The paper offers examples of ecological, utilitarian and moral-political senses of waste, and argues that they are not incommensurable, but form part of a continuum with respect to their relative freedom from constraint. For this reason, different senses of waste offer distinct political dimensions for waste scholars that relate to boundaries between the human/non-human and critiques of oppression and injustice more broadly.

PDF XML