No matter ever vanishes. It can, at most, change its form. Rubbish is immortal, it pervades the air, swells up in water, dissolves, rots, disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke, into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it.
—Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage 1991[1988]: 8
I t is September 2021. A truck with a covered body is backing up to the edge of the Smoke landfill.1 We stand at both sides behind the car and show the driver when to stop to get as close to the edge as possible. When the driver stops and gets off the truck, he takes on thick leather gloves and greets us with a brief and hardly recognizable mumbling. We respond similarly. The eyes of my fellow waste pickers are full of excitement. When the guy pulls the stick to open the door, everybody wonders how much copper might be inside. No, it does not look good. A mass of sandpaper cuts along with paper and plastic strips starts falling out. When the driver tips the entire load, waste pickers briefly walk around the pile, lift and drop a few large pieces of paper, and walk away with disappointment. No copper cables this time, just a lot of sandpaper.
While my friends look uninterested, I look with astonishment at a pile reaching up to my shoulders and taking space of about six meters in diameter. It consists mostly of diverse sandpaper: coarse, fine, red, green, rectangular individual sheets as well as heavy rolls that must have several meters of the sandpaper still neatly rolled; I cannot even move them on my own. They are too heavy. Wait a minute. The sandpaper smells fresh. It is intact! I am perplexed to see such wastefulness, while recalling how expensive even tiny sheets of sandpaper are in the store.2 My buddy Fero explains: “I heard that they have new machines for grinding and do not need this kind of sandpaper anymore. Take some. I already have plenty of it at home.” One of the local companies producing parts for the automotive industry decided to send the truck with their unwanted sandpaper to the Smoke landfill, hoping it would be an easy way to make it disappear. Who would care if those hundreds of kilograms of unused sandpaper were dumped? For the rest of the day, I contemplate this approach to resources as well as the landfill’s capacity to make such disappearance possible. A few incoming drivers who take sheets from the pile indicate that disappearance via dumping is limited. The material comes back.
Three days later, I watch the evening news on TV. A host brings dramatic footage of a fire accident at a landfill, depicting dark gray fumes emitting from the burning garbage. A subsequent visual shift to a new incinerator with a slick design and modular plasma-based facility embedded in a transport container provides examples that contrast the terrifying heaps of garbage disposed of at the landfill. My younger daughter makes an ironic comment: “Gosh, your waste again!” One can tell that she is not excited about her dad’s work, but her comment is significant because of the word again. Yes, again. To give another spin to Joshua Reno’s (2016a: 5, 227) phrase that “garbage keeps coming,” my daughter’s note suggests that garbage keeps coming despite being physically disposed of: it tends to reappear as a sign with surprising pervasiveness. It inhabits news, popular magazines, discussions on the radio, adventures of Peppa Pig, criminal movies and books, and, of course, scholarly studies. While I consider my professional bias of seeing waste everywhere, its pervasive semiotic presence in public space is beyond doubt. Interestingly, garbage and landfills seem to be a powerful representational couple tied with an invisible umbilical cord. They appear in public spaces to convey divergent messages: wastefulness of contemporary capitalism, climate crisis, environmental pollution, the necessity of market solutions in waste management, technological hopes, or crime. It is striking how much such representations flourish, given the widely shared conviction to keep the waste matter away or let it disappear (see Alexander 2016; Alexander and O’Hare 2023; Reno 2016a).
The co-occurrence of garbage and landfill signals a specific kind of relationship. It can be understood as a hyphen (Fine 1994; Ingram 2024). I am interested here in hyphen beyond its mere linguistic dimension. It can be approached as a tool for exploring connectivity (Ingram 2024: 366). When I talk about the invisible umbilical cord above, I refer to a relationship that can be detected analytically without being acknowledged in everyday practice. It goes without saying that garbage evokes landfill and landfill evokes garbage. When one attempts to get rid of garbage, it may entail getting rid of landfilling as its semiotically most pervasive twin. Similarly, when one attempts to get rid of landfills, it is also a way of getting rid of garbage. As Robyn Zink and Lisette Burrows say, the hyphen “denotes a relationship at work” (2008: 262). Although I would not go so far as to suggest that the hyphen embodies a mutually constitutive kind of entanglement (Ingram 2024: 366), the relationship between garbage and landfill, or dump, is intimate and forged by centuries of disposal practices.
Resistance of garbage to disappearance is not only a matter of representation in media and public discourses. Diverse kinds of waste tend to resist attempts to be contained or enclosed (Reno 2016b; Resnick 2024b; Zhang 2020). Waste crosses boundaries. It flies over fences, spills over containers, leaks through liners, and moves between categories. Its unruly spread appropriates space via pollution (Liboiron 2021; Serres 2011) and exposes diverse forms of life to the effects of slow violence (Doherty 2019; Nixon 2011). As Ivan Klíma argued in the initial quotation, waste resists disappearance through its openness to transformation (see also Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2020: 23). Waste may become a ghost that troubles the narratives of progress as it haunts us (Gan et al. 2017). There are, however, transformations that are not necessarily negative and harmful. They rely on creativity and skill mobilized to generate satisfaction from waste labor (Sanchez 2020), tinkering (Reno 2016a), or repair (Martínez and Laviolette 2019). These transformations may even generate a sense of reliability in a world full of precarity (O’Hare 2018) and enable garbage to reappear as life-giving rather than only abject and life-threatening (Millar 2018: 32). The reappearance of waste simply has multiple pathways and modalities.
This book is about human aspiration to make waste disappear and the impossibility of achieving it. While the original meaning of appearance is intimately tied to visuality, vernacular understandings of disappearance tend to embrace a wider field of stimuli, which relate to other senses and cognitive processes. This is the wider meaning of the verb zmizet (to disappear) in Czech. The aspiration to make waste, or garbage in particular, disappear goes way beyond the visual sense. It should prevent waste from troubling us in any imaginable way: being seen, smelled, felt on the skin, tasted, or haunting our imagination. This conceptualization of disappearance covers the whole spectrum of relations to entities that vanish. One should not even have an idea popping into one’s mind when disappearance as a project succeeds. This kind of aspiration is ubiquitous in Czechia, and traverses scales from a single disposal of a spoiled ham to large accumulations of garbage in Europe. They all should disappear.
I delve into the world of those who come into direct contact with garbage and its unruly offshoots to shape what stays, becomes transformed, or is left to rot. Via immersion into the lives of landfill workers, waste pickers, drivers, and managers, their relations to material flows, other organisms, societal expectations, and valuations, I trace how these lives unfold within the major project of disappearance, while simultaneously altering or resisting the goal of the project itself. Building upon what I have experienced over the years of my research on Czech waste streams and infrastructures, I argue for a need to reconsider the ubiquitous conviction that waste must disappear (see also Reno 2016a: 217). This reflexive exercise requires a critical rethinking of two associated ideas that also tend to be taken for granted. The first is a belief that the ideal of disappearance can be best achieved via technological innovation or an economic model based on circulation that creates a sense of infinity. I will demonstrate that neither technological innovations nor a turn to economic circularity can resolve the problem of how to relate to waste. The second idea is a complete outsourcing of waste handling and treatment by the forces of the market. In contrast, I propose leaving space for non-market mechanisms, which would prevent the world of discards from being completely swallowed by the hungry trap of the market.
