The waste of nations: Household trash and the affective politics of recycling in Israel

Abstract

Solid waste treatment is an acute concern for countries facing waning landfilling capacity, increasingly strict controls on waste transport and treatment, and the persistent threat of climate change. These challenges are typically met by neoliberal and technocratic solutions that privatize public services while encouraging curbside recycling. I examine such an effort to promote curbside recycling in Israel. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Israeli recycling world, and on anthropology, geography, science and technology studies and critical waste studies literatures, I interrogate the affective politics of household waste recycling in Israel over the past decade and attempts to configure a Europeanized and moral national space through recycling. I describe the cultural and ethnonational repertoires through which curbside recycling was naturalized in the Israeli landscape, how recycling was mutually animated with a range of sociopolitical concerns that far exceeded its financial or environmental significance, and how these mutually shaped waste as a social–environmental problem. I argue that social and material conditions gave rise to a dual process, in which both the problem of waste, and its necessary solutions, were actively and mutually constructed. This paper contributes to comparative literatures on national cultures of waste recycling, shedding light on how a project of Western ecological modernization was translated and became locally meaningful in Israel's settler-colonial context, how household waste was ontologically coproduced in this process, and how its stakes were experienced, voiced, and materialized.