Regulating Responsibility: Environmental Sustainability, Law, and the Platformisation of Waste Management

The scope of Sustainable HCI research is expanding to include the broad sociotechnical and ecological contexts of computing. We examine the intersection of environmental sustainability, technology, and the law. By studying the legal dispute between a platform service that facilitates crowd-sourced waste disposal and the local government’s regulation of waste management, we step through an evolving debate on the meaning of care and responsibility for the environment. When faced with the municipality’s claimed monopoly on responsibility for waste management, the platform argues for the paradigms of individual responsibility, designing for user needs, and personalised and on-demand digital services. In arguing against this framing, the municipality highlights the gap between the law, its interpretation, and the idealistic values of technology-driven environmental care. We contribute to the framing of environmental care within Sustainable HCI as a locally constructed, regulated, and contested aspect of technology design and appropriation.