![]() I draw on theories of gendered, social reproductive labor to explore how the work of localized reuse, disproportionately borne by unpaid women, reproduces communities. The glut of donations is due to the sheer volume of materials moving through a wasteful linear economic system, as well as the practice of donation dumping, where unusable used goods move through reuse economies, washing their previous owners free of guilt while entangling laborers in messy relationships with objects. This paper explores the interlinkages between the abundance of stuff moving through community‐based reuse organizations and the labor needed to manage this material. Not only we disclose the hidden biases of the notion of circular economy and other ‘innovative’ problem-solving practices in the waste management literature, but we also propose to pay more attention to non-hegemonic waste practices amongst communities, which are often overlooked in both the waste management and the social studies of waste literature. We aim to bring those two main research streams into dialogue through a presentation of two case studies among indigenous communities in the Russian North. The social scientific waste studies literature takes a more critical stance from its outset and advances a relational account of waste. Considering the assumption that waste is a natural category, which we need to ‘dispose of’, the scholarship on waste management and its sustainability offers mainly problem-solving propositions (e.g., the 3Rs proposal-re-cycling, re-using, and reducing-or ‘circular economy’). In the last few decades, the literature on waste has soared and taken two main directions. Drawing inspiration from feminist science and technology studies, this article argues that the analytical lens of care, which highlights the ‘affective engagement in space’, ‘the ethics of care’ and ‘interdependency’, may further the existing studies of waste by inspiring us to imagine a politics of inclusion and the temporality of slowness. Consequently, research on waste tends to exclude ways to live with the waste materials that cannot always be transformed away easily. ![]() However, all three tend to be inadequate in balancing the discussion of ‘waste’ with a discussion of the ‘stewardship’ of discarded objects, emphasising instead the potential value generation or transformation of waste. ![]() ![]() Each of these theoretical framings of waste points to a specific type of politics and temporality. It shows how three major streams of research in the literature conceptualise waste: as a resource and property, a risk and a source of prosperity. This article examines the development and theoretical orientation of the scholarship on waste in discard studies. In the process of reuse, they enhance their moral selves and perform a good deed, however minor, by preserving both the stories of these objects and the embattled earth. Beneath their goal of cleaning out the garage, garnering some extra cash, or obtaining a bargain, participants assert that the reuse of and care for still serviceable goods is meritorious and morally praiseworthy. Participants derive some small recompense in the form of money made, the acquisition of inexpensive goods, and the self-satisfaction associated with reducing waste, but shoppers and sellers are also allied in a tug of war against the landfill to claim the future of goods, especially the storied items adopted by shoppers. This article therefore examines the garage sale as a site for redistributing goods with emotions and histories attached. Second-hand purchases are often imbued with “sticky” emotional orientations (Ahmed 2010) and reminiscences. But unlike the mundane act of recycling used papers and cans at the curb, making goods available for reuse at garage sales is an action loaded with personal sentiment. Lengthy corridor sales in the U.S., like that held annually on Route 127 (the “World’s Longest Yard Sale”), serve the same function, drawing positive media attention and promoting civic pride. ![]() Sales can be so effective for redistributing consumer goods and reducing waste that numerous municipalities, such as Sunnyvale, California and Sydney, Australia, promote their sales through a community-wide staging. Among the mix of motivations that inspire people to sell and shop at garage sales is the desire to prevent the disposal of still usable goods. ![]()
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