The challenges of climate and environmental change and the contribution of cities to global warming and natural resource depletion make the issue of sustainable urban waste governance crucial for contemporary urban spaces and for their wider ecological footprint. However, while some of the issues surrounding the governance of waste have been identified in the contemporary literature, relatively little attention has been given to the various, often highly contested, ways in which waste and its governance are framed. This book offers a critical social sciences perspective on the issue of organising waste in cities. Often positioned in terms of relatively narrow engineering, economic and/or physical scientific discourses (see, for example, Barton et al, 1996; Morrissey and Browne, 2004; Skordilis, 2004; Hung et al, 2007), the book aims to emphasise the ways in which the notion of waste, and the narratives and discourses associated with it, are socially constructed with corresponding implications for the governance of waste and local waste handling practices (see, for example, Cooper, 2009; Tuler and Webler, 2010; Fried and Eyles, 2011; Corvellec and Hultman, 2012; Foote and Mazzolini, 2012). Therefore, the contributions contained in this book position the governance of waste not from a specific managerial perspective but from a range of different understandings of how the waste problem is defined, interpreted and governed. The focus of the book is on urban and municipal household solid waste, but concerns over waste are linked to such issues as globalisation, governance, biodiversity and social, economic and environmental justice.

The popular saying, ‘Your rubbish is someone else's treasure,’ is not just an indication of the marketisation of waste, but also the way in which waste is socially constructed (see, for example, Douglas, 1966; MacKillop, 2009). The meanings of waste, and therefore the values attached to it, varies between places, societies, cultures, economies, markets, spaces and times. The waste infrastructures created to store waste become a mirror, making it possible to understand how society resembles it by providing its reflection (see Chapter Three, this volume). In other words, waste becomes a narrative/narrator of the society in which it is embedded. However, waste is much more than a social construct: ‘Waste is intrinsically, profoundly, a matter of materiality’ (Gregson and Crang, 2010: 1026).