Today the experience of waste and pollution is entirely natural. Wherever we happen to be, our adored archipelagos of locality are permeated by a profusion of contaminations that bathe the entire planet. In the world’s burgeoning metropolises − which are now home to well over half the human population − everyday life is carried out amidst a haze of industrial and photochemical air pollutions, the slow but steady secretion of toxins into waterways, soils and living cells, the seemingly endless accumulation of plastic bags, old furniture and discarded technology in laneways, parks and dumps, and the pummelling of our senses and bodies with the electromagnetic static of media and malodorous advertising.