Who is most responsible for waste?

This week I’ve been reading Myra Hird’s new book A Public Sociology of Waste. One of her main points is that the waste problem has been framed around household responsibility. In the public imagination it is households that produce waste. Fixing it is down to individuals to be careful about what they buy and recycle more.

That certainly seems to be a fairly common perception. If and when waste policy comes up in politics, it is almost always around domestic waste – such as Rishi Sunak’s imag...