This article examines how the idea that recycling conserves natural resources developed and stabilized into a matter of fact in modern U.S. history. Influential figures like Herbert Hoover reframed the focus of conservation from nature protection to production, efficiency and waste management. The conservation idea was used by the industry to emphasize its societal value, externalize waste management costs, divert attention away from resource extraction, and engage the public in sorting that would yield materials back to the industry. The 1970s energy crisis opened up possibilities to symmetrically compare different processes and materials by a unified metric: energy consumption. As a result, recycling came to conserve resources not only in the waste itself, but also in nature. The significant energy savings from recycling, compared to extraction, were emphasized and communicated, and the idea of displacement vanished in the underlying calculations and was thereby institutionalized into everyday language.

The plastic bag is a mundane consumer product. It consists of just one inexpensive material, intended to carry other, more important, items. It is one of those objects that becomes more visible when it is out of context. But the plastic bag easily ends up there, out of context, demanding our attention. This essay explores how the plastic bag became an iconic symbol of environmental degradation, with a special focus on Sweden, the very place where the bag was invented. By combining perspectives from marketing and new materialism, this essay deepens our understanding of how the plastic bag was institutionalised.

This study investigates the perceptions of three Swedish stakeholders towards the contested use of waste incineration bottom ash as aggregates outside landfills: waste producers, users and authorities. The interview study shows that the stakeholders lack incentives to circulate bottom ash. Waste producers have a functional outlet for bottom ash by using it as landfill cover. Since the transition from gravel to crushed rock, the availability of natural aggregates is enormous in Sweden at low environmental and economic costs. This causes the potential users of bottom ash to prioritize conventional aggregates. In cases where waste-based aggregates are nevertheless used, they are taken from project-internal sources. Hence, there are few incentives for the authorities to change the currently unfavorable regulations for using bottom ash as aggregates. With unclear environmental benefits and contested interests, the rationale for circulating bottom ash appears to be driven by morality.

This article examines a specific subtype of informal waste picking: deposit picking. Despite its global prevalence, waste picking hasneither been extensively studied in the Nordic countries nor in the context of a deposit-refund system. Through interviews and textanalyses of waste pickers in Stockholm, Sweden, similarities and differences between deposit picking and traditional waste pickingare uncovered. For example, unlike other waste materials, the income from deposits is stable. The focus on beverage containers andthe ability of reverse vending machines to sort the containers, lowers the knowledge threshold to begin the activity. The lightweightnature of beverage containers makes collection mobile, and deposit pickers often carry only a bag. The deposit pickers are mainly older,poor and male. Similar to traditional waste pickers, deposit pickers are central to the formal waste system, but their work is invisible,and foreign deposit pickers, in particular, are stigmatized. The dual invisibility of their labour and contributions, coupled with theirindependence from formal social systems, highlights the need for internal organization and representation within the formal systems.