This chapter analyzes the conflict of knowledges in the process of political decision about the treatment of dangerous industrial waste and the option for co-incineration. Although the history of the treatment of industrial waste in Portugal is already fifteen years old, the fight of Souselas (Coimbra) against the establishment of a co-incinerator, as its most recent "chapter," has been the one that, until now, has brought about a broader and more complex set of questions. The amplification of these questions has enabled a local protest movement, in its "most heated" periods, to define the national agenda. Beyond the interest derived from its great complexity, the analysis of this whole process seems to indicate that Portuguese society is undergoing deep structural changes, which actually had already begun to appear in other situations of public controversy.

As a matter of fact, the untangling of the possible consequences associated with the governmental decision led to the emergence of the controversy within the scientific community, which was one of the decisive elements in the whole process. This movement also reflects the need to adjust and relate knowledge to specific socio-spacial contexts, namely at the level of environmental problems. In a process like this, which involved questions of risk and uncertainty, it became clear that by keeping the discussions within the restricted bounds of science many of its potentialities were eliminated. The knowledges that were deemed valid to the resolution of the problem point to a modern solution for a postmodern problem, since the results obtained, in addition to not extending beyond scientific knowledge, have enabled the association between the scientists that produced those results and political decision-makers. Beyond this dimension of the politicization of science, this chapter allows us to explore the emancipatory possibilities of the democratization of so-called scientific knowledge and of the latter's confrontation with lay knowledges.