Contained Redistribution: The Technopolitics of Plastic Burning

Opening Up “Control:” A Plastic Event

“Please do not take photos, sir.”

“But the chart and the data are all displayed in public view outside your premises,” I reasoned in Hindi. Two company representatives and their entourage rushed out of the plant to surround me, with one raising both hands to block my camera.

“Yes, you can read them, but you cannot take photos,” said the more senior employee, adding, “please.”

The representatives, keen to stop the recording of data and contain its circulation, worked for Enviroclean (alias), the private company running Mumbai’s only biomedical waste treatment plant. Discards from private and public clinics, nursing homes, and hospitals across Mumbai, mostly plastic equipment and devices, bound in plastic containers, end up in the facility to be burnt. The chart and data in question are supposed to refer to the daily emissions released by the facility, an accountability measure responding to the requirements for filtration—emission control—according to India’s and the Maharashtra state’s waste management laws.

Set up in 2009, the operation has long been mired in controversy. Situated in an area traditionally used for residence, local inhabitants have protested against emissions from the plant and have demanded its removal. Indeed, Deonar is one of Mumbai’s most densely populated districts. It is also a historically marginalized site, subjected to open landfilling for nearly a hundred years, sludge from local animal slaughterhouses, and refinery emissions from adjacent petrochemical industrial parks in Mahul and Trombay (Sharma 2022; Tripathy and McFarlane 2022). Authorities are planning to build yet another waste incineration plant close to Enviroclean’s facility, right beside the open landfill.

Bordering mangrove forests along the narrow neck of the inward sea—the Thane creek—Deonar is home predominantly to socioeconomically marginalized people: Dalits, local Indigeneous fisherfolk, and migrant working-class Muslims from northern Indian states, who resort to living in cheap, informal settlement by the landfill in an otherwise expensive city (Tata Institute of Social Sciences [TISS] 2015). These populations are disproportionately exposed to hazardous living, and working, conditions.

Given that multiple polluting industries are present in the area, a simple cause-and-effect relation of bioecological harm vis-à-vis incinerator emissions is difficult to draw. Enviroclean representatives have long adopted such a reasoning in public and in court. However, water and soil samples from the vicinity show above-threshold levels of contamination with mercury, which is often used in medical equipment (Vincent et al. 2016). A local survey conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences found higher rates of incidence of tuberculosis and respiratory illnesses in Deonar and its vicinity, compared to other municipality wards in Mumbai (TISS 2015); this is confirmed by another independent study (Singh et al. 2021). More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, emissions became more prominent: thick black smoke loomed over the region, blowing directly onto the adjacent highway and into people’s homes, roads, and children’s parks. Air-quality monitoring by residents using DIY sensors confirmed particulate figures beyond safe limits, supporting their mundane encounter with thick dust sediments on the roof of parked car. For residents, living with incinerator smoke and toxic chemicals is compounded by epistemic violence: the systematic undermining of their knowledge claims, which is of course a recurrent theme in STS (Murphy 2006; Liboiron 2021). “No matter what survey or data you pull out, we speak from lived experience: we feel the pollution in our lungs; our life expectancy is shortening, we are dying every day,” lamented one resident of Baiganwadi who lived across from the plant (in-person conversation, July 21, 2022).

Residents are no mute sufferers. Following several representations from them, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) investigated the operation, recommending in 2019 that the plant needed to be shut down. However, Enviroclean managed to obtain a stay order from the Mumbai High Court, arguing that the plant’s operation was indispensable as the city’s lone biomedical waste management facility. Though the court issued relocation dates and ministers issued move-out notices to the company, the promised time line for the plant’s removal kept shifting.

In 2020, another MPCB visit concluded that the company had taken due technical measures for safe operation and monitoring. The report (MPCB 2020) noted that since the last inspection, the facility had provided dioxins and furans control, and its four incinerators were performing within safe operational standards, above the recommended temperature of 800°C. The surveyors recommended that 50 percent of the plant’s 3,500+ kg daily waste load be diverted to another company-run facility in Mumbai. ³ Nevertheless, plastic-filled medical waste continues to burn, albeit in lesser quantity; the smoke continues to rise, under potentially tighter controls of filtered containment and monitoring.

Yet residents accuse the company, off record, of staging and misrepresenting emissions data and complain that regular plant maintenance and monitoring are not carried out as recommended. Residents plan on petitioning higher courts to ensure implementation and accountability. Their suspicions are amplified by repeatedly denied requests to access the facility. Plant managers would send them away to come back with a written permit from the municipality—a long-drawn, elaborate process involving multiple levels of bureaucractic mediation. ⁴ In addition, the facility is guarded by a steel gate—opaque and imposing, bounded on all sides by tall concrete walls, with mounted asbestos sheeting. The premises and processes sat behind multiple walls of secrecy, surrounded by opaque, restrictive, boundaries. This was supplemented by attempts—as the two activists and I experienced firsthand—to contain the circulation of data by clumsily blocking the view and (rather forcefully) request not to photograph emissions data publicly displayed outside the facility.

