Cultural Materiality and Waste Practices
Summary
Cultural materiality and waste practices examine how societies assign meanings to materials deemed as waste and how those meanings shape practices of disposal, reuse and recovery. This field bridges material culture studies with waste management, revealing how cultural norms, economic structures and power relations influence the life cycles of objects. Research highlights the social production of waste categories, the contestation of value through everyday practices and the material operations that underpin resource recovery. It addresses how perceptions of cleanliness, dirt and risk inform the organisation of waste labour, and how alternative activities—from informal scavenging to organised reuse markets—reconfigure the boundaries between trash and treasure. Insights from this work inform sustainable policy and circular economy strategies by foregrounding the cultural dimensions of material flows across diverse global contexts.
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Cultural Materiality and Waste Practices publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in cultural materiality and waste practices across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Cultural materiality: The study of how societal values and meanings are ascribed to physical objects and materials, particularly those deemed as waste.
Resource recovery: Processes by which materials are reclaimed from waste streams for reuse or recycling, shaped by technological, economic and cultural factors.
Scavenger gaze: An orientation to urban or domestic environments that unlocks potential value in discarded materials through active searching and appraisal.
Valuation practices: The varied cultural and social processes through which objects are assessed for their worth, utility or symbolic significance.
References
- Doing the ‘dirty work’ of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU. European Urban and Regional Studies (2016).
- ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets. Worldwide Waste (2019).
- Conceptualising Reuse in African Households: Perspectives from Chembe, Malawi. Environment, Development and Sustainability (2021).
About these summaries
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