Wherever we live, in the affluent West, in emerging economies or in the poorest countries, the increasing presence of waste is a common experience that triggered many design experiments. Environmental sustainability is obviously the narrative glue which keeps together these researches, but it does not explain alone the attitude of waste and its recycling strategies (both in a material and conceptual sense) to become the engine of design and get so compelling solutions. Though the ethical intentionality is an integral part of these proposals, their aesthetic effectiveness lies more plausibly in the ambiguous relationship between past and present triggered by the very idea of recycling: between the reassuring continuity of the known and the threatening return of the removed, between nostalgia for the familiar and its inevitable estrangement. [This paper has been written and published within the PRIN 2007 research program "Waste Archipelagoes. Investigation on the Relationship between Waste and Design".]
