When “green” means more data: Climate data contradictions in digital waste governance

Abstract This article examines DigiWasteNet, a digital waste management system implemented in Polish cities, through the lens of climate data contradictions as an analytical problem in digital governance. Based on ethnographic research, I show that, while DigiWasteNet is promoted as part of the European Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan, it generates its own environmental costs. These costs take energetic, temporal, and material forms, while also reshaping what counts as environmental knowledge and accountability within “green” infrastructures. Drawing on Critical Data Studies and infrastructure theory, I analyse how everyday acts of waste disposal become data practices embedded in transnational digital infrastructures associated with globalised ICT supply chains. The case demonstrates how algorithmic decision-making (ADM) in public services—justified in the name of environmental protection and sustainability—produces new dependencies on private technology providers, shifts environmental responsibility onto citizens as “data subjects,” and externalises environmental costs beyond public accountability. Empirically, these dynamics illuminate questions of ecological justice (the uneven distribution of material and energetic costs), climate justice (the displacement of responsibility for climate goals onto citizens), and social justice (the concentration of infrastructural power and decision-making in private actors). Building on these findings, the article mobilises socialist ecology as a normative horizon for rethinking digital public infrastructures—not as tools of optimisation, but as infrastructures of care and collective responsibility grounded in democratic control over data and technology.