Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Acronyms and Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Busy-ness and Business -- Diversion and Power -- The Chapters -- The Actors -- The Method -- My Politics -- The Promise -- Chapter 1. Rags and Bottles -- Glass and Textile Wasting in the United States -- Neither Impacts nor Prices -- The History of Rags and Bottles in America -- Recycling to Save the Earth -- In Defense of Glass Recycling -- Chapter 2. Curbside Recycling Collection -- Earth Day 1970, New York City -- Aftermath: The 1980s and the Institutionalization of Recycling -- Recycling beyond New York City -- The Costs of Curbside Collection -- Front Groups, Co-optation, and Hegemony -- Chapter 3. Tonnage and Toxicity: The Nonissue of Nonhazardous Industrial Waste -- Data and Governance for U.S. Solid-Waste Streams -- The Evolution of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act -- (Lack of) Public Consciousness -- Stationary, Watery, and Unsexy -- Voluntary Success Stories and Industrial-Materials Recycling: The Resource-Conservation Challenge -- The Unpolitics of Industrial Ecology -- The Waste behind Factory Gates -- Chapter 4. Scale and Sufficiency: Zero Waste and the Quest for Environmental Justice -- The Materials Recovery Facility and Its Neighbors -- American Zero Waste in Practice -- The History of Local Loop Closure in New York City -- Lost Opportunity: Lack of Support for Public Materials-Recovery Facilities -- Locally Closed-Loop Assumptions -- California as Comparison -- Models of Planning: Great Ideas at Small Scales -- Sufficiency and Justice -- Chapter 5. Extended Plastics Responsibility : Producers as Reluctant Stewards -- Plastics Recycling in the Twenty-first Century -- Extended Producer Responsibility in the United States -- Attacking the Root of Plastic Waste -- Materials Management: A New Framework for Solid-Waste Policy?.

Environmentally Grounded Sectoral Analysis -- Conclusion -- Waste and Citizenship -- Business, Movements, and Power -- Bit by Bit: The Implicit Theory of Social Change -- From Local to National -- A U.S. Materials Policy -- To the Soil -- Biodegradation in the Cities -- The Promise of Recycling -- Appendix I: Summary of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Data on Solid-Waste Generation, Disposal, and Recycling in the United States -- Appendix II: Summary of Textile and Glass Disposal and Recycling in the United States and New York City -- Appendix III: Changes in Quantity and Composition of Municipal Solid Waste over Time -- Appendix IV: Fractions of Municipal Solid Waste Suitable for Reuse Using a Model of Repair, Refurbishment, and Retailing -- Appendix V: Details on Various Quantities of Different Plastics in Municipal Solid Waste -- Appendix VI: Fractions of Municipal Solid Waste Referred to in the Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Index -- Urban and Industrial Environments.