The waste commons in an emerging resource

The Waste Commons in an Emerging Resource
Recovery Waste Regime: Contesting Property and
Value in Melbourne’s Hard Rubbish Collections
geor_704

395..407

RUTH LANE
School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. 3800, Australia.
Email:
Received 17 January 2011; Revised 30 April 2011; Accepted 3 May 2011

Abstract
Practices of scavenging of Melbourne’s hard rubbish collections are examined in
the context of an emerging resource recovery waste regime linked with policy
shifts that promote resource recovery over disposal through landfill. Waste
regimes have many parallels with regimes in natural resource management and
contestations over property are an important but neglected aspect. Based on
research conducted primarily in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne, I argue
that hard rubbish on the kerb-side forms an informal ‘waste commons’ that
facilitates various forms of revaluing of municipal household waste. Results of a
survey conducted by householders scavenging of their own hard rubbish piles
suggest that informal scavenging activities were more effective for diverting
waste from landfill by recycling than the formal processes of council hard rubbish
contractors. Interviews conducted with residents, waste management contractors
and self identified ‘professional’ scavengers revealed different perspectives on the
waste commons and highlighted the contested nature of property in hard rubbish.
Together with the survey findings, they allow tentative conclusions to be drawn
about the role of the waste commons in the transition from a regime of disposal
through landfill to one focused on resource recovery.
KEY WORDS scavenging, waste; property; recycling; Melbourne; waste

regime; commons; household

Introduction
In the suburban streets of Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, a strange ritual plays
out around local government hard rubbish
(bulky waste) collections. Residents seize the
opportunity to undertake major cleanouts of
sheds and spare rooms and cart out unwanted
goods and materials to the kerb-side in front of
their residence where they arrange them in neat
piles as directed by the brochure they received
in their mailbox. Over the ensuing period
between notification of the scheduled collection
and the formal pickup, a succession of cars and
utility vehicles slowly cruise past the piles,
Geographical Research • November 2011 • 49(4):395–407
doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2011.00704.x

stopping now and then to collect selected
items. Sometimes whole trailer loads of collected materials may be seen departing from the
scene. Curious neighbours stroll past the piles
in their own street, souveniring items of interest
and striking up impromptu conversations with
neighbours they rarely communicate with at
other times of year. Stories abound about
student share houses furnished primarily
through scavenging hard rubbish. By the time
the council contractors arrive for the formal collection the piles are much smaller, although
often somewhat less orderly. The extent of these
scavenging activities suggests that hard rubbish

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operates effectively as an informal waste
commons.
Despite the best efforts of waste management
authorities worldwide, the amount of waste generated in large cities around the world continues
to exceed the capacity to enclose it through
industrial recycling channels and increasing
quantities of waste materials are either landfilled
or incinerated. This is in part due to the rapid
growth of urban populations since the mid 20th
century but also reflects the emergence of globalised production systems that have reduced the
price of many consumer goods to such an extent
that it is both easier and, in many cases cheaper,
to discard and replace rather than repair and
maintain (Cooper, 2005; Jackson, 2006).1 In relation to domestic waste, the increasing ‘churn
rate’ of goods through households has increased
the need for convenient disposal options explaining the popularity of Melbourne’s hard rubbish
collections. There have also been changes in the
types of materials that make up domestic waste,
with many items made up of composites of different materials that pose challenges for industrial materials recycling.
Official rhetoric of waste management in Victoria suggests a paradigm shift is underway from
an earlier approach that treated waste as a hazard,
to both human and environmental health, to a
new approach that treats it as a resource. Victoria

is not alone in this regard as waste management
in the developed world is now largely framed in
terms of an environmental management agenda
that emphasises materials recycling in line with
principles of ecological modernisation (Mol
and Spaagaren, 2000). Historically, government
approaches to the management of metropolitan
waste in Australian cities relied mainly on burial
in landfill sites and householders commonly used
back yard incinerators to supplement council
garbage collections. Over time, waste disposal
has been increasingly regulated to reduce risks to
both human and environmental health. Landfill
facilities have been relocated away from the city
along with the expanding urban periphery and,
since the 1990s, a range of new waste transfer
facilities have been developed in inner suburbs to
provide more convenient disposal options and
recovery of recyclable materials. While individuals and commercial enterprises have always
engaged in forms of resource recovery, government environmental rhetoric around recycling in
Victoria can be traced to the Environment Protection Act 1970 which makes explicit mention
of the ‘waste hierarchy’ as a guiding principle

