Trashification: Towards a Philosophical Geography of Waste, Value and Uneven Development

Contemporary discussions of waste have generated important contributions across environmental studies, political ecology, human geography and the social sciences. Yet, waste is still predominantly understood as a material condition or as the final stage in the life cycle of objects. This paper argues that such approaches overlook a more fundamental process: the social production of waste itself.

We propose trashification as an integrative philosophical concept that shifts attention from waste as an object to the processes through which objects, spaces and human subjects become constituted as waste. We define trashification as the socially and geographically uneven process through which objects, spaces and human subjects become socially recognized as waste despite retaining material, practical or social value. Rather than describing an intrinsic property of discarded objects, trashification refers to a relational process through which value, ownership, legitimacy and exclusion are continuously produced, negotiated and contested.

The concept was initially developed through the study of the refugee camp of Patras (Greece), where discarded materials simultaneously became resources for survival and markers of social exclusion. Building upon that empirical work, this paper develops trashification into a broader philosophical framework capable of integrating insights from theories of value, human geography, political ecology, social ontology and ethics.

We argue that trashification is fundamentally geographical. It emerges through historically specific configurations of capitalist development, property regimes, waste management systems and state regulation, producing distinct spatial expressions across different societies. Consequently, neither waste nor trashification can be understood as universal categories. Instead, they are socially and geographically differentiated outcomes of uneven development. While the material forms of trashification vary across places, its ideological function remains strikingly consistent: practices of reuse are repeatedly transformed into signs of disorder, illegality or backwardness, while those who depend upon trashified objects—including refugees, Roma communities and other marginalized populations—are themselves represented as "waste people". Trashification therefore operates simultaneously as a material process affecting objects, a spatial process restructuring places, and an ideological mechanism through which social hierarchies are legitimized and reproduced.

Beyond proposing a new analytical framework for waste studies, this paper argues that trashification provides an integrative philosophical concept through which material value, spatial inequality, ownership, social exclusion and ethics can be understood as interconnected dimensions of the same social process. Finally, it asks whether, in an era of accelerating commodity obsolescence and expanding waste production, it is possible to formulate a universal ethics—or even a universal right—to the use of trashified objects.