Affective encounters with waste: The role of affects in trash activism

Abstract

Previous scholarship on waste has identified lack of public knowledge as one of the greatest barriers to the success of any recycling initiative. However, informational influencing has proven insufficient, as it tends to ignore the messy, ambiguous, bodily relations that people have with waste. Waste is prone to evoke visceral affective responses, and those affects matter for how we relate to waste. In this article, we examine the role of affects in the practices of Finnish trash activists followed by means of ethnographic fieldwork both on trash walks and on social media. We show that while negative emotions like disgust were for trash activists a key impetus to take action, the encounters and entanglements with waste also sparked such positive affects as joy, pleasure and inspiration. Our analysis also shows affects to be crucial in and for the formation of ethical ways of relating to waste.