The political ecology of informal waste recyclers in India: circular economy, green jobs, and poverty

Waste is increasingly a site of social conflict. The questions related to waste management are not merely technical; what, how, where, and by whom become political questions. This book is about the power relations in recycling. Informal waste recyclers (so called waste pickers) are socially invisible. Their struggle aims to transform this situation. This book focuses on environmental conflicts, with two emblematic case studies from India. First, ship breaking, where the metabolism of a global infrastructure, namely shipping, shifts social and environmental costs to localized communities in order to obtain large profits. Second, the conflict around municipal waste management in Delhi shows how environmental costs are shifted to urban residents, and recyclers are dispossessed of their livelihood source: recyclable waste. The first is an example of capital accumulation by contamination, while the second involves both dispossession and contamination. Therefore, the book investigates ‘social relations of recycling’, which are the social relationships that recyclers must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of existence. It makes a case for the recognition of the contribution of informal recyclers in making the economy more sustainable, and in the name of justice, calls for due compensation for the services they provide. Based on extensive field work lasting a decade, the book presents a range of experiences to inform theory on how environments are shaped, politicized, and contested. The struggles of informal recyclers constitute an attempt to re-politicize waste metabolism beyond techno-managerial solutions by fostering counter-hegemonic discourses and praxis. © Federico Demaria 2023.