Most of the his writing and research has focused on various types of waste, mammalian, municipal and, most recently, militaristic, particularly their significance for political movements and global markets and their emergent entanglement with human and non-human life. With Catherine Alexander he co-edited Economies of Recycling (2012) on the myriad social relations and informal markets that develop around the reuse of waste. His ethnography, Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill (2016), is based on fieldwork as a paper picker at a large landfill in the rural outskirts of Detroit, as well as an associate of local activists opposed to the landfill. He is in the process of writing a new book, War Machine Waste, on the waste of the American military industrial complex, based on research with abandoned and reused military equipment and forgotten sites of destructive creation.