This book’s theoretical aspiration is twofold. First, I unpack various regimes of disappearance and reappearance to capture their multifaceted quality and the pervasiveness of their operation. Such a hyphenation of disappearance and reappearance challenges a simplified view that the organisms’ relationship to waste can be understood via the lens of presence and absence. In contrast, disappearance and reappearance are contingent upon the eye of the beholder and the regime at work. Second, I propose to think with fluidity (Strang 2014), whose conceptualization goes beyond the material properties of waste. Taking the already existing term ‘waste stream’ as a starting point, I embark on a journey exploring diverse flows within these waste streams (cf. Hird 2021). The metaphor of fluidity enables me to build relations between the materiality of waste, associated social practices, and discourses dissolved in public space. Fluidity enables me to capture underflows, backflows, or sedimentations that can serve as alternatives for thinking about informality. Moreover, I use fluidity as an epistemic tool to see what kind of knowledge emerges when a researcher steps into the muddy waters of waste streams and lets them set the direction of floating.
In August 2012, I examined a sample of household waste from one of the urban quarters of a nearby city along with Lenka and Viktor, two of my students, who joined me in our small garbage project. Our tent was built on the edge of the active zone of the Pureland landfill. It was the second week of our field research, and we still struggled a bit with the annoying stench from a nearby chimney designed to release landfill gas. The last several days were sweltering, so we were all looking forward to the end of the day. At about 4 pm, when the landfill’s surface reached its peak temperature, and the air shimmered, we suddenly felt a wind coming from nowhere. Ten meters from us, a spinning air cone started moving across the landfill while sucking all the objects that were light enough to be lifted and became part of what looked like a composite figure twisting in a crazy dance. We were astonished at the amount of plastic and paper material ascending and moving to the northeast. Czechia was not a country where one could experience tornadoes, so even this dust devil was unusual.3 While most members of this strange flying squad fell to the ground or got caught in treetops near the landfill, a plastic bag decided to enjoy flying and embarked on a journey. We stopped working and watched “the parachute” rise and rise. It kept moving northeast toward the city until it became a tiny spot in the sky. It did not seem to descend. I could not help but think of Jules Verne’s novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, while imagining the worlds the bag might see if it takes advantage of the unusual weather conditions. After half an hour of watching, we started speculating on how far it could get—a few kilometers for sure. The main point, however, was the ability of this tiny adventurer to resist disappearance and make itself a hero of the day visible not only to us but to an unknown number of other creatures who could speculate about its origins and destiny.
This vignette describes one of the senses of disappearance and reappearance. The plastic bag, which was supposed to be buried at the landfill, took a different trajectory. This book will explore the dialectics of disappearance and reappearance through three interconnected registers. Although it is not entirely possible to separate these registers because of their overlaps and mutual interdependence, it is useful, analytically speaking, to classify different ways of thinking with disappearance. It helps to clarify the range of processes where disappearance and reappearance operate.
The first register focuses on the disposal of unwanted matter, which is pushed out of sight but comes back via acts of recovery, repair, exchange, leakages, or unexpected travels facilitated by both human and nonhuman actors. It includes tactics of mixing different things to conceal their properties or origins. It refers primarily to the movement or flow of matter and transformations that enable former waste to reappear. This register is inherently tied to the materiality of waste with all its contingencies and repercussions.
The second register is semiotic and processual. Garbage may index a family’s thriftiness that prevents careless use of resources and the presence of polluting forms of scrap metal processing or borders. Garbage may symbolize impurity or unruliness. It may get contained, enclosed, or transformed to reduce its semiotic capacity to signify. Alternatively, it can be mobilized and rendered present as a sign around waste infrastructures, in media, or in public talks to convey various meanings in service of specific goals or generate unintended consequences. Importantly, many signs do not refer to garbage as an object but rather to practices that engage with garbage in multiple ways.
The third register relates to the disappearance and reappearance of landfilling as a technology with all its relations. During the last several decades, the star of landfilling has been fading out in the European Union (EU) and slowly being replaced by other technologies for garbage management. This kind of disappearance, however, contrasts with the attention landfilling has received as a synecdoche of all wastes that plays a vital role in the social mechanism of giving up as a solution to the crisis.
The concept of fluidity connects these registers. It feels strikingly familiar to the world of sanitary engineering with its concept of waste streams that serves as a tool to “imagine flows of different materials that have distinct properties and are headed for different destinations” (Reno 2015: 559). Although theorizing about fluidity often starts with water (Krause and Strang 2016; Strang 2014), its goal goes beyond materiality of fluids. It is an invitation to think with fluidity as a metaphor of continuous change that refers to molecules, barriers, relations, negotiations, and experience alike. What is particularly useful for my exploration of fluidity of matter and practices, is Zygmunt Baumann’s succinct observation that, unlike solids, fluids “are not easily stopped” (2000: 2). This resonates with the movement of wastewater and practices of waste pickers described in this book. Even more importantly, fluidity enables specific forms of coexistence. As Annemarie Mol (2002: 143) argues, fluidity has a capacity for inclusion that enables coexistence of what is markedly different. This is relevant for imagining practices of different actors who shape the waste streams.
Thinking with flows is a way to capture the unruly dynamic of waste movement in space. Myra Hird (2021) uses flow as a conceptual tool to approach the journeys of Canada’s waste through regions and countries. Also, Hird (2021: 178) uses flow to highlight waste’s capacity to challenge social categories and leak through. Waste, in other words, is hard to immobilize because of its proclivity to escape and flow further through physical and social forms of containment.
Although some flows can be discerned and sensed easily, others remain hidden. Cleo Wölfle Hazard (2022) developed the concept of underflows to capture dynamism in hydro-ecology and extended it as a conceptual tool for thinking about diverse unseen flows. Hazard’s metaphorical thinking moves from the river water that seeps through gravel and soil to form underflows beneath the surface to the spheres of discourses and politics. Underflows serve to direct attention to “latent discourses that lie hidden or disregarded, like fluid underflows are hidden beneath a stream’s bed” (Wölfle Hazard 2022: 8). To follow this kind of thinking, I explore a gamut of fluidity from the everyday underflows of waste matter in the tipping zones of landfills to the underflows of ideas about rescuing value. There are two analytical moments that deserve attention. First, the flows do not exist only on the surface where discards move through the conduits of waste infrastructures. There are invisible underflows accessible only to those who have intimate knowledge and experience with them. Second, matter does not have to be the only entity flowing in the waste streams. There are flows of ideas, signs, discourses, pollution, or harm that do not make it to the surface and remain hidden.
* * *
Disappearance is an existential quality of life. Organisms grow and mature, relations with friends are formed and last, but eventually all disappear. This sense of disappearance is closely tied to death. The entropic power of the universe always wins, sooner or later. Humans have attempted to overcome the existential weight of disappearance. Potions for eternal life, incantations, deals with the devil, and medical interventions all try to prevent the disappearance caused by death. One might even try to outsmart death, as Ingmar Bergman’s figure of the knight Antonius Bock tried when he challenged death with a chess game. All these attempts have been futile so far.
