Paper short abstract:

The paper applies the concept of Big and Little Futures to analyze how the twin transition of digital and environmental change take place in the context of waste management. The role of everyday practices and technologies in the enactment of Futures in a waste management organization is highlighted.

Paper long abstract:

Waste management, a classic environmental governance issue, is a field where the ‘twinning’ of the green and digital transition takes place. Digital technologies are seen by scientists and practitioners alike as tools to enable a circular economy, which aims to reduce the use of primary resources (e.g. metals, oil) and the amount of waste materials. Therefore, waste management seems an ideal field to explore the question of how and why the digital and the ecological transitions are connected.

Within our contribution we rely on the idea of Mike Michael (2017) and explore how the Big Futures of circular economy and digitization become Little Futures in the daily practices of waste collection, route planning, or dispatching within a municipal waste company in Germany. Different green and digital futures interact, connect and compete in daily practices of various actors such as waste collection workers, dispatchers and digitization project managers. Thus, sensor-based data gathering enables predictive maintenance and improves waste separation but also opens the debate on social scoring. Moreover, mundane objects notably digital devices such as tablets, sensors, but also digital infrastructures such as data management systems play a crucial role when it comes to enacting different futures.

We will present preliminary findings from our research and discuss, for example, how the grand narrative of the digital and green transition as interdependent and mutually beneficial alters, interacts and collides with existing organizational processes and the daily routines of waste collection workers in a municipal waste company and beyond.