A method for treating the scattering and absorption of sound in the presence of non‐uniform boundary conditions is applied to the case of an infinite strip of material (of given width) placed on an infinite, otherwise hard, wall. The strip is assumed to be characterized by a normal acoustic impedance that may possess a resistive component.The wave equation is reformulated as an integral equation over the strip. A variational expression is found for the amplitude of sound scattered by the strip in any direction. The total cross section for scattering plus absorption is determined from the amplitude of specular reflection according to a well‐known cross‐section theorem. Comparison with Pellam's results for absorption by such a strip shows that the methods used have an accuracy better than 2 percent over the entire frequency range.