As part of our annual Earth Day programming, on today’s show we do a deep “dumpster dive” into the world of waste: food waste, medical waste, construction waste, e-waste, and more.

Our guest is Kate O’Neill, author of the book Waste, which traces the emergence of the global political economy of waste.

She and Patty discuss all things waste, including how COVID has changed the kind and amount of waste we’re producing, the increase in “disaster waste” fueled by the climate crisis, the waste-pickers who make their livelihoods from sorting at landfills, the “right-to-repair” movement, and where we go from here.

Kate O’Neill is a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Waste Trading Among Rich Nations: Building a New Theory of Environmental Regulation (MIT Press, 2000), The Environment and International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Waste (Polity Press, 2019).