Introduction

Despite recent attempts to improve urban waste management through increased recycling, insufficient attention has been paid to the social and distributional impacts of waste policy. This omission means that such changes appear to have reinforced environmental injustices through the re/production of inequitable social burdens and benefits. This chapter argues that, if policy makers were to consider waste management through the frame of ‘environmental justice’, such problems could be avoided. This assertion is illustrated by analysing household waste and recycling in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the city of Bristol, UK, where we are both resident. We provide evidence of unequal and unjust burdens faced by deprived communities in relation to waste collection services. Our aims are threefold. First, we intend to make an original contribution to the literature on environmental justice that, we consider, has overlooked the distributional aspects of municipal waste collection. Second, we aim to highlight the nature of the injustices that less well-off communities face in this regard, especially when compared to more resourceful actors who produce waste and profit from its sale. Third, we suggest ways that policy makers might ameliorate the injustices that occur in the processes of waste collection and recycling.

In this chapter we aim to make a contribution to the literature on waste from the discipline of social policy, a field of study that has been slow to catch on to the environmental debate (Fitzpatrick, 2011), despite the obvious links between the environment and poverty, disadvantage and inequality. We highlight the inadequacy of policy in this area, and demonstrate that, while there has been a welcome reduction in the amount of waste landfilled as a result of new waste collection policies, this has come at a cost to some of the households least able to bear it.

Although environmental justice is not inherently an urban issue – rural communities can also be affected – environmental justice discourse often has an urban focus. This is possibly because there are particular aspects of the unequal distribution of environmental goods and bads that are likely to be exacerbated, or have been shown to be more prominent, in the urban context, particularly in relation to urban air quality, access to green space, flood risk and the location of waste facilities (Walker, 2012).