As an ever-greater part of the world’s population is living in cities, dealing with urban waste is becoming an increasingly prominent challenge for local authorities (Frantzeskaki & Kabisch, 2016). In many places, local authorities are struggling to cope with growing amounts of waste annually, as cities grow and citizens’ consumption rises (Hoornweg, Bhada-Tata & Kennedy, 2013). Local authorities that lack the organizational capabilities and physical infrastructure to deal effectively with urban waste are often faced with huge environmental, economic and social problems (Hodson & Marvin, 2010; Mourad, 2016). Nevertheless, investments in organisational capabilities and physical infrastructure come with challenges and problems of their own. These investments tend to create lock-ins (see Chapter 3), which make the waste treatment system inflexible and prevent further improvements (David, 1985; Geels, 2002). The local authorities that make these investments run the risk of becoming stuck with systems that are technologically outdated and adequate only to deal with yesterday’s problems. To introduce new and smarter urban waste systems, local authorities need to challenge existing policies and institutions, technologies and business models (Uyarra & Gee, 2013; Weber & Rohracher, 2012).

It is a paradox that the same investments in organisational capabilities and physical infrastructure that local authorities make to deal with problems related to waste today might prevent them from coping with tomorrow’s problems. In this chapter we want to explore this paradox by focusing on how the municipality of Oslo deals with organic waste. The municipality of Oslo has made massive investments in a physical infrastructure consisting of an optical sorting plant, a biogas facility and an incineration plant. These investments have created strong incentives for the municipality to improve the sustainability of its waste treatment system by building upon existing infrastructure; for instance, by constructing a district heating infrastructure to make use of excess heat from the incineration plant and establishing a bus fleet that runs on biogas to make use of biofuels from the biogas plant. Nevertheless, the same investments also rely upon steady flows of organic waste and