Human-produced waste is a major environmental concern, with communities considering various waste management practices, such as increased recycling, landfilling, incineration, and waste-to-energy technologies. This article is concerned with how and why publics assemble around waste management issues. In particular, we explore Noortje Marres and Bruno Latour’s theory that publics do not exist prior to issues but rather assemble around objects, and through these assemblages, objects become matters of concern that sometimes become political. The article addresses this theory of making things public through a study of a small city in Ontario, Canada, whose landfill is closed and waste diversion options are saturated, and that faces unsustainable costs in shipping its waste to the United States, China, and other regions. The city’s officials are undertaking a cost–benefit assessment to determine the efficacy of siting a new landfill or other waste management facility. We are interested in emphasizing the complexity of making (or not making) landfills public, by exploring an object in action, where members of the public may or may not assemble, waste may or may not be made into an issue, and waste is sufficiently routinized that it is not typically transformed from an object to an issue. We hope to demonstrate Latour’s third and fifth senses of politics best account for waste management’s trajectory as a persistent yet inconsistent matter of public concern.

Environmental Values Environmental Values is an international peer-reviewed journal that brings together contributions from philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, geography, anthropology, ecology and other disciplines, which relate to the present and future environment of human beings and other species. In doing so we aim to clarify the relationship between practical policy issues and more fundamental underlying principles or assumptions.

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As landfilling costs increase and controversies emerge over new waste processing facilities, managing growing quantities of municipal solid waste is a pressing environmental and political concern for Canadian municipalities, who bear the primary responsibility for coordinating waste management (WM). In 2015, Metro Vancouver's plans to expand their capacity to manage their waste through energy-from-waste technology was put on hold indefinitely despite shrinking landfill space and persistent public opposition to new landfills. Using Bulkeley et al.'s (2005) 'modes of governing framework', we analyze Metro Vancouver's failed attempt to expand their energy-fromwaste capacity to better understand the challenges associated with how waste is governed in Canada. We argue that a history of downloading responsibility for WM to municipalities, regional districts, and private industry has fragmented WM governance, posing a challenge for developing new waste infrastructure. We find that this localization of responsibility is incompatible with contemporary WM challenges. The scalar mismatch between waste's material impacts and the scale at which waste is managed has resulted in co-dependence and conflict between putatively independent municipalities, regional districts, and private companies. As a result, both higher-level WM coordination is inhibited while the autonomy of individual municipalities is simultaneously undermined.