Jennifer Clapp examines the nature of international trade in toxic waste and the roles of multinational corporations and environmental NGOs. Waste transfer has become a routine practice for firms in industrialized countries and poor countries accept these imports but struggle to manage the materials safely. She argues that governments have failed to recognize the voices of protest.

Finn Arne Jørgensen examines the development of the Scandinavian beverage container deposit-refund system, which has the highest return rates in the world, from 1970 to the present day. He reveals the challenges faced when the system was exported internationally and explores the critical role of technological infrastructures and consumer convenience in modern recycling.

By reporting on their own and others’ experiences composting with dung earthworms, Sebastian Abrahamsson and Filippo Bertoni argue for a shift in the notion of “conviviality.”

Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.

ENHANCE is a four-year innovative training network (ITN) funded by Marie Skłodowska Curie that is dedicated to further establishing the Environmental Humanities as a field of cutting-edge scholarship in Europe and further afield.

In this commentary, Stefan Helmreich considers how Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave, has recently been leveraged into commentaries upon the Anthropocene, and how the image has been adapted to speak to the contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis.

Discard Studies is a website designed as an online hub for scholars, activists, environmentalists, students, artists, planners, and others whose work touches on themes relevant to the study of waste and wasting.