The end of life, however, represents a social arena with noticeable significance. From mortuary studies, we know that dying and death are not just social phenomena related to loss and sorrow but also an opportunity for the living (Metcalf and Huntington 1991; Nešporová 2021; Robben 2004a). Mortuary rituals are arenas where the living meet and negotiate with each other. Ironically, mortuary rituals are often performed for the living (see Gillespie 2001: 78; Parker Pearson 1982: 112; Verdery 1999), although native conceptualizations of soul-doubles and their mutual relationship with the souls of nonhuman beings make the simplified contrast between the living and the dead more complex (Brož 2024). Ritual practices associated with death and ideas about dying can be mobilized in the service of various ends (Lock 1996), including negotiations of group belonging and distantiation from others (Fotta 2019). Since the death of organisms and things generates a need for subsequent management of their absence, the process invites similar engagements (Hetherington 2004: 168). Sometimes, things and human bodies can even disappear together at dumps as “society’s discards” (Millar 2018: 62). All this suggests that it might be productive to approach disappearance at landfills as an arena that creates opportunities known from the contexts when human life ends (cf. Reno 2016a: 218).
There are ways to cope with the inevitability of disappearance, thought of as death. Disappearance can only be a matter of perspective. Cross-culturally shared ideas about death and regeneration of life, analyzed by Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1982), embody the transformative solution to the problem of vanishing life. The social rupture caused by death is solved via the embracement of the belief that the essence of life does not disappear entirely; it only transforms.4 Rebirth negates the finality of death and the disappearance of life. Building upon Robert Hertz (1960) and his vision of mortuary practices as anomy-avoiding mechanisms, Bloch and Parry (1982: 15) demonstrate that the representation of death and rebirth as part of a cycle has consequences for social resilience and order-making. Three decades later, David Graeber (2012) extends the concept of cycling and transformation into the economy to argue that the ideas about death and the regeneration of life, on the one hand, and recycling, on the other, have something in common. They both solve the problem of keeping the status quo while being exposed to omnipresent change. Neither organisms nor things vanish; they only undergo transformations imagined as cycles.
Disappearance acquires a polysemic quality. The concept may refer not only to the state of being dead but also to vanishing from being sensed, ceasing to be known, or having an effect. Different senses of disappearance show diverse ways the process unfolds. The disappearance of the Ndembu initiates via their seclusion in the forest lodge during the circumcision ritual serves as a vehicle for ritual transition from one state of a human being to another one (Turner 1967). This sense of disappearance is always temporary, and vanishing from sight carries the promise that the entity will return. In contrast, Antonius Robben’s (2004b; 2018) work on terror in Argentina depicts disappearance as a repressive tactic of the state’s armed forces that abduct their political opponents and make them disappear for good. This kind of disappearance creates uncertainty among the opponents and prevents revenge or at least a proper funeral. Only the absent dead bodies that would never appear again serve the goals of what Jason De León (2015: 71) calls necroviolence. This sense of disappearance does not carry the promise that the person will come back. In contrast, uncertainty and doubts about the future serve the political goals of those in power; they destabilize Argentinian guerillas or contribute to Prevention Through Deterrence among De León’s migrants on the US-Mexico border. What remains after such disappearances are memories and signs such as personal belongings, photos, and texts that can trigger these memories.
In waste and discard studies, the disappearance has received particular attention. Martin Melosi’s (2005; 2020) historical research demonstrates that spatial solutions in waste management following the logic “out of sight, out of mind” can be a powerful way to make waste disappear. This process can be thought of as “placing absences” (Hetherington 2004: 159). In Hetherington’s view, the placement of absences is an essential part of social life and an important vehicle for the performance of social relations. Absence is as socially constitutive as presence, and its significance goes way beyond the themes of waste and discard (Bille, Hastrup and Flohr Sørenson 2010). Discard, nonetheless, is an arena where the management of absence has far-reaching consequences for thinking about disposability, socioeconomic relations, or understanding self and the ways we inhabit the world (Reno 2016a). Spatial management of waste and its disappearance does not mean that one has to make a shortcut claiming that waste is necessarily matter out of place (Liboiron 2022). As Liboiron points out, waste is rarely out of place in a sense proposed by Mary Douglas (2002). Waste is often in place and its spatial management reflects power relations in society (see also Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022).
Keeping waste inaccessible to senses can be understood as an act of hiding. Living in societies where Durkheim’s organic solidarity dominates inevitably results in reliance on others, which also means that specific processes and relations are hidden to everyday workings of social life. Such an absence can be taken to the extreme of the modernist insistence on self-creation, which denies the role of others in this creative process (Graeber 2007: 100). Building upon Graeber’s ideas, Reno (2016a: 14) argues that landfills intensify reliance on others while simultaneously hiding this reliance. I suggest that attention to the effects of hiding can move this line of reasoning further. As David Berliner (2022) shows, one of the effects of hiding approached from the perspective of the “gymnastics of the self” is the removal of constraints on action. Berliner describes the effect of a mask in promoting action that would not happen without the mask hiding a person’s identity. Mask provides a barrier. It constrains but simultaneously opens possibilities. Imagining society as a person and hiding tactics in landfills’ placement (remoteness, environment) as a kind of mask, we might consider what such hiding does. I argue that keeping landfills with garbage out of sight enables not only the perpetuation of specific, and not necessarily sustainable, ways of life but, more importantly, also removes constraints on actions that literally get off the leash. Dumping already sorted plastics ready for recycling, tombstones with the names of the deceased, intact packed food, or perfectly usable furniture can happen only because the disposal is hidden and the discards are supposed to disappear. Without the “mask,” it would be much harder to perform not only such a disposal but also enable the degree of consumption that generates excess. This view, I believe, resonates with Francisco Martínez’s (2025: 6) claim that opacity, secrecy, and hiding are not marginal effects emerging in a modern society, but they are intrinsic to it. Martínez, however, does not envision hiding as a practice that would simply perpetuate the status quo. He elaborates on the idea that hideouts are spaces for creative opportunities to transform the hidden and ambiguous into something else and potentially challenge the established configurations of power. In this perspective, the act of separation simultaneously carries the potential to establish relations and to reengage with the world across time and space.
The disappearance of waste has a strong temporal dimension. Interestingly, it is not a simple linear process based on the capacity for decomposition. As Romain Garcier (2012) demonstrated in his study of nuclear waste treatment, a circular movement between storage facilities can create a sense of disappearance. Viewed from a single storage location perspective, nuclear waste may be gone, but the temporal game based on circulation only postpones the final solution. The disappearance of waste is situated within multiple coexisting temporalities (Reno 2016b; Weber 2022b), which can be conceptualized as heterochronic (Sosna 2017) or chronotopic (Alexander 2023).
Catherine Alexander and Patrick O’Hare (2023) provided a key intervention in theorizing about the “disappearance of waste from view.” Putting knowledge into the center of their attention, they developed a classification of the “technologies of unknowing,” which are supposed to deflect attention away from wastes. Their elaborate classification includes temporal, spatial, epistemological, calculative, and rhetorical technologies. In addition to the spatial and temporal techniques mentioned in the previous paragraph, Alexander and O’Hare describe a range of techniques based on silencing or development of the regimes of secrecy, changing modes of measurement, calculation, scalar shifts, as well as ways waste is renamed or relabeled to become part of discursive games with words. Although many of these techniques are based on intentional decisions to make waste disappear, less conscious forms of ignorance are at play as well. As Judith Bovensiepen and Mathijs Pelkmans (2020) demonstrate, “wilful blindness” includes both conscious and unconscious forms of ignorance. The wide coverage of various modalities of unknowing or not knowing provides a productive conceptual framework for analyzing the disappearance of garbage, landfill leachate, or landfills as such, which will be discussed in the following chapters of this book.
