Historically, waste infrastructures have enabled the development of the modern city by ensuring the hygienic disposal of commodities and materials people wanted to get rid of. Starting by the end of the 19th century the incineration of waste has increasingly established as socio-technical regime in waste infrastructure systems in many western countries enabling to reduce the volume and hazardousness of waste in an apparently safe and environmentally sound way. Today, this regime has consolidated as a socially accepted and dominant pathway in German waste management, and 99% of the residual waste from households is incinerated. It is only since recently that urban waste systems have attracted more political and scientific attention due to different developments such as the shifting environmental discourse from the protection of the local environment towards the global conservation of resources and ecosystem services, increasing prizes and emerging markets for raw materials due to increasing resource scarcities and new European and national policy reforms towards a “recycling society”. Regime shifts towards waste prevention and the recycling of the different waste fractions require new governance approaches addressing the place specific production of waste and (re-) production of secondary raw materials. However, the existing incineration regime has developed powerful inertia due to enormous sunk costs invested in the centralized systems, undermining a transition towards urban waste prevention and recycling infrastructures. Addressing this “battle of the systems” between incineration and recycling regimes this paper is based on a systematic comparison of three cities in German metropolitan regions (Berlin, Bochum, Frankfurt). Based on the study of these dominant urban infrastructure regimes the paper focuses on the place-specific governance structures and socio-technical experiments constituting an opportunity for overcoming existing path dependencies and establishing decentralized approaches in recycling and waste prevention.
