Abstract

There is an endless problem with waste concerning management, recycling and landfilling which can be understood as a moral problem, too. The text starts with the legal management of waste in statutes since the 19th century and the judgements of the late 20th. The legal regulations do not prevent the actual distribution of waste all over the world, as to developing countries like Malaysia and the Philippines or to the surface of the oceans as it is done within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. These real ways of pollution on one hand with the seemingly well formulated regulations on the other reveal the paradoxical nature of the attitudes on waste which are the main part of a new moral problem. In the end, those paradoxes are dealt with as a question of communication.