In regions with advanced sewage and sanitation infrastructure, human excrements have remained largely absent from public discourse, hidden by an aversion to talking about them and by the ubiquitous 'flush and forget' system. This paper proposes that this regime of invisibility has been changing in recent years. Contemporary collective understandings and meanings ascribed to human excrements are shifting. Human excrements are no longer understood simply as disgusting dirt, but recognised as waste material, human waste. This conceptual transformation occurs simultaneously across academic research and broader public consciousness, generating recognition that human waste is a subject of social, political, and environmental concern and a matter of collective responsibility. Rather than accepting narratives of inevitable public powerlessness against entrenched capitalist interests and environmental disaster, this paper focuses on how community mobilisation and public education can create openings for meaningful change in human waste management practices. The central question driving the inquiry is: what social, political, and environmental transformations become possible when human waste becomes visible and politicised? To address this question, with a focus on some European contexts, the paper will present a brief overview of the transition of human excrements ‘from dirt to waste’. It will also present the cases of grassroots campaigns opposing sewage contamination, and of sewage museums – educational institutions that foreground the technological, ecological, cultural, and social dimensions of human waste and of its management. Short biography: Dr Isabel Crowhurst is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Essex in the UK. Her work explores the construction and impact of social norms. She has researched these aspects with a focus on intimacy and personal life, commercial sex, taxation and financial technologies. More recently, she has embarked on a new project exploring the social and political dimensions of human waste.