Global capitalism has changed drastically during the past three decades. Key to this is its exponential growth, coupled with an enormous production of waste. The resultant ‘global waste problem’ in fact involves different types of waste and gives rise to variegated practices of waste handling at multiple sites. In this special issue, the authors discuss waste through a focus on inequalities. Contrary to the all-embracing notion of a ‘global waste problem’, there is nothing (normatively) equal in the way people are entangled in, and affected by, the production of waste and the processes of wasting. The consequences of waste and pollution are shared unequally, laying the ground for vast injustices. The articles in this issue encourage a more critical and situated understanding of waste-related inequalities and their global connections. Scholars and activists alike need to face frictions through waste in order to make sense of the particular global connections and inequalities related to changing patterns of wasting.