Not knowing refers not only to the absence of knowledge but it may also signify more. As Milan Kundera suggests in his Unbearable Lightness of Being, people design facilities to make their bodily wastes disappear in the darkness of “invisible Venices of shit.” Kundera’s elaboration on the conduits facilitating the disappearance of this particular kind of unwanted matter includes ideas beyond the notions of visibility and knowing.5 In addition to the recognition of a waste’s semiotic potency for contradiction (i.e., feces vs. Venice), described also by Dominique Laporte (2000) in his shit vs. gold binary, Kundera notices that such facilities are evidence of hypocrisy. The more elaborate and beautiful the bathrooms, the more hypocrisy in ignoring the essential physiological processes of the body. The same logic can be applied to other types of waste, their management, and associated infrastructure. The development of waste management policies often reinforces the hypocrisy. Slick incinerators, robotic recycling centers, or experimental physical-chemical devices share a lot with Kundera’s toilet bowls reminiscent of beautiful water lily blossoms designed to forget the poverty of the human body.6 Pavel Mašek’s observation that garbage trucks are ideal apparatuses, in Vilém Flusser’s sense, because they deflect attention from their content and use their surface instead to build trust, resonates with Kundera’s story.7 Those who have had an opportunity to experience the interior of these trucks would probably confirm the contrast between the outer surface and the interior, including the content. The new technologies for waste management make it easier to ignore the poor garbage by emphasizing slick metal sheets, walls, nice colors, and positive slogans. The treated matter is not only out of sight, but it is believed that it can disappear entirely.
Alexander and O’Hare (2023) also make a key point that unknowing exists in a dialectic relationship to knowing. In other words, analytical attention should be paid to both these ways to “divert attention away from waste and its consequences and, in others, emphasize waste to create opportunities for dispossession and intervention” (Alexander and O’Hare 2023: 428). The need for waste’s disappearance clearly goes hand in hand with its return and the need to keep it present in various senses of presence, be it its unexpected appearance in landscape, containers of waste workers, households of waste pickers, works of artists, inside bodies of organisms, in bird nests, as stench on work apparel or in car trunks, or various media representations where garbage and landfills do some performative work.
Waste is never either fully present or absent. It might be suppressed and pushed away in certain contexts, but it has a surprising capacity to cross boundaries, both imaginative and physical, and reappear always ready to engage with new relations. Even contemporary struggles to make waste disappear through circularity are problematic (Corvellec, Stowell and Johansson 2022; O’Hare and Rams 2024a). Waste’s disappearance has always faced its reappearance and unexpected presence. Hetherington’s (2004) conceptualization of disposal as “placement of absence” builds upon the scholarship that puts into its center of interest the relationship between order-making and rejection of certain elements (see Douglas 2002). It is not enough, however, to reject the elements through sorting, it is necessary to eradicate them (Liboiron 2019). Waste must disappear to prevent its undisciplined agency to harm, or, as Reno puts it, avoid “alternative possibilities we would rather not experience or imagine” (2016a: 10–11). This understanding of disappearance, however, is about the productive potency of absence that holds and becomes socially effective as such. But the disappearance of waste is a fantasy that is both imperfect and reversible. Waste’s odor spreads, wastewater leaks, pieces fly or get transported by humans, mammals, and birds, and incineration of garbage is not without residues. Various clues and signs signal waste’s victory over disappearance. It lurks around and reminds us that it cannot be gotten rid of easily.
Waste can appear in public spaces as a powerful sign that conveys various meanings. Given the fact that waste can be in more than human perspective conceptualized as a sign of life (Reno 2014), it is productive to examine what kind of lives are signified by such signs. While Reno’s primary aim was to extend the conceptualization of waste beyond the human, his semiotic approach also works for the contexts when waste-as-sign gets channeled back from the doom of forgetting to shape social life. The physical appearance of garbage and even hoarding in public spaces can serve various political purposes. In the “You stink” (tal’at ríhtak) movement in Lebanon, garbage amassed on the streets or even sent in packages to politicians was a vehicle of resistance against the supposedly corrupted political regime (Abu-Rish 2015). Trash revolts in Dakar paralyzed the city via dumping household waste in public spaces to raise the issues of social inequality and the value of labor and served as a vehicle for negotiating collective identities (Fredericks 2018). Berg (2023) shows that garbage strikes may lead to “garbage talk,” which offers actionable solutions but leaves the real causes unaddressed. Her emphasis on garbage as an opportunity to reframe debates and shift attention indicates that waste’s semiotic presence is intimately tied to absence. In other words, being present may be more about hiding what is not supposed to be present.
An ethnographic immersion into the lives of landfill workers, waste pickers, employees of incinerators, managers of companies, people living close to waste infrastructures, and other organisms thriving on garbage enables me to learn and narrate what it means to live with waste in uncertain times. It offers a view into the world full of unexpected consequences, creativity, emerging relations, and forms of living to demonstrate that waste’s disappearance is only illusory, as Ivan Klíma argued in the initial quotation of this chapter. It is not only an issue of the slow decay of materials that resist disappearing (Hage 2021: 3; McDougall 2021) but also waste’s capacity for engagement (Gille 2007; Henig 2019; Hird 2012). As Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins argues, waste never truly disappears; it only changes place and form (2020: 23).
In this sense, the project builds upon existing scholarship concerning the treatment of primarily municipal solid waste through ethnographic immersion into the lives of those who care for garbage on behalf of others (Butt 2023; Doherty 2022; Fredericks 2018; Furniss 2017; Gutberlet et al. 2021; Millar 2018; Nagle 2013; O’Hare 2022a; Reno 2016a; Resnick 2021; Saethre 2020; Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2020; Zapata and Zapata Campos 2015). These ethnographies demonstrate that living with garbage is anything but passive witnessing of its disappearance. In contrast, garbage offers a multitude of opportunities for engagement, including those presented in this book.
Czech Minister of Environment Petr Hladík articulates explicitly what seems to be the most pervasive approach to landfilling in Czechia: “We should completely eliminate landfilling … The landfill ban is insurmountable; without it and others, we will not move forward in the circular economy and in meeting the European target.”8 Although the pan-European plans are less radical, they lend landfilling a special role in the story of waste’s disappearance. Landfills literally represent disappearance squared. Not only does garbage need to get out of sight and mind, but the landfills themselves should also disappear. Disposal at landfills9 is often perceived as outdated technology that ranks at the bottom of the preferred means of waste management in the European Union (EU 2018b). By 2035, the member states should reduce the landfilling of municipal waste to 10 percent of the total amount of municipal waste generated (EU 2018a). The European Commission made an ambitious step forward to reduce landfilling to the necessary minimum. After thousands of years of waste dumping, this practice is disappearing. Although EU plans and documents aiming at greater environmental and social responsibility try to be realistic, vernacular interpretations in places like Czechia push the meaning further to imagine and call for the end of landfilling. These interpretations aim at the point that Patrick O’Hare (2022b: 63) metaphorically describes as an act of throwing landfills onto the trash heap of history.
