Countercycling : an ethnographic study of waste, recycling, and waste-pickers in Curitiba, Brazil (original) (raw)
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Discourses on the recycling of urban waste are usually articulated under 'unpoliti-cal' eco-logics (Crenson, 1971). The pressure of looming environmental threats makes it harder to discern how recycling circuits benefit some agents and margin-alize others. I argue that circuits of material recycling are assemblages of humans, technologies, streams of materials, and social relations that demand the discussion of notions of social justice and attention to uneven urban geographies. Contrary to what is communicated by the visual symbol of recycling, the circuits set in motion beyond each bin, commercial truck, package material, or council leaflet that displays it, are not simply flat, fluid, unilinear, and circular movements of waste from selective bins back to commercial shelves. If one follows the materials and the bodies that transport and transform them, one will encounter the transactions, attachments, interactions, hinges, mechanisms, and 'membranes' through which inequality is engendered and reproduced. This chapter centres on the recycling circuits set in motion by informal waste pickers in Curitiba, Brazil. The city's strong recycling culture combines aspects of the urban South with models characteristic of wealthier cities in the global North. Catadores (the Brazilian informal waste pickers) are people who rummage through the city's waste in search of materials to sell. They form a group of highly marginalized people, from migrants recently arrived from rural areas to long-term inner-city slum dwellers, mostly with no formal relationship with the bureaucratic or welfare state. These informal recyclers are attracted and marginalized by the luring promises of urban recycling. In Curitiba, where, depending on who counts, 4,000 to 50,000 catadores operate, recycling is also closely connected to dominant discourses of efficiency and environmental sustainability. In 1989, this city developed one of the first campaigns promoting household recycling in the world. In the years that followed, partly because of its recycling model, Curitiba became known in Brazil as the 'first world capital city' and in international circuits of urban planning as a 'model of ecological efficiency' (cf. Rabinovitch
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Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2019
Based on the acknowledgment of the materiality of recyclable materials, and therefore of their condition of actants in the recycling market, this paper proposes a materially contextualised account of waste pickers’ marginalisation in Brazil, departing from the extant literature on the topic. Drawing on a mixture of interviews and participant observation data collected during six months of fieldwork using the follow-the-thing approach, it explores the case of ‘rubbish PET’, (i.e., PET—polyethylene terephthalate) bottles dyed in colours other than green or blue to which there is currently no recycling market. The afterlife journey of discarded PET bottles provides the background for a discussion around the capacity of pigments to assert themselves, endangering and defying human efforts to transform discarded PET bottles into resources again. Through the reactions they elicit from those aiming to control their disruptiveness, pigments come to encapsulate the interests of powerful actors and are then transformed into tokens that transmit and reaffirm their hegemony throughout the PET recycling chain, therefore becoming implicated in political processes that contribute to waste pickers’ socioeconomic deprivation.
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In recent years, the expansion of types of work that fall outside the category of formal waged employment challenge many of our anthropological conceptions of labor, class politics and contemporary capitalism. This paper addresses the need to rethink the meaning of work in the context of neoliberal capitalism by exploring the formation of new worker subjectivities and practices among catadores: informal workers who collect and sell recyclable materials on a garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Based on ethnographic research conducted among catadores from June through August of 2005 and in January 2007, this paper provides an analysis of the labor conditions, social relations, and forms of political organizing that have emerged on the garbage dump and which differ in significant ways from those found in situations of formal wage labor. Ultimately, this paper argues that while neoliberal capitalism has led to increased unemployment and underemployment among vulnerable populations in cities worldwide, the practices of those struggling to earn a living in urban informal economies are creating new spaces for alternative economic practices, social relations, and class politics today.
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This thesis seeks to understand and problematise waste pickers' underprivileged socioeconomic condition in Brazil from the perspective of their active participation in the recycling economy. It uses a Cultural Political Economy informed analytical toolkit that includes a political-economic, a semiotic, a material and a spatiotemporal dimension to examine how the recycling economy is configured in Brazil. Premised on the adverse incorporation of waste pickers into the economy, it further asks how and in what ways their participation may take place on unfavourable terms. Academic literature concerned with waste pickers' empowerment, especially in the Brazilian context, typically advocates for their organisation around collectives and the subsequent formalisation of their work by local authorities as providers of waste management services. Implicit in that literature is the assumption that informality is the root cause of their vulnerable socioeconomic condition and, hence, that empowering them entails expanding the reach of our current market-oriented development model, incorporating them into the so-called formal economy. Critiquing the formalisation and cooperatisation approach, this thesis rejects the dichotomous view of the economy (formal-informal) upon which the prevailing literature is based. The Global Production Network approach, with its focus on the social processes that underpin the global economy, provides the methodological schema used to navigate the complex interconnections of places, scales, actors and processes that constitute the PET recycling economy. The investigation unfolds using 'follow-the-thing' as a research technique. PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles are the thing selected to follow. My 7-month-long fieldwork journey started at Lixão da Estrutural, located in Brasília, which used to be one of the biggest dumpsites in Latin America and progressed until the point where PET bottles were repurposed into a new product, ready to re-enter the consumer market. To move along the recycling network, I used a snowball referral technique and a mixture of interviews and participant observation with waste pickers, brokers, wholesalers and recyclers, as well as with representatives of a sectoral association and of governmental bodies. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to denaturalise and re-politicise the prevailing academic approach to the study of the causes of waste pickers' poverty exposing some of the mechanisms in operation to constrain their power, their capacity to capture value, and the extent of their embeddedness in the recycling economy. In so doing, it hopes to contribute to opening up new forms of actions previously unthought-of for the promotion of waste pickers' empowerment. 1. Development: meanings and contradictions Desenvolvimento, the Portuguese word for development, hides a curious and unusual meaning which is obscured by its recurrent and appealing use as synonym for growth, expansion and progress, the common pursuit of most likely every nation on Earth. When its parts are dissected and analysed morphologically, however, desenvolvimento acquires a completely different definition. The verb desenvolver, 1. Introduction from which the noun derives, is composed of the prefix des, implying negation, similar to the English prefixes "non" and "un", and the radical envolver: to involve; to include. Desenvolvimento can therefore also be literally translated into English as non-involvement. Although secondary, this meaning is critical, since the conceptual idea of development in its ordinary usage, whose historical evolution has been traced by Esteva (2010) as far back as the 18 th century, has evolved to encompass a concern with representativeness, participation and inclusiveness, as epitomised in the slogan for the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: "leave no one behind". The contradiction between the primary and secondary meanings of desenvolvimento is, however, only conceptual since, unfortunately, development has not generally been practiced in a way that allows for the active participation of allif by participation we understand the ability to contribute to shaping frames of reference and reaping and enjoying the benefits that might accrue from such. In practice, the dynamic of development has become a merger of its conceptual meanings; i.e. development is growth and betterment, but just not for everyone. This contention is aligned with Peet and Hartwick's (2015:1) claim that "development can be used for many different political purposes, including some, and perhaps most, that conflict with its essentially egalitarian ethic ('a better life for all')". As the authors go on to argue, "the idea of development can be used to legitimate what in fact amounts to more money and power for a few" (Peet and Hartwick 2015:1). More than simply failing to be participative, the model of development that prevails globally, and which is based on neoliberal ideals, "converts participation into a manipulative trick to involve people in struggles for getting what the powerful 1. Introduction fun controlling the length of each other's sips to make sure that everyone would have an equal share of the drink, I started thinking about the sad irony of their lives: their families' livelihoods depend on selling reclaimed bottles of a product they cannot afford. As one research participant later said, "bottled beverages are a rich people thing".