Countering exclusionary infrastructure in apartment waste management: Towards a relational place-based governance in Victoria

Abstract

In this paper we illustrate how normalised practices and strategies of waste management pay insufficient attention to social life and distributional impacts by excluding apartments and placing them at the margins of domestic waste management. In considering shifts towards more circular post-consumption systems, this paper describes the problematic policy and regulatory imaginary of apartment waste management within the Circular Economy narratives of sustainable domestic waste management. We present an argument for a relational approach to domestic waste as a counterpoint to technocentric and market-based approaches, with implications for governance and infrastructures of apartment waste management. We illustrate how spatio-temporal and socio-material bundles of practices could chart new directions for reduction and collection. We seek to demonstrate how relational place-based measures and shifts in practices in Victoria and elsewhere could counter exclusionary infrastructure by more purposefully including the marginal spaces that apartments inhabit.