Although landfilling has its dark side, other means of waste management are not innocent either. Incinerators are well-known for reducing volumes but increasing toxicity (Gille 2007: 25) and their contribution to climate change is a question of the timeframe considered (Ballinger et al. 2020). Identifying malfunctions of these highly complex technologies resulting in pollution is not always easy to detect (Zhang 2024: 79). Recycling may have negative consequences via pretending to solve problems while serving the needs of the unproductive “busy-ness” and diverting attention from real causes of problems (Hird 2022; MacBride 2011), allowing environmental degradation (Liboiron 2009), and generating jobs that are difficult to handle (Alexander and Reno 2012; Stowell and Warren 2018; Uhlová 2018). Moreover, the materiality of waste matters. As Forbes McDougall et al. (2008) argue, different waste management options are appropriate for different waste fractions. Therefore, “there are no overall ‘best’ or ‘worst’ options” (McDougall et al. 2008: 10). The omnipresent push for circular economy does not necessarily lead to a more sustainable future either (Corvellec et al. 2022).
If waste disposal were unambiguously the worst solution for waste management, one would expect its inferiority to be evident irrespective of space and time. However, this is not the case. From a global perspective, disposal at landfills has experienced historical ups and downs (Melosi 2020; O’Hare 2022: 59). Sanitary landfills still serve as a pragmatic solution for a world dominated by mass consumption (cf. Melosi 2020, 550; O’Hare 2022b: 64; Reno 2016a: 213–15). Formal comparisons of various management means for municipal solid waste do not show a black-and-white picture and suggest rethinking waste hierarchy without assuming that one size fits all (Vaverková 2019; Vergara and Tchobanoglous 2012). Even environmental engineers argue that a loop closure within circular economic models cannot be achieved without paying attention to residues and places for their final disposal (Cossu 2018: 86). In other words, imagining a world without places to dispose of unwanted matter is unrealistic.
There seems to be something other than the mere disadvantages of landfilling that encourages the need to get rid of it. In times of crisis, societies tend to develop various mechanisms to cope with it. As David Edwards (2017) argues, one of the solutions to a crisis is giving up something. For Edwards, giving up is a social mechanism that handles the danger coming from chaos-producing crises. Giving up entails a whole spectrum of acts ranging from abandonment to violence. René Girard (1986) envisioned crisis as a trigger for collective violence directed toward those who could be blamed for causing the crisis. Although the classic models of scapegoating work with living creatures, the logic of blame has a seductive charm that can expand to other realms that have an intimate relation to life. Using disposal at landfills as a scapegoat has the potential to make the world meaningful again and secure continuity. Although the EU experience varies from the discourses on the reduction of landfilling (Corvellec and Hultman 2012) to those calling for its ban and entire elimination, this means of waste management is imagined as a major culprit in the story of human failed attempts to wrestle with waste.
The role of crisis as a trigger for giving up deserves attention. Although Girard’s (1986) original notion of crisis mobilizing the collective response was associated primarily with “social crises” related to the dissolution of social differentiation or social order in general, the spectrum of crises that may cause similar effects is wider. Today’s world does not seem to be understood well via the singularity of a crisis. In contrast, multiple related and untangled dimensions of the crisis and smaller crises at different scales constitute what Thomas Eriksen (2016) calls overheating. Considering the individual dimensions of the crisis, such as environmental degradation, financial collapse, and global inequalities, separately does not augment but instead fragments our understanding of the problem (Hornborg 2016: 18). These connections, frictions, and interdependencies may be best viewed as polycrisis (Henig and Knight 2023). Capitalism is pushed to set realignments in motion when crises emerge and chaos spreads. As Anna Tsing (2005: 42) points out, such realignments may be associated with the calls to give up certain regions to enable the continuity of capitalism itself.
Waste and crisis are the usual suspects in the narratives about the world falling apart. Kelly Alexander (2024) describes the role of food waste in triggering moral panic. Building upon the ideas of Stanley Cohen (1972) and Stuart Hall et al. (1978), Alexander analyzes public messages featuring food waste in Belgium and the EU more broadly to demonstrate their potential in generating a sense of urgency. Messages concerning food waste seem designed to highlight a supposedly key issue and prompt the public to act. Alexander shows that, however, moral outrage redirects attention to consumer responsibility, while the excessive choice enabled by the market remains unaddressed.
Anne Berg (2023) addresses the close relationship between waste and crisis. Not only does waste represent a symptom of crisis, but it also serves, paradoxically, as a solution. Berg argues that large-scale systemic crises look more manageable when attention shifts to something else: questions of cleanup and moral expectations related to garbage management. More importantly, this shift to garbage talk and garbage practices that offer seemingly easy and quick solutions to the crisis “leave the causes of that crisis unaddressed” (Berg 2023: 48). Therefore, refocusing attention on giving up waste disposal in the face of technological advancement is a well-tested strategy to shift attention from societies’ main problems. In the case of European waste disposal, however, garbage makes another step forward. Embodied by monstrous masses of unwanted matter that fill specific parts of the landscape, landfilling itself, as practice, should disappear. This practice is given up for the greater good and the continuation of life.
Landfilling has a crucial quality that makes it prone to be given up. In a time of increasing environmental awareness and scrutiny, landfills embody a clear link between the profitable disposal10 of garbage and the negative consequences of this process. Key actors in waste management tend to conceptualize the problems of garbage via negative externalities: peripheral costs resulting from a specific kind of waste management.11 In the case of landfilling, the potential negative externalities such as leakages and fires can be linked to the particular place where the trajectories of discarded things supposedly end. Although linking is not always easy and is contingent upon slow temporality (Doherty 2019; Nixon 2011), landfills’ materiality and immobility make future scrutiny possible.12 Landfills are out there with their full bellies firmly set in the landscape.
Both incineration and circular models offer better opportunities to decouple profit from its negative consequences. Incinerators are not places where matter ends. They are rather highly sophisticated black boxes for transformation where garbage enters and residues leave.13 The residues are mobile and continue their journey to uncertain “somewheres.” Circular models are even more capable of befogging the link between profit and negative externalities. Circularity may slow down the negative environmental impacts, including their very recognition (Corvellec et al. 2022: 6; Millar, McLaughlin and Börger 2019). Things move, get reclassified, have negative consequences, and responsibilities get fragmented and distributed. Leaving landfilling behind is another step in the story of minimizing obstacles to generating profit at a time when industrial activities face the danger of being subject to increasing scrutiny. As Alf Hornborg argues, “the very rationale of capitalism is to keep such externalities external” (2016: 115). The more uncertainty in linking negative externalities to profit-making, the better for the economic subject that uses waste as a means of profit. Landfilling is too straightforward to efficiently obscure socioeconomic relations and hide its material consequences.
