Contested Waste

"Deliege’s paradox – the more essential the work, the more undervalued the workers - is nowhere more evident than in urban waste. Not only does this book illustrate the global relevance of this paradox, it also illuminates the sharply conflictual experience of exploited informal labour. An antidote to labour-displacing ‘engineering solutions’ in waste management, this authoritative volume, resulting from the great Environmental Justice Atlas, maps the social frictions around waste and finds waste-workers’ resistance key to social development. Essential reading for waste-istas!"

Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford University, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College

"In this comprehensive volume, waste pickers are the authors and agents of transformative change. They confront the forces of privatization, enclosure, and corruption to provide critical services for our communities. These are the garbage wars of the 21st century and we will know no peace until the waste pickers have prevailed!"

David N. Pellow, University of California Santa Barbara; author of ‘Garbage Wars’ (MIT Press, 2004) and ‘What is Critical Environmental Justice?’ (Polity Press, 2017)

"Contested Waste casts a bright light on the changing political economy of informal waste picking in the Global South in the face of urban transformation, privatization and waste commodification. Focusing attention on conflict, competition and resistance on one of the largest global resource frontiers, it is a must-read for anyone interested in environmental justice, urban politics and activism, or the politics of waste."

Kate O’Neill, Berkeley University; author of ‘Waste’ (Polity Press, 2019)

"Drawing on case studies of informal recyclers from across the Global South, this volume brings invaluable knowledge from the ground to reveal their everyday resistance against privatisation and marginalisation, advocating for their recognition as indispensable actors in inclusive waste economies and policies. This book is a vital contribution to the study of informal labour and urban environmental justice."

Kaveri Gill, Shiv Nadar University, New Delhi; author of ‘Of Poverty and Plastic’ (Oxford University Press, 2009)

"The world industrial economy produces much waste. We are very far from a "circular economy". Marco Armiero calls the current historical period the "Wastocene". It could also be called the "Entropocene", if we think of the excessive amount of greenhouse gases, the mountain of non-recycled outputs from the economy, the dissipation of energy and materials. One small part of the waste is solid urban domestic waste. The main protagonists of this extraordinary and very empirical book are the urban waste pickers and the networks, cooperatives, and trade unions they form. The book collects stories of their achievements and failures while confronting capitalists who need the waste for their incinerators, mafias trying violently to corner the waste trade, city governments disregarding the ecological usefulness of the waste pickers work, ashamed of the public exhibition of their badly paid work and their poverty. This moving and brilliant book is a great contribution to comparative political ecology. It is based on co-production of knowledge between activists and young academics who contributed case studies to the Atlas of Environmental Justice. The book travels around different continents, different topics (depending sometimes on the metabolic composition of the waste), and different forms of waste pickers' organisation. It brings into the open one of the most relevant international manifestations of working-class environmentalism."

Joan Martinez Alier, Autonomous University of Barcelona; author of ‘The Environmentalism of the Poor’ (Edward Elgar, 2002) and ‘Land, Water, Air and Freedom. The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice’ (Edward Elgar, 2023); Balzan prize 2020, and Holberg prize 2023.

"Combining innovative comparative methods with a compelling theoretical framework anchored in political ecology and ecological economics, this volume analyzes the often localized-struggles of waste pickers as a global phenomenon. A must-read for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the ever-evolving frontiers of capitalist expropriation and the grassroots struggles against it."

Manisha Anantharaman, Sciences Po Paris; author of ‘Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability’ (MIT Press, 2024)

"Up until the 1990’s waste pickers were neither recognized in policy making nor in the literature. For the technocratic literature, waste picking was seen as outdated, traditional, a primitive kind of work, and as a nuisance. It was within the social and human sciences literature that crucial themes such as identity, organizing, recognition, redistributive and socio-environmental issues, and contributions to city systems and to the value chain came to surface. This book makes a great contribution towards integration of two important streams of the literature – ecological economy and political ecology – in a way that integrates theoretical and empirical contributions. As such the book enables a much needed cross dialogue between different and valuable streams of the literature and with activism."

Dr. Sonia Dias, WIEGO’s waste specialist

"The book provides a critical examination of the struggles waste pickers face globally, foregrounding issues such as privatization, dispossession, waste incineration and other systemic threats. It emphasizes the urgent need to address the labor and human rights violations these workers endure. Through 71 case studies, the text reveals the social and environmental consequences of global consumption and waste, demanding a compelling call for change."