(Gertsakis and Lewis, 2003). However, it is only
since the 1990s that significant government
resources have been directed towards resource
recovery from municipal waste and there have
been no initiatives to promote reduced consumption in line with the specifications of the waste
hierarchy. Amendments to the Act in 2002 and
2006 explicitly focus on reducing ecological

impacts by improving resource efficiency and
materials recovery (Environment Protection
Authority Victoria, 2007).
Resource recovery by government waste management agencies in Australia has primarily
focused on facilitating large-scale materials recycling industries, so far concentrated on metals,
paper, glass, and plastics. The main role of government agencies has been to provide an appropriate collection system that effectively delivers
those materials able to be recycled to relevant
waste management industries. For municipal
waste this has generally been achieved through
local governments providing dedicated kerb-side
‘recycling bins’ and collection services that are
funded through council rates. Australian cities
have been particularly efficient in materials recycling, because of a combination of high levels
of public awareness of environmental benefits
coupled with the convenience offered by a
system of kerb-side domestic recycling bins
with weekly scheduled collections (Australian
Bureau of Statistics, 2006). Despite this success,
in Melbourne, where most of the research for this
study was conducted, state government targets
for the reduction of domestic waste to landfill are
unlikely to be met without new initiatives that
will counter the continuing upward trend which
is thought to be due to increasing population and,
to a lesser extent, increasing levels of affluence
(Department of Sustainability and Environment,
2009). The environmental public good associated
with such interventions is expressed through the
terminology of ‘landfill diversion’ and their
effectiveness is measured in terms of the portion

of the total domestic waste stream diverted from
landfill (Victorian Government, 2005). This terminology captures the avoidance of environmental hazard but not the reassignment of new
resource value to the materials concerned.
Zsuzsa Gille has usefully coined the term
‘waste regimes’ to refer to a structure of rights,
rules, and institutions that are designed to govern
and regulate waste, both its production and distribution, at a macrolevel (Gille, 2010, 1056).
Drawing on Young’s concept of a resource
regime in the management of natural resources

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(Young, 1982), she uses the term to denote a
specific set of social institutions relevant to ‘the
production, circulation and transformation of
waste as a concrete material’ (Gille, 2010, 1056).
Institutions for waste management assign value
to waste materials. They may be negatively
valued as environmental hazards as well as positively valued as potential resources with use or
exchange values. The manner in which waste
is valued is an element in waste regimes and
various historical analyses have traced how
valuing of waste has changed over time in
specific country contexts along with changing

material needs (e.g. need for metals during
wartime) and technological infrastructure for
collection and disposal (Strasser, 1999; Cooper,
2010). Gille (2010) applies this concept to the
management of industrial waste in Hungary
from 1948 to the present and her macro-analysis
focuses on the national scale, tracing transitions
through three regimes emphasising different
materials and industrial processes. However, the
idea of regimes can also capture complex transitions in municipal waste management.
As with the governance of natural resources,
one might anticipate that property rights are an
important element in waste regimes, with implications for the framing of relationships between
people and resources and the negotiation of
power relations among resource users (Berkes
et al., 1989; Ostrom, 1990). The emergence of
what I term a ‘resource recovery waste regime’
coincides with the emergence of neoliberal governance approaches that emphasise individual
responsibilities and enhanced roles for markets
in promoting public environmental benefits
(McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). It has generated
a new political context for the reassignment of
value from hazard to resource that justifies government facilitation of the transfer of property in
waste materials to industrial recyclers. These
developments at a macroscale have affected practices at the microscale of the household, including the provision and use of kerb-side recycling
bins and new roles for householders in contributing to the minimisation of waste as hazard and
generation of waste as resource (Chappells and
Shove, 1999).
Various studies pitched at the microscale
have traced the movement of objects through different regimes of value as they are discarded,

salvaged, remade, etc. (Gregson and Crewe,
2003; Hawkins and Meucke, 2003; Gregson
and Beale, 2004; Hetherington, 2004; Hawkins,
2006; Gregson, 2007; Gregson et al., 2007;

Reno, 2009). However, scaling up the revaluing
of waste, according to Martin O’Brien, requires
the development of a political economy that
facilitates the creation of new values,
Industrial sectors exist because of the values
that can be extruded from the exchange of
those objects. This is why what is waste today
will not be waste tomorrow and why what
was, common-sensically, waste yesterday is
now incorporated as an economic ‘sector’.
(O’Brien, 1999, 278)
O’Brien observes that processes of revaluing
always reach beyond the formal waste management system and argues that this is why no
regulatory system for waste management has
ever achieved its stated goal of reducing or eliminating ‘useless waste’ (O’Brien, 2007). Multiple
processes of creating value from waste keep
materials in circulation through channels other
than those established by waste management
agencies. If we accept this argument, it then
becomes important to examine the activities of
informal actors operating outside formal waste
management systems and to explore broader
social norms and institutions operating at microas well as macroscales that contribute to the
revaluing of used goods and materials.
Of particular value for understanding the

diversity of pathways by which materials are
revalued, is the framework developed by Bulkeley et al. (2007) for understanding ‘modes of
governing’ municipal waste. Drawing on recent
theorising on governance and governmentality,
they focus on structures and processes of governing in order to recognise the plurality and multiplicity of sites and activities of governing. In this
analysis, institutional relations and technologies
are shown to coalesce around specific objectives
and entities to be governed which are described
as ‘rationalities’. For example, ‘landfill diversion
mode’ is one rationality that is primarily associated with government actors, while ‘waste as
resource’ is another rationality associated with a
much wider range of actors and a wider range of
revaluing processes (Bulkeley et al., 2007). Connections can potentially be drawn between activities operating at multiple scales through common
governing rationalities. In contrast with Gille’s
waste regimes approach, the modes of governing
approach emphasises these cross-scale connections as a potential source of change. Regardless
of the actors or systems involved, revaluing processes have quite tangible dimensions and may
be accompanied by transformations in the mate-