One of Marx’s major contributions to understanding capitalism was a recognition of its mystification powers. Although the concept of fetishism has appeared at the center of attention concerning mystification (e.g., Ellen 1988; Gudeman 2008; Taussig 1980), Marx’s more general aim was to depict the entire system as effectively obscuring the basic principles and relations upon which it relies. As David Harvey emphasizes, a specific method enabled Marx to “discover how deceiving the world of appearances can be” (2010: 8). Marx’s analysis uncovered the capitalist power to mystify social relations and their effects on the economic process. Representations of the capitalist system, both in public discourses and theorizing of pre-Marx political economists, failed to acknowledge the social constitution of capital and its inherent potential to generate social inequality. For Marx, the mystification is “implicit in the relations of capital as a whole” (1990: 1024). Although the critical idea of focusing on what can be hidden behind overt appearances of any socioeconomic system offers rich space for examining mystifications, opacities, or deflections, I will direct the reader’s attention to a narrower problem of the development of this trend.
Market economies tend to develop in less and less understandable forms. As Stephen Gudeman (2016: 23) argues, one of the dominant trends in market economies is their expansion into abstract spheres. This abstraction increases the distance from the material world and has other effects. Abstraction combined with sophisticated technologies enabling high-speed trading or decentralized forms of value exchange and storage generates space for discovering new ways of profit-making. A limited ability to understand these abstractions and trace their inner workings prevents recognition of their adverse effects, such as failing to offer new social alternatives after the demise of the state (see Tremčinský 2022) or their environmental consequences.
Neoliberal versions of capitalism, as systems heavily relying on the calculative market logic, have successfully hidden its effects on the rise of social inequality (Harvey 2007: 119). With the increasing capacity of capital generation, the inner workings of capitalist formations have become less visible. While increasing abstraction and technological complexity generate the “smoke and mirror” effect, there is another way to reach the same end. Anna Tsing (2005: 27–28) argues that new frontiers of capitalism are contingent upon the capacity to confuse various boundaries. Such confusion effectively stimulates new opportunities for profit-making and accumulation of capital.
In the world of discard and waste, the confusion stems from the indeterminacy of waste (Alexander and Sanchez 2018; Gille 2013; Henig 2019; Hird 2012; Lepawsky 2018). Waste is not simply something out there. It is part of the social orders, discourses, and material flows operating in societies but emerges from specific social arrangements and ideas about social life and what might be left behind (see Furniss 2017: 305; Gille 2007: 18). Recently, Michelle Schmidt described the contingencies of the waste concept using her ethnography of the Mopan Maya. She demonstrates that “‘waste’ is an ideational and material construct that turns people into consumers, nature into objects, and surplus into trash” (2022: 104). For my argument concerning the potentiality of waste to create opportunities for market, politics, and social relations, it is primarily the categorical and discursive ambiguity rather than the ontological indeterminacy based on the material liveliness of the waste matter itself (see Hird 2012). I will demonstrate that waste’s indeterminacy always lurks around and offers various opportunities for those who can recognize this potential.
This book focuses on Czechia. This move attempts to break from the grand narratives about Eastern Europe as a uniform block contrasting with Western Europe. These monolithic views of the social world in Eastern Europe create a false image of a universal post-socialist experience (Caldwell 2009: 4). Although certain features of social life and structural conditions resonate well across Central and Eastern European countries affected by Russian imperial presence before 1989, there are differences in the ways individual countries have adapted to the Europeanization project (Jehlicka 2002: 18). Capital accumulation can affect spaces differently and challenge a rigid notion of geography based on fixed centers and peripheries in Europe (Kojanić 2020). Living with and relating to waste is a productive arena for understanding the nuances of the Europeanization project because it touches upon deeply rooted assumptions and values of what the appropriate modes of engagement with discard should be like. This arena has the potential to reveal the specificity of practices and modes of thinking in this country as well as similarities shared across larger European spaces.
One of the arguably best portrayals of Czechs is in Mariusz Szczygieł’s novel Gottland.14 This Polish novelist provides a nuanced and sensitive immersion into the history of Czech society using the life stories of selected people. The tragicomic book builds upon Franz Kafka’s playful approach to polysemy and absurdity to depict the coexistence of seemingly incompatible social elements. An expansion of Baťas capitalist shoe empire before 1948, the greatness of artists, and the bravery of those who challenged the Communist regime are juxtaposed with the collaborators with the Nazi regime, builders of the monuments to demonstrate the never-ending friendship with the Soviets, various culture-specific silences, or unexpected consequences of the postsocialist transformation after the Velvet Revolution. Szczygieł’s journey into the Czech souls is helpful in providing a sense of how contradictions and absurdities offer a framework for social life. Contradictions represent an essential feature of all societies (Berliner et al. 2016), but Czechs seem to have this logic embedded deeply under their skin. When outsiders wonder why an emphasis on formal rules and disciplining does not fit an omnipresent willingness to transgress the rules, why one of the strongest pro-Israeli societies brings up children listening to rough antisemitic jokes, why Václav Havel could become a legend while his texts remained unknown to the vast majority of the Czech population, or why Milan Kundera, the most celebrated novelist, held a ban on translations of his French-written books to his native language, or why Czechs portray themselves as overachievers in recycling while sending most of the collected plastics to incinerators (see Sosna, Stehlíková and Mašek 2024), an image of the soldier Švejk, the ultimate trickster, emerges on the scene. Should one be surprised to learn that the Czech publishers of Szczygieł’s book were threatened to be sued for supposedly illegal use of the title Gottland? Not really. It sounds precisely like another chapter from Havel’s absurd drama.15
The Europeanization project, which has strengthened substantially since 2004 when Czechia joined the EU along with seven other Central and Eastern European countries, brought new challenges. On the one hand, the spread of EU policies and regulations from the center has not always been smooth and their impact has not been uniform (Martínez and Beilmann 2020: 1349). On the other hand, the new countries have discovered limits in their capacities to shape the debates in the center. The project of Europeanization has had a strong disciplining component that forced the new member states to figure out ways to adapt to various regulations (see Barry 2006; Dunn 2004: 163; Gille 2016; Martínez and Beilmann 2020; Skalník 2018). These regulations, nonetheless, have been subject to creative interpretations, resistance, or misuse. Although these capacities developed during the period of state socialism and experience of life under Marxist-Leninist ideology, they continue to shape social life (see Hann, Humphrey and Verdery 2002: 11). They seem to have much deeper roots that pre-date 1948. An extensive scholarship on postsocialist Eurasia (see Balaš 2024; Berdahl and Bunzel 2010; Bridger and Pine 1998; Burawoy and Verdery 2000; Cervinkova, Buchowski and Uherek 2015; Dzenovska 2018; Hann 2002, 2016; Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Pehe 2020) tackles various aspects of the social condition. What the socialist period probably reinforced was a framework for imagining and thinking about the regulations as tools emerging in a formal system that is not necessarily compatible with practices and sentiments of everyday life. As Ladislav Holy (2003: 213) argues, the experience of state socialism resulted in an untenable tension between the images of the evil state and the great nation, which eventually resulted in the fall of the Communist regime. Although this argument captures only part—symbolic and identitarian—of the dynamic behind the fall of the Communist regime, it is essential because it suggests where the distrust of any formal structure, such as state or union, comes from in Czechia. With a certain degree of sensitivity to local nuances, a similar logic probably can be traced in other postsocialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
The lack of trust grows from long-term experiences of disillusion and disappointment. Every time I talked to my Romani buddy Libor, a fellow waste picker, about possibilities to improve the quality of life of his family, he listened. Still, his calm eyes told me clearly how much hope he had when a white educated gadžo (non-Roma) like myself brought such suggestions. He had been around long enough to believe such fairy tales. I was sad, but over time I realized that it was not difficult to scale this experience up and see a similar pattern of distrust among the Czechs related to the broader category of Westerners. The 1938 Munich agreement, when Czechoslovakia was betrayed by its allies France and Great Britain, is deeply ingrained under the skin of Czechoslovaks. A recent 2025 reenactment of a similar humiliating ritual, this time between the political representatives of the United States and Ukraine, happened in Munich again! The parties slightly changed but the inner logic remained the same: Eastern Europeans can be thrown overboard.
