Article Caring for waste: Handling tailings in a Chilean copper mine Sebastian Ureta Departamento de Sociologı ´a, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile Abstract How do we practically deal with the waste produced by industrial processes? Until now this question has overwhelmingly been answered in one way: through the deployment of different kinds of waste management programs, technology-based top-down actions for waste whose ultimate aim is to make it disappear both physically by leaving it in fully enclosed dumps and politically by eliminating it as a matter of concern that must be dealt with. Due to the multiple setbacks that this approach has faced in terms of large spills and continual pollution, this paper states the need to consider a parallel set of practices that have been enacted, that is, the practice of caring for waste. Based on current developments in science and technology studies, care is presented as a way to deal with waste that, based on everyday practices and the inescapability of failure, proposes temporary and experimental ways to involve all the concerned parties in the search for alternative ways to live with our waste, in material, ethical and political terms. In order to explore the challenges that such an approach entails this paper will present some examples of caring for waste developed by the personnel of a large copper mine located in central Chile. Keywords Waste, care, infrastructure, mining, waste management Management and care One of the most pressing questions of our time is how to deal with the waste produced by human activity. From households that continually discard items that its members no longer want to countries who ‘‘outsource’’ millions of tons of different kinds of toxic wastes, the way we deal with waste is usually seen as one of most visible materializations of the ultimate unsustainability of our current production and consumption patterns. Among the different types of waste, industrial solid waste (ISW) occupies the utmost central position, amounting to 97% of the total waste produced in countries such as the US (Liboiron, 2013). Until now the heterogeneous set of practices and devices devoted to dealing with ISW have been largely understood as different materializations of Waste Management (WM) programs. According to the editors of the eponymous journal, WM can be defined as Corresponding author: Sebastian Ureta, Departamento de Sociologı ´a, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Cienfuegos 46, Santiago 8340588 Chile. Email: sureta@uahurtado.cl Environment and Planning A 0(0) 1–17 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16645103 epn.sagepub.com