Waste in Zero-Waste Households: The Power of Materials and Norms in Everyday Consumption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines the challenges of everyday waste minimization of ‘zero waste’ practitioners in Chinese cities. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography of a zero-waste community, this article details the processes during which different types of waste were ‘inevitably’ produced in everyday practices, such as those related to shopping and gifting, food provisioning and eating, binning and composting. Using theories of social practice, this article turns away from focusing on individual awareness, behavior, and choice, and instead seeks to explain how practices that people come to perform can be reproduced and reinforced despite individuals’ commitments to change. The findings illuminate how waste generation is subject to culturally and collectively constructed norms and rules, key social relations of love and care, and is embedded in the material arrangements that make up everyday life. The research sheds light on the importance of paying attention to both the more routinized and reflexive aspects of everyday life, and the power of diverse actors in affecting and shaping daily activities of consumption and waste.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".