Texturing Waste: Attachment and Identity in Every-day Consumption and Waste Practices

Waste has often been a target of literature and policy promoting pro-environmental behaviour. However, little attention has been paid to how subjects interpret and construct waste in their daily lives. In this article we develop a synthesis of practice theory and psychosocial concepts of attachment and transitional space to explore how biographically patterned relationships and attachments to practice shape subjects’ understandings of resource consumption and disposal. Deploying biographical interview data produced by the Energy Biographies Project, we illustrate how tangible, intersubjective and interdependent experiences rub up against cultural and behavioural norms, reshaping the meanings and strategies through which subjects interpret and manage waste.