This book uncovers, explores and analyses the cultural and social factors and values that lie behind waste making, recycling and disposal in the Asia Pacific region. It will be an important read for scholars, researchers and students in sustainability, development studies, discard studies, and social and cultural history.

Viktor Pál is a Hungarian environmental historian, an Associate Professor at the University of Tampere, Finland, and the University of Ostrava, Czechia, and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of the book Technology and the Environment in State-Socialist Hungary: An Economic History (2017), and with Stephen Brain, he has co-edited the collection of essays, Environmentalism under Authoritarian Regimes. Myth, Propaganda, Reality (2019).

Iris Borowy is a Distinguished Professor at Shanghai University, China. She is also a founding director of the Center for the History of Global Development at that university. Her publications include Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission), published in 2014.