Rhythms of recycling: reconfiguring apartment waste practices in London and Melbourne

Taking the example of recycling in apartments, this paper argues that paying heed to the rhythms of urban waste can provide insights into how the waste burden can be more justly distributed. Housing in London and Melbourne, our two case study sites, is an essential locus for the domestic waste regime, and apartments are anomalies that disrupt it. Overall, recycling rates are lower in apartments, and comingled stream contamination rates where they exist are relatively higher. Rather than assuming this is a product of household behavior, we take the starting point that socio-material dynamics are at play that make apartments and apartment living incompatible with dominant waste regimes. We construct and apply a practice-based spatio-temporal rhythmic framework, in which recycling is analyzed as a social practice and apartments as the site of the social, leading to two main insights. First, the spatio-temporal dimensions of more than material and more than waste relationships add to the insights that practice theory can provide on the importance of mundane urban domestic processes of waste management by pointing to unevenness. Second, spatio-temporal rhythms analysis also assists in identifying possibilities for purposive attempts to intervene at various scales of waste governance.