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rials themselves. Various pathways of revaluing
entail physical and spatial transitions and the
residues from one transformative process may

generate new forms of waste elsewhere (Gregson
and Crang, 2010). Further, some materials are
more readily transformed through industrial
recycling processes than others and these qualities are also of consequence.
In this paper, I focus specifically on the issue of
property in hard rubbish. I set this in the context
of an emerging resource recovery waste regime
and consider how property rights are understood
in both formal and informal institutions involved
in reprocessing these materials. The desired transition in value from waste as hazard or nuisance
to waste as resource requires a parallel transition
in ownership. While consideration has been given
to the technical systems and governance arrangements needed to support this transition (Darier,
1996; Bulkeley et al., 2005; 2007; Davoudi,
2006; 2009; Davies, 2008; Watson et al., 2008;
Watson and Lane, 2011), little attention has so far
been paid to the transfer of property.2 Neither
Gille’s ‘waste regimes’ approach nor Bulkeley
et al.’s ‘modes of governing’ approach address
the issue of property overtly. I argue that Melbourne’s hard rubbish collections form a kind of
informal waste commons where discarded goods
and materials are relinquished by their owners
into the public space of the kerb-side for a brief
period of time. The kerb-side or ‘nature strip’,
where the transition in ownership takes place, is a
critical locus for the categorisation of private
property more generally, as Nick Blomley has
shown in his work on gardening infringements in
Vancouver (Blomley, 2004). It forms a boundary
between public space formally managed by local

government authorities and the private space of
the domestic residence, although this boundary
can be challenged through informal activities of
residents (Blomley, 2004; 2005). The commercialisation of kerb-side waste collection through
contracting arrangements further complicates
matters.
In neoliberal approaches to environmental
policy an alliance often exists between a market
instruments paradigm that seeks to delineate
new forms of private property in environmental
resources and an environmental citizenship paradigm where individual citizen consumers are
assumed to carry certain responsibilities for the
maintenance of environmental public goods such
as clean air, healthy river catchments, biodiversity and so on (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004;
Barry, 2006; Lane et al., 2008). Becky Mansfield

observes that it is not unusual for environmental
policy to have multiple and sometimes contradictory agendas (Mansfield, 2009). This seems to be
particularly the case when markets are implicated for the implementation of policies to
promote environmental public goods. Given that
the revaluing of waste as resource leads to new
markets one might expect to find a similar contradictory mix in understandings of property in
waste management policy where the public good
of hazard reduction is deliberately coupled with
the generation of new commodities with market
value.
I begin by describing hard rubbish collections
in the context of government waste management
and resource recovery initiatives in Melbourne. I
then consider the range of options available to

householders seeking to dispose of unwanted
goods and materials, and argue that hard rubbish
collections form one of the few waste commons
currently in existence in Melbourne. A brief
summary is then provided of the results of
empirical research involving a residents’ survey
of scavenging of their own hard rubbish piles that
indicates the quantity and type of materials most
likely to be scavenged. To identify different perspectives on property rights and governance
arrangements in hard rubbish I then draw on a set
of interviews with residents, waste management
contractors and two self-identified ‘professional’
scavengers. Finally, based on these various lines
of evidence, I tease out tentative conclusions
about the role of the waste commons in the
context of a transition towards a resource recovery waste regime.
Hard rubbish collections in Melbourne
Most of the 31 metropolitan councils in Melbourne provide an annual or biannual collection
of ‘hard rubbish’ in addition to weekly kerb-side
collections of recyclable materials through bins.
The state government agency, Sustainability
Victoria, supported by the Metropolitan Waste
Management Group, provides model contracts
for these collections that local governments can
modify to suit their specific needs. Residents are
advised of a scheduled hard rubbish collection
through a leaflet in their mail box which invites
them to place up to one cubic metre of unwanted
materials on the kerb-side in front of their residence, with guidelines provided about specific
materials that will not be collected (such as

asbestos) because of their hazardous nature for
health and safety. Council waste management
contractors then collect the materials, usually

