While our sense of waste is today conditioned by the ascendency of a sustainability agenda that reaches from global politics to the design of systems of energy conservation, the phenomena that come to constitute an entire language of waste also work against the possibility of those attempts to find the means of sustainable living in exceptionally subtle ways. It is not just because the stuff of waste may pollute, or that it illustrates the profligate use of scarce resources that we have to be concerned about it. It is also the case that aesthetic sensibility, consciousness, and time-awareness...