Contested Waste

Abstract

This book explores socio-environmental conflicts involving waste pickers in the Global South. It focuses on their marginalisation amid changing urban waste management systems. Public authorities increasingly favour privatisation and incineration as rising levels of waste accumulate in cities across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. These changing systems exclude informal recyclers, numbered by the ILO at about 20 million workers in the Global South, who manage up to 50% of total waste disposal. This exclusion sparks conflict, documented in over 70 cases in the Environmental Justice Atlas (ejatlas.org). This book examines how shifts in the urban metabolism and political economy of waste drive these conflicts using the lens of ecological economics and political ecology. The privatisation of waste management, waste enclosure, incineration projects, and the persecution of waste pickers constitute just some of the threats to informal recycler survival. Waste, once freely available to the poor, is being appropriated and enclosed for business gain. As a result, private corporations get large profits, waste pickers lose their livelihood, and society at large is deprived of the social and environmental benefits of recycling. These processes align with “Accumulation by Dispossession” and “Accumulation by Contamination,” respectively, displacing waste pickers and shifting environmental burdens onto marginalised communities. Despite the challenges, waste pickers are organised into unions, cooperatives, and alliances with citizens and environmental groups to resist their exclusion and to fight for environmental justice. Case studies highlight waste pickers’ critical role in sustainable ecosystems and advocate for inclusive waste management policies.