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sending one truck in advance to pick up recyclable items, especially metals, and a second
compactor truck to collect the remaining materials which are transported to landfill. Official
figures provided for council hard rubbish collections indicate a landfill diversion rate of only
13% of all hard rubbish for Metropolitan Melbourne (Department of Sustainability and Environment, 2009) so these collections are not
considered particularly effective for the purpose
of resource recovery. There is no acknowledgement of scavenging as a channel for either reuse
or diversion of hard rubbish from landfill, and
scavenging is only mentioned as a problem for
local governments to manage. The Metropolitan
Waste and Resource Recovery Strategic Plan
(Department of Sustainability and Environment,
2009) anticipates future changes to improve
resource recovery from hard rubbish will be
driven by enhanced product stewardship programmes as well as concerns about health and
safety issues. In particular it notes that, ‘Future
contractual arrangements may need to include
requirements for the practical recovery of
“product stewardship recoverable items” to

maximise resource recovery from hard waste
services’ (Department of Sustainability and
Environment, 2009, 39). In Australia, product
stewardship is based on voluntary agreements
between government and manufacturers for recycling of specific products, especially those classified as ‘Ewaste’ (Lane et al., unpublished data;
Environment Protection and Heritage Council,
2011).
While householders have embraced the system
of hard rubbish collections, which is particularly
convenient for the disposal of bulky items, they
have a range of other options for disposing of
unwanted goods and materials (Lane et al., 2009;
Watson and Lane, 2011). They may drive their
waste to their nearest waste transfer station
where they pay a fee for dumping. They may
donate items to a charity through a door-to-door
collection, a dedicated ‘charity bin’ or by dropping them off at a local charity retail store.
Garage sales held at the residence provide
another outlet for disposing of a range of
unwanted goods. They may use online trading
sites such as EBay™ to find buyers for their
goods or they may use the Freecycle moderated
email list to advertise items they wish to give
away. It is instructive to consider these various
disposal channels in terms of the transfer of
property. At the waste transfer station, householders pay a fee for the right to dispose

of unwanted property. Donations to charities
involve bequeathing property to a new owner
who may then give or sell it to another party.

Garage sales involve direct purchase of property
which then passes from one private owner to
another. The Melbourne Freecycle group provides a loose governance structure and communication forum to facilitate gifting of goods
from one owner within what might be described
as a restricted access commons among an online
community of subscribers. However, hard
rubbish collections appear to function effectively
as a more informal commons for the period that
materials remain on the nature strip. Goods and
materials scavenged from hard rubbish re-enter a
private property regime where they may acquire
either new use value or exchange value as commodities for resale. The remaining unscavenged
materials become the property of the waste management contractor at the time of collection.
Scavenging of hard rubbish generates both
public interest and concern. A review I conducted
of local newspaper reporting of scavenging
activities showed an even mix of reports in
favour and critical of scavenging. A survey conducted in 2007, primarily in the suburb of Frankston in Melbourne’s south-east, an area with a
relatively low socio-economic profile, found that
over 40% of respondents had acquired items
from hard rubbish over the last two years. Homebased parents of young children were the most
prominent socio-demographic group involved in
these activities and furniture formed the most
sought after items. However, scavenging is also a
concern for many Melbourne councils and some
have enacted a by-law prohibiting it with fines
for transgression. In some cases a flashing road
sign is erected in areas where collections are
underway to convey the message ‘Scavenging is
Illegal’. However, such laws are difficult to

enforce and most councils lack the capacity to do
so. These measures are partly in response to residents’ complaints about the mess left by scavengers. An officer of one council showed me a file
of resident’s complaints used to justify council
policy. However, they may also be a response to
representations from waste management contractors who lose potential income from scrap metal.
Some councils have switched to an ‘at-call’ or
‘booked’ hard waste collection, paid for partly by
the council and partly by the resident, as a strategy to deter scavenging.
In order to further explore these points of
tension around scavenging of hard rubbish, I
enlisted 69 householders to monitor what hap-

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pened to their hard rubbish piles between setting
them out and the formal council collection.
Given that scavenging could take place at any
time between residents placing items out on
the kerb-side and the arrival of the council
contractor, the only way to gain a relatively
accurate measure of what materials were actually removed by scavengers was to enlist the
assistance of those who put the materials out in
the first place. The 69 residents were provided
with survey forms that included a list of different categories of items, space for the respondent

