Modern industrialised, chemicalised and globalised societies produce a world of waste. Managing and regulating the various forms of waste require multiple relations, practices and strategies. This Special Collection focuses on the multiplicity of and around waste by asking in what ways waste is addressed and problematised by social groups, organisations as well as sociomaterial assemblages and arrangements. In doing so, the Special Collection sheds light on multiple qualities of waste, from toxic to zero, from material to quasi-intangible, from unwanted to desired. Depending on these active, but simultaneously attributed waste qualities, the Special Collection directs attention to the multiple relations formed around waste. These range from valorising and collaborative to scrutinising and demonising. Against this backdrop, the Special Collection contributes to a better understanding of how waste becomes accessible as a relational category based on practices and processes of valuation, commodification and decommercialisation, knowledge production or ignorance.

Guest editors: Nadine Arnold (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Christiane Schürkmann (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) 

Paper are still being added to this collection.