Can we trust again? It is hard to say, but the feeling of being EU citizens of the second category has never faded out. Opportunities to travel and test the quality of identical brands in other countries and contemplate the notion of justice behind different wages at the same multinational corporations in various EU countries do not alleviate the doubts. Moreover, centuries of Western imagination of Eastern Europe as a barbaric, uncivilized zone (see Wolff 1994) can hardly be erased during the mere two decades of shared lives within the EU. The Orientalizing mindset still permeates the thinking of politicians, laypeople, and even scholars who have supposedly high capacities for reflection (see Buchowski 2006; Jehlička 2021; Kürti 2008; Thelen 2011). A revelation that Czechia has served as a dumping ground for both legal and illegal waste (Billig 2019; Lozoviuk 2012) imported exactly from those countries that have positioned themselves as European environmental leaders and “teachers” of the barbaric East can hardly be viewed as anything else than hypocrisy.
The economy has structured the relations of Czechia to the outer world substantially. Thanks to its industrial history, Czechia developed strong economic ties, especially with Germany. In the language of managers of multinational corporations, Czechia falls among the “best-cost countries” in contrast to “high-cost countries.” This euphemism is not only telling, but it also shows a discursive tool for neutralizing tacit hierarchies. Czech industrial history has been an opportunity for the heavy hitters in the West, and the state has been generous to foreign investors by supporting “investment-promotion machines” (Drahokoupil 2009: 150). This strategy not only results in negative environmental, economic, and social consequences (Delanová 2015; Franc and Nezhyba 2007; Lupták Burzová 2019; Pavlínek 2014; Schling 2017; Sosna and Brunclíková 2019), but also reinforces the notion of hierarchy and sense of being used. Waste management did not diverge from the general trend of foreign investment. Austrian, Danish, French, and German companies recognized an opportunity to grow their business and started expanding into Czech waste management from the early 1990s. The largest share of the market, however, is still controlled by the company AVE, which has a complicated ownership structure but still has a component of local Czech businessmen and women.
European concerns about sustainability and associated environmental policies and regulations were essential features in the historical development of the EU (see Barry 2001: 75). The EU has been developing agendas related to sustainable development and officially adopted them in 1992 when the Maastricht Treaty was signed. Formulating and implementing policies that would profoundly change European capacity to face systemic challenges in pursuit of prosperity while respecting environmental limits is considered one of the core values of the EU (EEA 2021: 9). In the sphere of waste management, the early policy (75/442/EEC) of the European Economic Community (EEC) specified that “the recovery of waste and the use of recovered materials should be encouraged to conserve natural resources” (EEC 1975: 2). Subsequent development led to the formulation of the waste hierarchy and the promotion of circular economic principles. Consequently, disposal at landfills has started disappearing but at a variable pace. While countries such as the Netherlands or Sweden have been leading the abandonment of disposal at landfills (Corvellec and Hultman 2012; Egüez 2021: 5), countries to the east of the Iron Curtain followed a different pathway that still relied on landfilling (Gille 2007; Weber 2022a).16 Nonetheless, it is essential to emphasize that compliance with the waste hierarchy goes beyond the mere diversion from landfilling (Egüez 2021: 1). Also, it is worth noting that the 2018 amendment of the EU Waste Act enriched the debate about the future of landfilling via a focus on materiality. The act established specific restrictions on landfilling of recyclable or energy-recoverable materials (Zhang et al. 2022: 11). In other words, it is not only about how one may dispose of things but also about what kind of things can be disposed of. This kind of policy development resonates with Gille’s (2016: 131) claim that its efficacy stems from its focus on the materiality of economic activities.
The adoption of EU regulations and policies is a story of power asymmetry. As Gille (2016) described convincingly, the unruly terrain of power frictions in Hungary-EU relations was structured by policies targeting material conditions of social life. The foundations of the EU-wide regulations were originally designed to match the needs of the producers in the countries that were early EU members. This resulted not only in disadvantageous shifts on the side of the producers in the later EU member states whose traditional ways of doing things were different—not necessarily inferior—but it also, paradoxically, enabled lowering the standards in some cases. Gille’s depiction of the gradual materialization of EU politics and its consequences for the prolongation of inequalities between the former East and West fits nicely into a wider picture of “Eastern Europe” being understood as a recipient of knowledge and goods, a region in the never-ending process of improvement or catching up, a kind of blind spot on the map (see Buchowski 2004; Fishberg, Larsen and Kropp 2023; Jehlička 2021; Müller 2021). Given the continuing inequalities among the EU countries, regardless of how much they are embedded in the relations on the ground or just perceived by those who feel that they pull the shorter end of the rope, one should not be surprised that a response is often resistance, because it is precisely the last resort that the weak use to curb the strong (see Scott 1985). Moreover, going back to Szczygieł and his depiction of playful absurdity, one may realize that resistance can take advantage of this capacity via the verbal exaggeration of EU’s regulations, while doing everything to bypass them in everyday life on the ground using various tactics of informality that have long tradition in the former Soviet block (see Brković 2015; Henig and Makovicky 2017; Knudsen and Frederiksen 2015; Ledeneva 1998; Makovicky 2018; Morris and Polese 2014; Polese 2023).
Ethnographic insights into discard practices and waste management in Central and Eastern Europe received arguably limited attention compared to the attention they received in Africa, Asia, or the Americas. Gille’s (2007, 2012, 2016, 2025) works provided a detailed view of the Hungarian waste regimes and situated various findings in broader theorizing about the nature of socio-material entanglements, global connections, and reflections on socialism. Anthropological approaches were usually immersed more into local ways of life with waste and various salvaging activities of the urban poor (Chelcea 2015; Hejnal 2013; Rakowski 2016, 2017; Vašát 2014, 2023). Special attention was devoted to food waste, especially to the activities of dumpster divers (Kliková and Brunclíková 2017), everyday practices of food management in households (Podjed and Polajnar Horvat 2020), and thrifty activities that minimize wastefulness (Sosna, Brunclíková, and Galeta 2019). Romani studies have produced several reflections of economic activities (see Brazzabeni, Pereira de Cunha, and Fotta 2015a) associated also with sanitation, scavenging, or recycling (Dohotaru 2013; Dunajeva and Kostka 2021; Filčák and Ficeri 2021; Pulay 2023; Resnick 2018, 2021, 2025; Saethre 2020). Some studies focus on garbage and its potential to convey various meanings (Kacperczyk 2021; Sosna 2017) and provide a source of information about consumption (Antošová et al. 2024; Bilska, Tomaszewska, and Kolozyn-Krajewska 2024; Brunclíková 2017a; Jehlička, Veselá and Kubíčková 2025; Kormaňáková, Remešová, and Vančová 2021; Kubíčková, Veselá, and Kormaňáková 2021; Sosna and Brunclíková 2019; Veselá et al. 2025). Although landfilling and life at landfills represent a small portion of these studies, those that address these topics suggest that the discussions about technical and political aspects of waste regimes are reductive. They often fail to acknowledge the dimensions beyond the general idea that landfills are primarily infrastructures to make waste disappear. What life at landfills shows are diverse ways of waste’s reappearance, mobilization, and reuse.
