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This article presents a mini review of research aimed at understanding material recovery from municipal solid waste. It focuses on two areas, waste sorting behaviour and collection systems, so that research on the link between these areas could be identified and evaluated. The main results presented and the methods used in the articles are categorised and appraised. The mini review reveals that most of the work that offered design guidelines for waste management systems was based on optimising technical aspects only. In contrast, most of the work that focused on user involvement did not consider developing the technical aspects of the system, but was limited to studies of user behaviour. The only clear consensus among the articles that link user involvement with the technical system is that convenient waste collection infrastructure is crucial for supporting source separation. This mini review reveals that even though the connection between sorting behaviour and technical infrastructure has been explored and described in some articles, there is still a gap when using this knowledge to design waste sorting systems. Future research in this field would benefit from being multidisciplinary and from using complementary methods, so that holistic solutions for material recirculation can be identified. It would be beneficial to actively involve users when developing sorting infrastructures, to be sure to provide a waste management system that will be properly used by them.

In order to increase resource recovery from solid waste, better sorting of household waste is needed. This article reports on a case study about waste sorting infrastructure performance carried out in two buildings in Gothenburg, Sweden. Results from the study reveal mismatches between users' needs and what the system offers, affecting the sorting rates and quality of the sorted material. Frequent sorting errors were observed from the tenants in these apartment buildings, where more than 70% of the discards that go in the mixed waste could be sorted out into other available fractions, with biodegradable waste being the most neglected. Hazardous waste was often discarded wrongly and recurrent errors were observed in the containers available for sorting different packaging material. Given the performance observed, initial suggestions are made for housing companies to rethink the sorting system they offer to their tenants (i.e. accessible space for electronic waste, more space for biodegradable waste, possibility of sorting textiles, etc.). Most importantly this paper makes the case that housing companies have the opportunity to provide sorting infrastructure that is designed for the user, rather than just fitted to the waste management system.

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Citizen-led repair initiatives that collectively create urban commons, questioning the configuration of production, consumption, and discarding within neoliberal capitalism, have emerged in recent years. This paper builds on recent discussions of the openness of the commons by examining the role of repair in commoning. It is informed by the case of the Bike Kitchen in Göteborg, using in-depth interviews as well as ethnographic and visual observations to support the analysis. Through repair practices, commoning communities can reinvent, appropriate, and create urban commons by transforming private resources – bicycles – creating common, liminal, and porous spaces between state and market. This openness of the commons allows commoners to shift roles unproblematically, alternating between the commons, state, and market. We argue that commoners’ fluid identities become the vehicle by which urban commoning practices expands beyond the commons space. This fluidity and openness also fuels the broad recruitment of participants driven by diverse and entangled rationales. Beyond the porosity of spatial arrangements, we illustrate how the dramaturgic representation of space, through simultaneous frontstaging and backstaging practices, also prevents its enclosure and allows the creation of openings through which urban commoning practices are accessed by newcomers. Finally, we call into question strict definitions of ‘commoner’ and the commoning/repair movement as limited to those who are politically engaged in opposing the enclosure of the commons. Rather, commoners become political through action, so intentionality is less relevant to prompting social change than is suggested in the literature.