From Seaweed to Plastic: Gleaning and the moral economy of waste in Indonesia

Abstract

This article explores practices of gleaning in Indonesia to analyse how different values are generated from residual materials under conditions of economic marginalisation, environmental degradation, and uneven governance. Moving beyond gleaning’s agrarian conception as the ancient practice of gathering leftover crops after the main harvest, it compares the collection of loose seaweed in coastal aquaculture with the informal gathering of post-consumer plastic waste outside formal waste management systems. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines how marginalised communities generate value from materials deemed residual through labour shaped by subsistence needs, moral claims, social hierarchies, and unequal distributions of obligation and risk. Framing these practices within a ‘moral economy’–in which shared values and notions of the common good are integral to economic life–the article shows how gleaning functions not only as a survival strategy, but also as a contested ethical project that both reproduces gendered divisions of labour and enables claims to dignity and belonging amid contested environmental governance and shifting regimes of value.