Waste management in a more unequal world: centring inequality in our waste and climate change discourse

ABSTRACT

Climate change is expected to contribute to global inequality, and exacerbate ecological risk for the world's poor. Despite recent trends within waste management academic discourse, which has begun to engage with inequality, and its underlying socio-economic and socio-political causes, discussions of inequality have so far remained absent from our investigations on climate change's impacts on waste management systems and practices. The purpose of the discussion is to call for a centring of inequality within our waste and climate discourse. I identify two main pathways for scholarly investigation, specifically, developing alternative waste management solutions for contexts in which waste management systems fail, which do not just perpetuate existing inequalities, and addressing the growing inequality in waste management technology and practice between the Global North and the Global South.