Introduction
In the official vocabulary of waste management, a disposal site is rendered as an engineering problem: siting, contracts, leachate, and odor control. This idiom leaves little room for the meanings and political struggles a dump accumulates for its neighbors. This study follows one such site's entire contested life: the municipal dump at Anjilsi, in Babol County, Mazandaran, Iran, operating from emergency founding in 1998 to contested closure in 2024, after a judicial order and residents blocking the trucks themselves. Anjilsi arose because an earlier dump at Mati Kola, near Babol, had been closed by protest, and the search for a successor skipped any feasibility study; what was meant as temporary lasted three decades. Full ethnographies of a dump's entire arc remain scarce in posthumanist waste scholarship, especially beyond the global North. The organizing question, why did this project fail, or more pointedly, who killed this site, is one its own framework must first unsettle.
Theoretical Framework
The analysis draws on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, read through a posthumanist sensibility. ANT treats "the social" not as a pre-existing structure but as the provisional outcome of associations among humans, objects, institutions, and texts; agency is not an inherent property but an effect of position in a chain of mediations. Translation and black box redirect inquiry from who acted to what actor enabled and redirected action. Non-humans qualify as actors whenever their presence or removal changes events, giving leachate, rainfall, birds, and jackals the same explanatory weight as officials and judges. In this framework, the opening question of who killed Anjilsi dissolves: since action is distributed across a network, the better question is which network produced, and later undid, three decades of stabilization.
Methodology
The research combines field ethnography with science and technology studies, treating Anjilsi and surrounding villages not as a bounded area but, following ANT's flattening of the field, as one including documents, administrative trails, and institutional actors. Fieldwork ran from April to September 2025, with indirect follow-up into early 2026, beginning through a local contact and expanding by snowball sampling. Data came from participant observation, unstructured interviews, and documents; interviewees included residents, provincial and municipal waste-management staff, legal, technical, and environmental officials, two university faculty members, and a former municipal employee, with the judiciary reconstructed through others' accounts. Residents are referred to here collectively; identities are withheld given the material's sensitivity. Following ANT's principle of symmetry, non-humans, leachate, odor, rainfall, birds, dogs, jackals, and trees were analyzed as actors, since each altered residents' decisions and possibilities for action.
Results and Discussion
The findings trace one highly unstable network through five intersecting dynamics. First, an improvised temporary fix hardened over decades into an almost irreplaceable fixture through institutional-economic lock-in: no alternative site, weak inter-agency coordination, and compensatory goods, roads, electricity, water, jobs, bound residents to the site's survival, turning contingency into what all treated as a natural institution. Second, technical remediation arrived only after contamination had stabilized: treatment of roughly forty cubic meters a day fell far short of output near one hundred twenty-five, with only a fraction separated, so university and contractor interventions were belated repair, not prevention, exposing officials' limited evaluative capacity. Third, this incapacity had consequences no fence could contain: leachate reached rice paddies, orchards, and household wells; odor entered domestic life; birds, dogs, and jackals redistributed waste far beyond the site, and residents described cancer, chronic illness, and fear for their children, pollution becoming a bodily fact. Fourth, these injuries attached to the region's name: villages once known for orchards and forest came to be known for the dump; land devalued, youth left, and while a neighboring village gained town status, Anjilsi's downstream neighbors stagnated, foreclosing a future the site might have held. Fifth, resident opposition evolved from a 2003 road blockade suppressed by security forces, through years of petitioning, to early-2010 lawsuits that secured a court order, which residents enforced by occupying the entrance once implementation stalled. Read together, these dynamics form a single contest over whose account of the dump would prevail: municipal and security actors enlisted roads, jobs, and delay to override residents, until leachate, birds, jackals, and finally the judiciary, mobilized by residents, undid that arrangement, so neither endurance nor closure traces to any single human or non-human author.
Conclusion
The paper argues that waste has no fixed essence and that a dump site is a social fact exceeding any nature/culture divide, so no engineering fix confined to its physical perimeter could resolve what it became. Narrated as a three-decade chronicle, the case also makes a historiographical point: granting leachate, birds, and jackals narrative weight alongside officials and judges yields a history that rejects the hierarchical logic of dominant over subordinate, center over margin, a logic still organizing much writing on Iran's social past, including critical genealogies of marginalized places such as Tehran's Kahrizak district. Waste governance thus emerges here as an ongoing, contested process of meaning-making among heterogeneous actors rather than a problem any single purely technical fix could close.