to note how many of each type of item they set
out, space for them to note if and when it had
been removed prior to the formal collection, and
space for additional comments. The information
gathered provided details about the extent of
scavenging and the types of goods most likely to
be scavenged. To gain a cross section of perspectives on property and value in hard rubbish,
I conducted three interviews with waste management contractors responsible for kerb-side
collections in Melbourne,3 six interviews with
Melbourne householders and a further interview
with two self-identified ‘professional scavengers’ working in Sutherland Shire in Sydney
where scheduled hard rubbish collections are
conducted by local government contractors,
similar to those in Melbourne. The term ‘professional’ signals that they derive significant
income from scavenging and approach it in a
systematic way, unlike householders who may
simply scavenge items in their own neighbourhood on a casual and not-for-profit basis. In
analysing this material, I particularly focused on
tensions between waste managers, scavengers,
and householders.
Results and discussion
The survey by householders who observed scavenging of their own hard rubbish piles showed
that of a total of 546 items set out for the collection 35% were scavenged prior to the council
collection. This finding indicates that the overall
percentage of materials reclaimed from hard
rubbish is much higher than the official 13% in
official data provided by contractors. Based on
these figures, informal scavenging appears to be
far more significant in achieving government
policy goals of diversion from landfill than is

recycling by the waste management contractors
who collect hard rubbish.
The other key finding was that scavengers
recycle a much wider range of materials than do
contractors, who only recycled metal items for

scrap. The survey results also showed that some
types of goods were more likely to be scavenged
than others. The ten most common items set out
were furniture (105), electrical appliances (100),
packaging (43), garden equipment (42), computer equipment (35), toys (28), miscellaneous
metal (25), miscellaneous timber (23), and white
goods (18). The percentage of items scavenged
compared with items set out in each category
(where the number of items Ն15) revealed that
the items most likely to be scavenged were: white
goods (72%), sports equipment (60%), furniture
and electrical goods (46% each), children’s toys
and computer equipment (43% each), and miscellaneous metal (40%) (see Figure 1).
While scavengers may have sold items to
materials recyclers rather than passed them into
reuse channels, this was more likely to be the
case for metal items because of the unusually
high prices for scrap at the time of this survey.
It seems more likely that furniture removed
by scavengers (generally made of wood) was
reused, either immediately by those who
removed it, or via a more mediated channel
involving resale. This conclusion is supported by
the earlier survey of Melbourne householders

that indicated a strong interest in salvaging furniture from hard rubbish.
Householder perspectives
Of the six householders interviewed, five
described acquiring as well as disposing of
things through hard rubbish and three had
acquired furniture this way. The practice of
placing items on the nature strip outside of
formal collections seemed to be widespread and
was considered a community spirited thing to
participate in. For example, one householder
explained that although there was no council collection in her suburb, her family and other residents still disposed of things by putting them on
the nature strip, sometimes with a sign saying
‘Free’. Her family had also acquired items of
furniture and children’s toys this way. Another
interviewee, a widowed retiree who lived alone,
described the scavenging activities that he and
others engaged in within his street as a deliberate
gifting of discarded materials that contributed to
communal sociability. Some of the householders
interviewed were unsure if the practice was
legal but condoned it regardless. The nature strip
outside suburban residences was clearly understood by these residents as a useful site for both
the divestment and acquisition of property and
hard rubbish as a commons operating at the

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Figure 1 Summary of residents’ observations of scavenging for different categories of discarded objects.

community scale. While the existence of council
hard rubbish collections may have been important in initiating such practices, in some suburbs
they appeared to have attained the status of a
social norm or informal institution that endured
regardless of formal collections.
The use of hard rubbish collections often overlapped with the use of other second-hand channels for disposal such as gifting within networks
of family and friends, donations to charities, or
the use of garage sales or online trading. The
choice of which channel to use for disposing of
particular items was often carefully considered
taking into account both potential market value
and the potential for the reuse value to be compromised by rain or vandalism. The two householders with young children spoke of their
reluctance to sell unwanted items, especially
children’s things, as they had been the recipients

of many gifts and felt they should carry on this
practice themselves. The sense of mutual obligation around giving and receiving clearly contributed to perpetuation of these practices. From this
perspective the waste commons provided by hard
rubbish was linked with practices of giving and
receiving gifts, and the idea of communal benefits, rather than the acquisition of private property for personal gain. It was difficult to tease
out motivations for scavenging based on convenience and economic benefit, which were clearly
significant for those with young families, from
the community spirit explanations that interviewees emphasised.
Objects acquired through scavenging by householders interviewed were primarily obtained for
use value rather than exchange value. However,

goods acquired frequently needed repairs or
modifications before they could be used and this

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required appropriate spaces in the home, equipment such as sewing machines and carpentry tools
and the time and skills to use them. So the capacity
to realise use values was contingent on space,
time, and labour.
Contractors’ perspectives
At the time of the study, WM Waste Management
was the most prominent contracting business
involved in hard rubbish collections in Melbourne, servicing approximately one third of all
local council areas. The company also managed a
waste transfer station which contained facilities
for sorting recyclable materials and a tip shop
where salvaged objects were on sale, although
this operation was largely independent of the
hard rubbish collections. Contracts for hard
rubbish varied among councils with some including additional requirements for separating out
specific recyclable items such as mattresses. One
truck was dispatched first to collect scrap metal
and, where required, other trucks for specified
recyclables. The remaining material was then

