Revisiting the Ontology of Waste: Compossibility and Compost-ability

Abstract

This article introduces the newly coined term compost-ability in order to propose a reconceptualization of the ontological domain of waste. Structured around two interrelated components—“compost” and “possibility”—compost-ability functions as both an ontological and an epistemological category. As such, it may be theorized in relation to the problem of imagination, understood in connection with cosmotechnics, a concept developed by Yuk Hui. Drawing upon Gilbert Simondon’s notion of milieu, compost-ability is articulated as a technological operation governed by the principle of compossibility. From this perspective, waste can be interpreted as a task of technological reintegration into the human milieu. In this light, waste becomes a site where the terms of coexistence are contested, and the milieu emerges as an active domain in which limits and vital potentials are continuously renegotiated.