Whose value lies in the urban mine? Reconfiguring permissions, work and the benefits of waste in South AfricaPresenter: Nate Millington, Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies, Department of Geography, University of Manchester How waste should flow, and who should pay for and benefit from these flows, have never been easy questions. Recent efforts to recognize and capture value from (some) waste has led to new flows, and new conflicts. In this paper, we explore ongoing ideas and initiatives about reworking the wastescape in three South African cities. Various actors seek to capture more waste, make the wastescape more legible, and shift the costs of work. Despite ongoing rhetoric that frames waste as a new resource, interviewees note that much easily accessed waste is already claimed, and there are underemphasized costs associated with increasing the volume of collected waste. In this context, we consider efforts to change the wastescape as ways of reconfiguring existing flows and reworking ongoing arrangements of the state, industry, reclaimers and workers. This includes changing who is permitted to access waste and create value. Across our interviewees, we find many contrasting ideas about what more desirable infrastructure might entail. We suggest that contestations over waste are not just about permission to create value, but are underwritten by different visions of what infrastructure is and ought to be, who ought to know and govern it, and in whose interest waste flows. Keywords: waste; infrastructure; South Africa; urban political ecology; value |
(Un)knowing toxicity: waste, value and indeterminacy through artistic engagements with Lebanon’s coastal landfillsPresenter: Hanna Baumann, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, The Bartlett, University College University College London) In the southern Lebanese city of Saida, a mountain of garbage, including waste from hospitals and slaughterhouses, piled up on the coast for decades, with leaking methane often causing fires and explosions. In 2016, after Lebanon’s trash crisis escalated to the point that it almost brought down the government, the rubbish mountain was gradually removed, its components sorted, and turned into a green space, transforming it into a site of vitality. Similar plans have been on the table for other waste sites along the Lebanese coast, including for the Metn-Nord landfill just outside Beirut. Here, garbage is dumped into the sea for ‘land reclamation’ purposes – with the newly-gained landmass to be developed into parks as well as lucrative sea-front real estate. The paper takes as its starting point artistic engagements by Marwa Arsenios, Jessika Khazrik, Fadi Mansour, Bassem Saad and others dealing with Lebanon’s ‘garbage crisis’. I argue that their works show how the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) of environmental destruction operates across timescales. The coastline is littered with two types of waste – rubble from the Lebanese civil war and the rubbish of the postwar reconstruction – revealing how both littoral land reclamation and green revitalisation reverberate with foundational violence. Despite its sometimes apocalyptic permutations, I conclude that the toxification of Lebanon’s coast is not a sensational aberration, but in fact a system that sustains lives and livelihoods (cf. Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018), at the same time as causing slow death. References: Liboiron, Max, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo. 2018. “Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world.” Social Studies of Science 48 (3):331–349. Keywords: crisis, Lebanon, slow violence, toxicity, value, waste |
Scavenging for Infrastructure: Waste, Public Health, and the Vulture Crisis in Postcolonial IndiaPresenter: N.J. Dharan, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania In the 1990s, the vulture population of India underwent a dramatic population decline. Still in the process of recovery, this species collapse has had consequences for public health, informal economies, and the funerary practices of the Parsi community. Through an international collaboration of scientific experts, it was determined that diclofenac, a veterinary anti-inflammatory drug, was the cause of the collapse. Diclofenac was used extensively by Indian farmers to keep their livestock healthy and productive, but it rendered the carcasses of animals that had ingested the drug toxic to vultures. The vulture crisis, as it is known, thus reveals the profound interconnectedness and fragility of India’s social ecology. This paper probes multiple dimensions of waste in order to understand the interplay between human and non-human animal health in the postcolonial context. Vultures perform the crucial sanitary work of consuming carrion in a country where many refrain from eating meat, but remain exceptionally vulnerable to pharmaceutical waste, often an afterthought for the industry. Marshalling journalistic, legal, and scientific texts, I ask whether understanding vultures as a kind of infrastructure properly captures the complexity of the crisis. In particular, I critique how the characterization of the vulture population as a static, technological object has obscured questions of risk, justice, and temporal depth. Drawing upon recent work in animal studies, history of science, and the anthropology of infrastructure, I ultimately argue for a livelier conceptualization of infrastructure, which better accounts for human and non-human actors and the vital role animals play in waste management. Keywords: India, animals, environment, public health, infrastructure |
A Tactical Approach to Discard Studies? Thinking through Privy2Presenter: Nicholas C. Kawa, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University Drawing inspiration from “deep listening” and “sonic awareness” exercises, this paper relies on a series of soundscapes recorded in urban renewal projects that use biosolids—treated sanitation wastes—for landscaping and beautification in the City of Chicago. Specifically, the paper examines how such recordings and attempts to contextualize them ethnographically can help to guide understandings of the contemporary applications of biosolids as well as their uneven distributions and effects in urban contexts. In some instances, biosolids-enriched landscapes can serve to extend the pleasures of late industrial nature and outdoor recreation, which can be heard in the sway of native prairie grasses and the hum of insect populations. However, in other cases, biosolids can raise alarms about emerging contaminants and their impacts on food safety and public health, particularly in urban environments that are already unduly stressed. Collectively, this project contributes to the use of sensorial ethnography in discard studies and specifically the experimental use of soundscapes to trace the afterlives of biosolids—as well as the promises and pitfalls of their application—in late industrial Chicago. Keywords: biosolids, soundscapes, late industrialism, emerging contaminants, urban renewal |
4 Mystification: from dirty work to green labor: the political economy of recyclingPresenter: Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor, Anthropology Department, New York University Citizen recycling campaigns are a central part of China’s recent efforts to create a more sustainable system of urban waste management. Drawing from ethnography work with an environmental NGO to promote recycling in the southern city of Guangzhou, this paper shows that sanitation work and the recuperation of scraps, are performed not by citizens but by migrant laborers and the working poor, whose wages and working conditions have been fundamentally reconfigured by the forces of marketization in the post-reform era. Recycling, as a practice of reclamation, mediates various types of exchanges between bodies, objects and values. In the name of creating a green city and promoting environmentalism, urban recycling campaigns valorize a middle-class environmental ethic while they simultaneously obscure and foreclose the right of the urban poor to reclaim resource. |