Following the Introduction, the first chapter describes the ways in which the knowledge presented in this book has come into being. It narrates the story of a researcher originally trained to analyze material remains of past societies and his unexpected encounter with the richness of social life associated with contemporary waste infrastructures. The chapter explains the origins of ethnographic research and its specificity, given a patchy back-and-forth nature in the country where the researcher was born and spent most of his life. At the center of the epistemic interest is a question of how to examine the nuances of the familiar. Building upon Marianne Lien’s (2015) call to attend to the concepts and assumptions that are widely shared and taken for granted, I present a research strategy based on the use of the self as a vehicle for understanding the limits of the familiar. Switching between environments provided me with the opportunity to contrast and confront divergent forms of living in ways that could generate reflections on those elements that were taken for granted. Additionally, the chapter outlines the key sites, their unique characteristics, and the reasons they became central to the knowledge presented in this book. Special attention is paid to trust as one of the central components of the research of waste underflows.
The second chapter takes the reader into the world of landfill workers, who, in addition to their formal duties, interact with garbage in multiple ways. The chapter demonstrates a commitment to not letting garbage go to waste but to developing various ways to salvage it. Using Cleo Wölfle Hazard’s (2022) notion of underflows, I examine workers’ practices as an unrecognized part of the official waste streams. These invisible underflows contain not only matter but also ideas, signs, discourses, and pollution that can unexpectedly resurface to make garbage present again. Scavenging and tinkering enable workers to pull their “fish” from the waste stream, allowing them to flow into new waters. The chapter describes different regimes within these underflows that engage with garbage through reuse, sharing, gift-giving, and both collective and individual forms of commodification. The paradox of these salvaging activities is their self-evident presence, combined with their capacity to remain hidden due to being unrecognized. This creates ethical friction between workers and management, which stems from a need to conform to formal rules while tolerating salvage activities that have multiple positive effects for all the actors involved. To understand the fluid nature of this recovery ethics, I place at the center the notion of ordinary ethics, which accounts for the ambivalences and contradictions of everyday social practices.
Staying with landfill workers, the next chapter examines the landfill leachate’s recirculation as a form of circular economy. Recirculation is a technoscientific solution to the problem of wastewater at landfills, which attempts to keep the fluid in motion within the constraints of the waste infrastructure. Landfill leachate is arguably the most critical matter at sanitary landfills because it challenges their primary function: to contain the waste. Leachate emerges in quantities that fluctuate, its toxicity is unpredictable, and its fluidity and causticity make waste infrastructures susceptible to leaks. Recirculation, practiced by landfill workers, represents the most common solution to the indeterminacy of leachate. This chapter approaches recirculation of landfill leachate from the perspective of circularity to understand the relationship between the circle as an abstract ideal and the circle as an economic model. This approach explores what forms of representation the circle engenders and what consequences circular dynamics produce. I argue that spraying the leachate back to the surface, letting it percolate, capturing it in the sumps, and eventually spraying it back again is a vehicle of postponement. Recirculation saves the company’s money for special treatment of hazardous waste, minimizes the probability of leaks, but keeping the fluid in motion postpones the solution of what to do with the unwanted matter.
The fourth chapter describes the salvaging activities of waste pickers who shape the disappearance and reappearance of garbage at landfills in multiple ways. These people, who are dominated by the Roma, disrupt garbage disappearance inside landfill bodies and make parts of it sensible again. Building upon Kathleen Millar’s (2018) forms of living, I examine why waste pickers do what they do despite having other work opportunities. All the challenges and obstacles associated with their state of being unwelcomed but tolerated at landfills are outweighed by freedom, the social nature of work, and an opportunity to take advantage of the waste pickers’ strengths. I pay attention to the various modalities of the disappearance and reappearance of garbage. The first one is based on the disruption of the normative trajectories of garbage. Waste pickers create underflows within these streams and use tactics to temporarily hide or reveal recovered items, primarily scrap metal. These practices are immersed in the fluid relations among the actors who react to the changing composition and magnitude of waste streams. The second modality relates to waste pickers themselves. While affecting waste streams and rendering garbage visible, usable, and exchangeable, waste pickers themselves remain elusive. Their existence and contribution to sustainability and the circular economy remain unrecognized. The third modality includes material sediments of scrap metal processing left in the woods, as well as smoke from burning scrap metal components. The semiotics of fragments in the soil, the positioning of knives and rotten pieces of meat to deter potential visitors, and smoke as a prominent indicator of informal scrap metal processing reveal a rich spectrum of signs that make the practices of scavenging and processing present. The last modality depicts mixing as a powerful tactic of concealment. Using two cases, I demonstrate the role of mixing in reducing an observer’s ability to distinguish between different components that constitute the whole.
The fifth chapter explores the logic of organizing entities perceived as uncanny or strange. Using the Czech vernacular word podivnost, I examine entities that share the capacity to irritate or disturb. Building upon scholarship about classification and the role of invisible forces of categories in shaping social life, I place the center of interest on sites of discard, military areas, industrial farms, mines, and places of tragic events. Via focusing on the histories of these places, the chapter reveals an inherent logic that I call magnetism of strangeness. The use of a metaphor of magnetism points to the capacity of strange entities and activities to attract each other along a spatiotemporal continuum. I argue that strangeness sticks to places and tends to perpetuate itself through a series of magnetic relations over time. The metaphor of magnetism is examined from the perspective of its capacity for both attraction and repulsion, regularity of patterning, and the invisible nature of magnetic relations, which are not seen, but their consequences can be felt. To demonstrate the power of magnetism, the text embarks on a journey to narrate the histories of three places. The first describes the transformation of a mine into a dump site, sanitary landfill, and incinerator. The second place traces the history of a former military training ground used by different armies over centuries, which was later converted into a sanitary landfill, then attracted an industrial piggery, and already has plans for a new shooting ground once the landfilling is complete. The third place witnessed a rich history of mining, its decline, and the atrocities of World War II, which were brought about by the rubble of abandoned mines, subsequent dumping, and sanitary landfilling. All these uncanny histories demonstrate the spatiotemporal and classificatory qualities of disappearance as well as a position of discard and waste within a wider field of entities and processes that provoke and disturb.
The Conclusions chapter of Europe’s Disappearing Waste brings together the disparate ideas, people, places, and histories that the reader encountered during their journey through this book. It demonstrates the local pervasiveness of a pressing need to make garbage disappear and the failures to achieve it. This part of the book summarizes the different registers and modalities of vanishing and reappearance. Although the thrust of the book rests in local conceptualization and understanding of life vis-à-vis (un)wanted matter, the Conclusions situate this particular knowledge in a wider field of practices designed to make garbage disappear in other parts of the world. I argue that the future of our relationship with waste should not be driven by the desire to make its disappearance more efficient or absolute. I argue that the better direction would be accepting the necessity and presence of waste that requires care and offers opportunities for reflection and support of alternative forms of living.