Gleaning around the globe: Reframing urban thrift via practices and economies of hard rubbish reuse

Abstract

This article examines the practice of gleaning or waste picking, that is, retrieving, reusing and exchanging disposed consumer goods collected from kerbsides and rubbish sites. While the literature has tended to be divided along geographic lines with waste picking either associated with poor communities in the Global South or understood as anti-consumerism activism in the North, this article reframes gleaning as a set of shared global practices conventionally positioned outside of market-based conceptions of economy, value and labour. Discussing a wide array of gleaning activities from around the world, the key argument made is that the alternative economies and practices associated with hard waste reuse activities can be seen as modelling different ways of living (with waste), consuming and disposing that offer potential environmental, economic and social benefits. The article argues that waste reuse activities should be viewed as a set of practices or routines that offer a critique of narrow neoliberal conceptions of economics, enacting instead broader models of value and labour that speak to notions of the public, social and (within limits) planetary good. Furthermore, these post-consumption practices challenge traditional conceptions of passive commodity consumption and disposal, extending the global value chain of goods to incorporate practices of sorting, disassemblage, repair and repurposing. In so doing, it suggests a need (particularly in the Global North) to reconfigure our relationship with and understanding of the life cycles of goods and materials in our lives and to re-materialise our everyday engagements with things as they shift from commodities to waste and back again.