Jutta Gutberlet, University of Victoria; author of ‘Urban Recycling Cooperatives’ (Routledge, 2016), and ‘Recovering Resources - Recycling Citizenship’ (Routledge, 2016)

"Most of us know that the world is producing more and more waste. But few of us know that, around the world, millions of waste pickers earn a living from manually collecting, sorting, and selling recyclable materials from urban waste. These environmental champions help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. This important book sheds light on the contributions of waste pickers, the threats they face from the privatization and modern technologies of solid waste management, and the struggles of their organizations to demand recognition and inclusion in solid waste management systems."

Marty Chen, Harvard University, and WIEGO founder; editor of ‘The Informal Economy Revisited’ (Routledge, 2022)

"This important book shines a light on the inspiring example of waste picker organisation but also why it is necessary: the multifold threats to waste pickers posed by the accumulation by dispossession and accumulation by contamination that inheres in contemporary neoliberal waste management models. With a punchy and clear conceptual framework, the book’s chapters constitute a treasury of trash conflicts and a clarion call for inclusive waste management."

Patrick O’Hare, University of St Andrews; author of ‘Rubbish Belongs to the Poor (Pluto Press, 2022)

"This book is an eye-opener and illuminates a reality in the field of waste and environmental justice that is too often relegated to the backstage of our society. Stepping on the ground of a dumpsite and learning about the life of waste pickers should be a must-do for every scholar, at least once in their lifetime. This is a “modern ghetto” - which must be experienced to fully grasp the ultimate consequences of the current extractivist, capitalist, anthropocentric, wasteful model of production and consumption. Thousands of tons of waste, including all kinds of products that are still perfectly edible, compostable, reusable and recyclable, are dumped in insalubrious mountains, exacerbating climate change and environmental injustice. Thousands of people, the poorest of the poor, make their livelihoods through collecting and recovering materials in the most precarious conditions - carrying out an ecological task that benefits us all. Now, dumpsites are not only the result of a series of misplaced or absent political decisions. They are also a space where conflict for life and survival clearly enlighten what are the indispensable solutions that we must build. Stepping foot on a dumpsite helps us to envision and build a better world. This book takes a step closer to our envisioned future, enabling us to find the answers, build solutions, and delivering the just transition that all waste pickers deserve."

Mariel Vilella, Director of Global Climate Program, GAIA - Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives

This book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the condition and position of informal recyclers in relation to the political systems in which they are working. It brings together strains of scholarship on capitalism, environmental justice, labour rights, and the tragedy of the commons, and recombines the associated discourses in interesting and illuminating ways. It is especially useful for scholars and practitioners associated with the formal and semi-formal institutions of waste management, recycling, and formal environmental governance, in that it provides a point of entry to understanding the socio-political and academic critique of practical 21st century environmental governance that refers to itself as “the environmental justice movement,” and that positions itself in opposition to governmental and professional communities of practice who deal with solid waste and recycling on a daily basis. Putting informal actors at the front of this analysis is very useful, insofar as it summarises, potentiates and complements existing scholarship and advocacy in important ways. Where the book falls short, is in imagining and communicating how the institutional and professional landscapes of waste management, materials recovery and decontamination of the planet — focusing on clean air and waste-free seas, for example — could formulate and engage with the environmental justice movement to arrive at larger-scale and broader-based management strategies that not only include waste pickers, but also re-imagine and promote politoco-socio-economic actions that improve the performance of governmental and private sector waste institutions that manage waste and materials. And that ultimately transform both formal and informal institutions to produce hybrid and inclusive systems. And recognise the importance not only of struggle, but of the need for rest, reconciliation and socio-economic recuperation to support long-term institutional co-operation and co-existence.
Like courts of justice, the environmental justice movement is correct in focusing on naming and responding to injustice and dispossession of the livelihoods of waste pickers, and it is essential in recognising and legitimising their claims to livelihood. But environmental justice, analogous to a court of justice, is only the first port of call in a much longer socio-politico-economic process of integrating current informal and semi-formal recycling and re-use iactivities into normal environmental governance, so that the children of the children of today’s waste pickers can have the choice to continue in their grandparents’ professions but with better conditions of work, higher social recognition, and a real place at the table. For those working on institutional reform in the waste sector, on recycling, waste prevention, climate change, on social justice, or simply on modernizing waste management in an era of global warming, there are good reasons to pick up this book and read it cover to cover.

Anne Scheinberg, global recycling specialist, Chair, Working Group on Recycling and Waste Minimisation, International Solid Waste Association (ISWA)