Waste Commoning as Critical Answer to the Property Question

Abstract Cooking food salvaged from waste bins, acquiring knowledge and skills to repair one’s bicycle in a ‘bike kitchen’, and collecting discarded materials as part of a waste picker cooperative illustrate how waste can be transformed into a commons through waste commoning. The possibility of such a transformation provides a critical perspective on the simplistic dualism that property is only either public or private. Waste commoning is a practice-based critique and questions the assumption that property can only be either public or private. Through insurgent knowledge, small-scale practices, and entangled rationales and relations, waste commoning points towards alternative ways to organize a more sustainable and inclusive society.