On the one side, waste disposal is an activity that heavily touches upon territories, to the point of not simply polluting areas but also leaving permanent stigmas upon them. Living near – or even inside – a dump, or in proximity of polluting implants, provides, in many places around the world, the ideal recipe for urban stigmatization and marginalization. Garbage thus functions as quintessential social anti-value: its contamination is double, at once biological and moral. Disposals mis-management recurrently leads to mediatized alarms that clear the ground for all sorts of emergency measures that prove capable of systematically trumping democratic procedures.”