Waste Regime at a Crossroad: Divergent Trajectories of Things, Cars, and Electronics is a three-year project (2020-2022) funded by the Czech Science Foundation. The project examines the impact of European Union’s emphasis on sustainability at a local level. Building upon Zsuzsa Gille’s concept of waste regime, this project examines how waste regime emerges and changes through an interplay of its constitutive parts. Central to our elaboration of waste regime is a model of multiple coexisting waste trajectories which mobilize different materials, ways of disposal, transformations of energy and value, categorical distinctions, degrees of informality, and meaning.  

The project’s key objective is to understand the relations between different waste trajectories and the ways they constitute and alter the waste regime. Our team of three researchers uses ethnographic methods to examine the disposal of cars, electronics, and municipal solid waste. Our research is located in the Czech Republic and includes activities such as disassembling computers, car breaking, working with informal waste pickers, and tracing relations between human-generated waste and other organisms. It offers unique insights into contemporary waste management and contributes to the understanding of the internal dynamics of waste regimes.