Scanlan, John. On Garbage. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range; garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmental degradation and so on, but also residual or “broken” knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. In this unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its own right) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that is valuable. (..) On Garbage shows that disposal causes not only the mountains of rubbish that we occasionally believe threatens to overwhelm us; it also creates a host of other “garbage,” particularly in the dead ends of useless knowledge and the often abject reality of our disposable lives. It turns out that we ourselves have become the garbage of our times. (Text from Reaktion Books)
- Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
- Mauch, Christof, ed. "Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Politics and Culture of Waste." Special issue, RCC Perspectives 1 (2016).
- Mauch, Christof, ed. "A Future without Waste? Zero Waste in Theory and Practice.” Special issue, RCC Perspectives 3 (2016): 69–77.
- Oldenziel, Ruth, and Helmuth Trischler, eds. Cycling and Recycling. Histories of Sustainable Practices. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015.