collected in a compactor truck and taken directly
to landfill.
The project manager interviewed, explained
that the main economic value was in the contract
to collect signed with each council. It was important that this allowed a viable profit margin
regardless of any additional income from recycling. He then elaborated on the financial incentives for separate collections of recyclable
materials. Contracts usually required a level of
recycling but there were additional incentives
based on profits and costs associated with specific materials. Metal was the most valuable component of hard rubbish as contractors extracted
additional income from sales to scrap metal
dealers. The main drivers for salvaging other
materials were all costs, including transport costs
associated with the removal of landfill sites to the
outer perimeter of Melbourne, and a rising landfill levy. Items such as mattresses were particularly expensive to deposit in landfill and it was
cheaper to collect them separately and take them
to recyclers. The project manager reflected that
the amount and composition of hard rubbish had
increased over the last 10 years and there were
more items of large domestic equipment such as
white goods and electronic equipment. This was
evidenced by an increase in the number of collections his company had undertaken over time
and the number of trucks required. While there
were differences between wealthy and poorer
suburbs in terms of the type and quality of goods

discarded, the greatest differences were between
new suburbs, that generated little more than
packaging waste because residents were still settling in, and more established suburbs, where
more waste was thrown out and large items such
as refrigerators were more common. He also

speculated that increasing quantities of hard
rubbish were a reflection on the difficulties
for residents to access landfills due to greater
distances to landfill sites, lack of appropriate
vehicles, and an aging population.
All the contractors interviewed commented
on a recent increase in scavenging activities that
they associated with the rising price for scrap
metal. This had reached a peak around the time
of the interviews, conducted between May 2007
and April 2008, then dropped towards the end of
2008 (London Metal Exchange, 2009). One man
who had been involved in waste management for
over 30 years considered that the nature of scavenging and the people involved in these activities
had changed over time from a more ad hoc
amateur approach to a more organised and even
‘professional’ approach that competed directly
with contractors for the exchange value of scrap
metal.
I think there’s always been scavenging of like
bookshelves or bikes or that sort of stuff, lawn
mowers and things. We’re not really bothered
by that. You know if it’s just the local people
just swapping stuff around – it doesn’t really
worry us. The only really consensus is that
people taking scrap metal – they’re the ones
that frustrate us.
One manager expressed his wish that more
councils would legislate against scavenging as he
thought this would allow a clear and enforceable

assignment of property rights to contractors.
Some councils using ‘at-call’ collections had
asked residents to leave their pile inside the front
fence as a strategy for reducing scavenging.
However, there had been incidents of misunderstandings about which items were for collection
and contractors consequently preferred to continue collecting from the public space of the
nature strip.
During collections contractors frequently disturbed scavengers at work provoking mixed reactions which on occasion became violent. While
most scavengers quickly left the scene, some
tried to negotiate for specific items and others
asserted a right to take items and became aggressive. In most council areas, contractors had no
legal capacity to apprehend scavengers so were

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restricted to verbal warnings. However, the contractors related an anecdote from an area where
the council had legislated against scavenging, in
which they had gone to the house of a known
scavenger and loaded his accumulated piles of
scrap metal into the back of their truck.
The contractors also related numerous interactions with residents who were expecting that
their hard rubbish would be reused or recycled
and were both surprised and dismayed to learn
that most of it was to go to landfill. While the

contractors felt there was a great deal more
potential for salvaging goods for charity logistical challenges prevented this. Opportunities for
reuse of electrical appliances were lost when
cords were cut off. Sometimes this was done by
residents on council advice in order to avoid
potential hazards from switching on a faulty
appliance. Sometimes it was done by scavengers
collecting copper wire for its value as scrap. Contractors also expressed concern that some reusable items were scavenged by collectors who
then sold them for personal profit, and opportunities were consequently missed for capturing
this potential exchange value for a more public
benefit.
Waste management contractors discursively
frame hard rubbish collections as a service to the
community and materials recycling as a public
environmental good. However, they understand
the waste commons of hard rubbish as an inefficient open access regime in need of regulation,
preferably to enclose it within a private property
regime administered by the government/corporate waste management system. Payments
for collection contracts underpin their business
but their profits could be greater if their right to
collect could be made exclusive. While aware
of potential use values and potential exchange
values in a range of materials, and of a public
benefit in reuse and recycling activities more
generally, their own activities were constrained
by economic considerations and their primary
interest in resource recovery was based on the
exchange value of scrap metal. However, their
legitimate government-sanctioned appropriation
of metals in hard rubbish was challenged by what

they considered illegitimate appropriations by
professional scavengers for individual economic
gain.
‘Professional’ scavenger perspectives
Because of the uncertain legal status of professional scavenging, it was difficult to trace individuals willing to be interviewed. Through social

