Making sense of waste: understanding the (in)visibilities of waste in Sydney through labour and infrastructure

Abstract

This thesis considers how waste works in Sydney, with an emphasis on the infrastructure, labour and materials of the city’s waste system. This work is grounded in feminist literature, specifically in the fields of human geography, discard studies, and science and technology studies. Having undertaking fieldwork within Sydney’s waste infrastructure, as well as historical and present-day document and policy analysis, this PhD research makes sense of waste through situatedness, standardisation and scale.

Waste is theorised in two fundamentally different ways within this thesis. Firstly, waste is understood as co-produced through and by its relationships to the city. This first framing of waste relates to land, place, embodied memory, and the forms of waste that exceeds use (the discards of excess and leakage). The second way in which waste is theorised is through a logic of management, in which an emphasis is placed on how understandings of waste shape the very materiality of waste.

I argue throughout this thesis that both ways of understanding waste are fundamental – the first, because waste co-produces and affects the spaces in which it is sunk or leached; and the second, because the management of waste is shaped by the ways in which waste is understood. This thesis explores how these perspectives might be brought together, in ways that enable a layered re-thinking of the city.