Waste Collection is an interdisciplinary anthology that features a diverse collection of global scholarship diving into the ecologies of waste and discard. It features 27 concepts and case studies, focused on waste as a nature-cultural concept, for considering how worlds are built and destroyed by our enmeshment with, and reliance, upon waste.

Contributors represent a variety of disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences, including art and design; politics, literary studies; civil and environmental engineering; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; environmental humanities; and, film and media studies, among others. Chapters also offer diverse geographic focuses, including textile waste in West Africa, e-waste recycling in China, environmental remediation in South Korea, the impacts of nuclearism in Japan, nomadic relationships to waste and reuse in North Africa, and cultures of thrift and innovation in India, to name a few regions highlighted by the collection.

The book seeks to thwart an understanding of waste as peripheral and “throw away.” Instead, it is committed to unpacking how waste is not an isolable, fixed entity; it is always an assemblage of the human, nonhuman, and more-than-human. In other words, and as Myra Hird argues in her foreword to the collection, waste acts as a material and conceptual anchor for the complexities, ecologies, and global power dynamics of contemporary life.

Jeremy Chow is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University, USA. Chow is the author of The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century (2023) and the editor of three anthologies: Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (2023), Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Eighteenth Century (2025) with Shelby Johnson, and the Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2025) with Declan Kavanagh.

Sage Gerson is Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies Program Coordinator at Rhode Island School of Design, USA. Her research has been published in Social Text, Media+Environment, Lateral, UCHRI's Foundry, and as part of The Black Scholar's Social Justice Handbook series.