This paper is part of a project that investigates the politics of waste in the West Bank. By exploring a spectrum of waste sites and circulations - from land-filling to cross-boundary sewage flows and the growing Palestinian-Israeli trade in used goods – the broader project analyzes some of the effects of geographical separation, state-building and continuing colonization today. Waste is inseparable from the questions of value and visibility. To historicize and to observe its circulations and the discourses and practices to which it gives rise is therefore crucial to understanding shifts in value, visibility and the emergence of everyday categories. This paper examines how the emergence of a new ontological entity called “the environment” has intersected with the era of separation between West Bank Palestinians and Israeli citizens. Specifically, it investigates how sewage was made over in the latter twentieth century from a central issue of public health under the banner of “sanitation” into a transcendental concern of the (sometimes “shared”) “environment” – at times as a resource and at others as pollutant. I draw on two years of fieldwork to examine how the smells, expertise, bureaucratic tanglings and debates to which sewage flows, cesspits and infrastructures give rise help us understand the spatio-temporal experience of living in the West Bank today. The questions this paper will ask include: What are the properties of sewage as a substance, and the infrastructures that have been developed to manage it, that make it different from other infrastructures that today make up the Palestinian Authority’s practices of statecraft? For example, how do sewage and ideas of “infrastructural violence,” “good governance” and “cross-border” flows in the particular case of post-Oslo Palestine speak to questions of sovereignty, the temporal scope of planning and the geographic scales of autonomous government?