networks, two ‘professional’ scavengers working
together in the Sutherland Shire in the south of
Sydney were identified who agreed to be interviewed. A similar hard rubbish collection system
operated in this area to those in Melbourne. The
senior partner, a woman in her late 50s who I will
call ‘Alice’, was keenly aware of the status of
hard rubbish as relinquished property in public
space as she had relied on this resource for her
livelihood for over 20 years. Her business
partner, a man in his late 20s who I will call
‘Ben’, had moved to Sydney from a country town
several years earlier when he found he could earn
a living by scavenging in the city. Alice was
annoyed at the unrealistic assumptions made by
councils about their capacity to allocate property
rights in the contracts they drew up with waste
management companies. At the time the price of
scrap metal was reaching a peak in 2007, Sutherland Shire advertised a contract for a scrap
metal processing business to buy the metal component of the hard rubbish collected by their
contractor. She explained that a contract was
eventually developed that gave the waste management contractor rights to the proceeds from
sale of scrap metal in return for assuming the
costs of land filling the rest. However, scavengers
ensured that there was no metal to sell and the

contractor lost money.
Alice explained that laws against scavenging
had been enacted in Sutherland Shire specifying
that only registered parties who possessed their
own scrap metal facilities could legally collect
hard rubbish, ruling out most informal scavengers. However, according to her, these laws had
made no difference to the activities of scavengers
despite some fines being issued. The spike in the
price of scrap metal had resulted in an influx of
‘professional’ scavengers in her area, including
some from rural areas outside Sydney, and there
had been incidents of aggression as they competed with one another for the resource. She
observed that many of these new entrants were
otherwise unemployed and assumed they used
the income to supplement unemployment benefits. In principle, she favoured a licensing
system for scavenging which would formally
recognise it as an industry and offered some
regulation of standards of practice, especially in
regard to occupational health and safety. Among
the long-term ‘professional’ scavengers she interacted with, she thought the great majority would
also prefer to be licensed provided the cost was
not prohibitive. Alice had recently been elected
to a council rubbish committee where she

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Geographical Research • November 2011 • 49(4):395–407

struggled to achieve recognition for the work of
scavengers. In her view a mechanism was needed
for a dialogue between scavengers, the council,
and local residents who she thought should also
have a say in what happened to their rubbish.
These ‘professional’ scavengers’ description
of their activities highlighted the skills and
knowledge needed for capturing exchange value
for a wide range of discarded goods and materials, the networks of second-hand auctions and
dealers and the logistical challenges involved.
Over time, Alice had acquired considerable
knowledge of the range of channels available for
selling second-hand goods around Sydney and
differentiated herself from other scavengers who
were only interested in scrap metal. She placed
great value on maintaining both historical and
reuse values and was particularly dismayed when
objects with potential reuse value were lost
through bulk processing either for energy production (through incineration) or bulk composite
materials such as wallboard. However, a key
challenge for realising potential exchange value
was the need for suitable storage space. Alice
and Ben restricted themselves to a relatively
small storage capacity as a strategy for limiting
expense overheads and, as a consequence, maintained a constant flow of goods and materials.
From the perspective of these ‘professional’
scavengers, hard rubbish is a common pool
resource in need of government regulation to

create a restricted access system with equitable
allocation of resources. Unlike the contractors
who wanted to enclose the commons as private
property and exclude scavengers, they thought a
realistic approach to regulation would incorporate scavengers as part of the waste management
system by licensing those who complied with a
code of conduct to work in designated geographical areas.
Conclusion: the role of the waste commons
in a resource recovery waste regime
Hard rubbish collections highlight a number
of challenges and dilemmas for the desired
transition to a resource recovery waste regime
within formal waste management policy and
practice. The tensions between waste managers,
scavengers, and residents around domestic hard
rubbish, and their differing perspectives on property rights, offer useful insights into the messy
and contested aspects of revaluing domestic
waste and also food for thought about the role
property rights play in waste regimes more generally. Property in municipal waste is a social

relation that must be enacted at the microscale in
order for it to be meaningful at the macroscale
where waste management policy is framed. The
perspectives of both householders and professional scavengers show that hard rubbish collections function as an informal waste commons
linked with social institutions and norms around
gifting and gleaning.
Neither scavenging by residents for use value
nor by professionals for exchange value has been
formally acknowledged in waste management
policy, yet both potentially contribute to the

broader objectives of waste management policy
and are consequently significant to an emerging
resource recovery waste regime. The evidence
presented here suggests that informal activities
are currently more effective in revaluing waste
as resource than are formal collection systems
although this cannot be confirmed without more
information on the ultimate fate of scavenged
goods and materials. When scavenging is taken
into account, hard rubbish appears to facilitate
revaluing of a much wider range of waste materials, suggesting that its common property status
is important for capturing diverse resource values
at the microscale. Regardless of these apparent
benefits the status of hard rubbish as a waste
commons is considered problematic by waste
management contractors and some local governments seek to enclose this commons within the
formal waste management system by enacting
laws to prohibit scavenging. These measures
inevitably fail because of the inability to secure
exclusive property rights to materials on the
kerb-side in any practical way. On the one hand,
professional scavengers assert equivalent rights
to collect hard rubbish for its exchange value
to that of council contractors. On the other hand,
residents who support or engage in scavenging
assert community benefits associated with use
value of waste materials and may perpetuate an
informal waste commons institution independently of formal council collection services.
Rather than a problem, the tension between the
commons and the commodity in hard rubbish

