Waste crime from three criminological perspectives: Implications for crime control and harm prevention

textabstractThis paper focuses on the waste-crime nexus. We discuss which implications different criminological approaches to the waste-crime nexus and their respective etiological explanations and views on financial incentives hold for crime control and harm prevention. After all, the criminogenic opportunities of waste as a product and a sector are utilized by corporations as well as criminal organizations. This makes waste crime a topic of research for corporate crime and organized crime scholars. Moreover, waste crime is also a topic of green criminological research. For each of these three perspectives, we discuss what consequences the theories have for controlling and preventing waste crime and whether the contemporary regulation and enforcement answers to these requirements. Besides existing criminological studies on waste crime, this paper builds on the finds of our own studies on the Dutch waste sector and the Belgian trade in e-waste. We also pay attention to how these three criminological perspectives are reflected in reports and recommendations on waste crime by NGOs and international governmental organizations. For each of the three perspectives, we discuss a couple of prominent cases of waste crime that reflect the framing of the nature and the causes of the theoretical perspectives