Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the Israeli-Palestinian moral universe of waste-making through the lens of physical surveys of trash. These valuations co-constitute waste within broader environmental stories, but their influence on policy is limited.

Paper long abstract:

In a physical waste survey, environmental consultants representatively sample trash from sidewalk bins or collection trucks and then manually sort, weigh and measure it, with the aim of evaluating how much garbage people are throwing away and how well environmental policies are being implemented. I examined physical waste surveys in Israel-Palestine as a lens into the moral universe of waste-making, characterizing how valuations of trash inform broader nationalistic, ethical and environmental claims.

Although physical waste surveys are rather low-tech and prosaic means of data gathering, they traffic in important ways with more elite forms of environmental expertise. Furthermore, in the highly competitive and contested world of waste and recycling, survey data become crucial to the ideological, regulatory, scientific and economic claims of diverse stakeholders.

Research was based on participant observation in waste surveys alongside environmental consultants and sanitation workers, as part of three years of fieldwork on trash epistemologies in Israel-Palestine.

My findings show that valuating trash is not merely a technocratic practice but also a story-telling practice: in the course of settling trash as a material, epistemic and normative object, some 'wastes' are more 'wasteful' than others. Further, ironically, the surveys did not influence policy implementation in meaningful ways. This suggests that the power dynamics of valuations in the Israeli-Palestinian case may differ from the more common European backdrop of STS, in a manner that remains under-theorized in STS and in valuation studies specifically.