may be a productive one for progressing towards
a resource recovery waste regime. The plethora
of small-scale actors involved in scavenging hard
rubbish for different kinds of value seems indicative of a situation that is highly dynamic with the
potential for further significant change. The fact
that most of the material collected by contractors
goes to landfill appears to diminish the moral
justification of property claims of contractors
over scavengers in a resource recovery waste

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R. Lane: Waste Commons

regime that presents large-scale materials recycling as the best solution to reducing the public
environmental hazard of waste in landfill.
However, although large-scale industrial recycling appears to lag behind the capacity of smallscale actors for comprehensive waste recycling,
it is clearly needed to achieve the significant
material transformations required for an emerging recycled materials economy in line with the
ecological modernisation emphasis in waste
management policy. New formal collection
systems associated with the introduction of
product stewardship schemes for specific goods
are likely to enclose more components of the
domestic waste stream as private property, but
the diverse nature of the materials themselves

is likely to work against ever capturing the whole
domestic waste stream within formal waste
management systems. For the reasons noted by
O’Brien (1999) earlier, it seems probable that
there will always be some materials unable to
be recycled but that this will change over time.
Given these considerations there is consequently
a strong case for preserving the waste commons
in some form. Options for co-management
(Carlsson and Berkes, 2005) of hard rubbish as
a restricted access common property regime
might be explored where local social institutions
around revaluing would be recognised and ‘professional’ scavengers allocated prescribed rights.
While Gille uses the idea of a waste regime to
argue the need for macrolevel theorising to better
understand the evolution of social institutions
around waste management (Gille, 2010), this
study of hard rubbish collections shows that
waste regimes, at least in relation to metropolitan
waste, require active participation by a wide
range of actors operating at the scale of households, streets and neighbourhoods and are also
affected by global processes. The neoliberal
emphasis in waste management policy assumes
that economic values in recycled materials will
be captured by emerging recycling industries and
informal scavenging, if acknowledged at all, is
seen as detrimental to this. However, the conflicts
over scrap metal recorded in this study show a
convergence around a resource recovery governing rational (Bulkeley et al., 2007) among contractors and small-scale professional scavengers
that could potentially expand to other recyclable

materials as new markets evolve. This aspect of
revaluing links activities on Melbourne’s kerbsides with global markets as the profitability
and livelihoods to be made out of recycling discarded materials from Melbourne’s kerb-sides

are linked to increased consumption and demand
for resources worldwide.
There are perhaps parallels here with the
tension between top-down and bottom-up
approaches in the study of natural resource management (Berkes, 2002; Young, 2002). The conclusions presented here are only tentative as my
focus on hard rubbish collections necessarily
emphasised the local scale and only hinted at
a bigger picture. To understand the extent to
which the macrolevel waste regime connects
with revaluing processes operating at the local
scale will require broader based but carefully
targeted research that engages in depth with the
political economies that influence revaluing processes at various scales.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work forms part of a larger research project on the reuse
of second hand household goods that involves collaborations
with Ralph Horne, Director of the Centre for Design at RMIT
University, and Matt Watson, Lecturer in Geography at the
University of Sheffield. I am very grateful for their insightful
comments on drafts. The interviews with householders were
conducted jointly with Ralph Horne and my analysis is
informed by our subsequent discussions around this material.
I would also like to thank the participants at a workshop on
‘Geographies of Reuse’ held at the University of Sheffield in
November, 2009 for a rich and stimulating discussion that
helped to hone the conceptual framing of this paper. This

workshop was funded through a British Academy ACU Grant
held jointly with Matt Watson, titled ‘Geographies of Reuse’.
NOTES
1. See also Jackson (2004) for an analysis of the contribution of local consumption cultures in the context of
globalised production systems.
2. Tensions around property in waste have been explored at
a global scale by Josh Lepawsky who examines international E-Waste legislation in terms of law–space relations
(Lepawsky and McNabb, 2010). He argues that attempts
to regulate the scavenging of waste materials have
resulted in the enclosure of property in these resources
for large corporations and the consequent disenfranchisement of groups of people whose livelihoods depend on
small-scale scavenging operations. Other work conducted in developing world contexts has focused on
organisations of waste pickers who negotiate rights to
scavenge (Gutberlet, 2008; Whitson, 2011).
3. One of the three interviews with waste management contractors was conducted as a focus group with four
employees directly involved in the collections. The other
two were one-on-one interviews with their managers.
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