According to Frazer (2006, 129), events exist “in relation to a particular set of problems” and allow us to think about the actual becoming of things that enter within situated processual relations. Multiple heterogeneous relations—social, material, technical, cultural, economic, and political—can come together within the event and emerge in ways that the content, identity, and relationality of things may or may not be maintained. ⁵ Examining the “controlled burning” event taking place within the Enviroclean facility at Deonar—especially from the viewpoint of residents and users of surrounding public spaces—one would notice an uneasy manifestation of control, where material containment is not prioritized. The smoke is striking, out in the open, prominently visible to the naked eye. Material issues—particulates and gases—are evident in air-quality readings posted by activists on Twitter, as are hazardous chemicals rendered visible in surveys run by researchers and activists (cf. TISS 2015; Singh et al. 2021). The by-products of plastic burning collect as sediment on household floors, schools, streets, and roofs of cars parked overnight, which are physically close to those who live and breathe in these neighborhoods.

Yet access to the plant is heavily mediated, as is scrutiny of equipment, operation, and processual data. Intractability also pervades diverse political–economic relations that privilege certain knowledge claims and interests over others.

Controlled burning—in this event—manifests as somewhat open, porous, as the facility fails to contain—filter—material by-products of the burning process, which leads to many people being exposed. Yet a more complex form of control is apparently being enacted. It goes beyond the material and technical, leaking into the political: as Enviroclean operations persist, diverse technosocial, contractual, commercial, environmental, sanitary, and political relations and interests embedded in the project are also “holding together” (Schoot and Mather 2022).

The Allure of Controlled Burning

Plastics embody profit. They are materials by design, malleable to product specification, custom-made for commerce (Bensaude-Vincent 2013). Privileging an abundance of raw materials (hydrocarbons and petrochemicals), plastics enable batch production at scale and have become iconic of modernity, its infrastructures, and alluring promises of growth, development, and security (Meikle 1995; Roberts 2010). Despite their late entry at the mass scale following economic liberalization in the 1980s, industrial demand for plastics has grown steadily in India, with products proliferating across commercial sectors (Gill 2009; Doron and Jeffrey 2018; Dey 2021) and essential infrastructure, including healthcare (Hodges 2017). Today, plastic production continues its unprecedented acceleration, including in India and other countries in the developing world, which are emerging as attractive markets (Tabuchi, Corkery, and Mureithi 2020; Bauer and Nielsen 2021; PlastIndia 2022).

Disposability is preconditional to the maintenance of production cycles and growth, that is, things need to be wasted to fuel demand (Hawkins 2013; Liboiron 2021). With the rise of the “use-and-throw” culture in India in the 1990s, the proportion of plastics in urban waste streams grew from 0.6 percent in 1996 to 9.22 percent in 2005 (Zhu et al. 2008; Pathak and Nichter 2019). Plastic’s volume and complexity overwhelmed the country’s weak and patchy solid waste management infrastructure (Gidwani and Corwin 2017; Doron and Jeffrey 2018). ⁶

As plastic waste ended up everywhere, citizens started holding the state responsible, urging for it to maintain clean and safe public spaces (Dey 2022). Furthermore, as plastic pollution stood to affect the commercial acceptability of plastics, producers needed to act, too. Faced with strengthening environmental actions against plastic globally, the industry persistently referred to the promises of downstream technological remediation and recycling as foolproof means to prevent plastic and its residues from leaking into environments and bodies, thus foregrounding solutions like controlled burning (MacBride 2013; Mah 2022).

In the context of waste in India, incineration has long been an alluring technology. During a series of plagues in 1890s Mumbai, colonial administrators experimented with incinerators as a sanitary measure, but later reverted back to landfilling as a cheaper alternative (Doron and Jeffrey 2018). Discussing incineration projects with bureaucrats more recently, Kornberg highlights officials’ persistent discursive affinity toward fire as a purificatory agent to clear the stigma of waste from Indian cities (Kornberg 2019). From the 1990s, policymakers urgently debated the technical and financial difficulties of waste management. Incineration operations were discussed favorably within lawmaking circles and courts (Gidwani and Corwin 2017; Luthra 2017). As some incineration technologies promised up to 95 percent volume reduction, they were alluring: quick, daily volume reduction of large quantities of intractable waste would lower the burden on existing landfills, built in prized urban real estate (Doron and Jeffrey 2018). With privatization, the high cost of operation and maintenance could be externalized and incineration emerged as the silver-bullet solution to the complex waste problem (Chaturvedi and Gidwani 2011; Gidwani and Corwin 2017; Doron and Jeffrey 2018). Ministers went on record stating that incineration would ensure India’s progress as a modern scientific nation; it would help maintain economic growth while providing clean civic spaces (Luthra 2017, 2020).

Particularly attractive were incinerators promising waste-to-energy (WTE) conversion, a technology that rose to prominence in Europe in the 1990s and gained momentum beyond, with European Union-made equipment, regulatory policies and framework uncritically imported elsewhere, including in India (Reis 2011; de Bercegol and Gowda 2019). With the ever-growing prevalence of plastic within waste streams, the prospect of energy recovery from its high-calorie hydrocarbon bonds appeared attractive. The likelihood of profiting from low-cost energy, in addition to promises of stable state subsidy, framed waste management as a corporate value proposition (Gidwani 2015; Shankar and Sahni 2018).

Many Indian cities, including Mumbai, were early signatories of costly incineration contracts from the mid-2000s, though in most cases, projects simply failed to take off. Waste companies tended to use cheap and secondhand equipment, acceptable nonetheless for municipalities facing budgetary constraints and growing pressure to manage waste (Doron and Jeffrey 2018). Low operational budgets warranted low-grade filters, and less scope for maintenance and repair, leading to equipment malfunction and increased emissions. The highly perceptible forms of pollution from a Delhi incinerator described by Demaria and Schindler (2016) bring to mind the ever-prominent dark smoke in Deonar. Activists and waste management scholars have questioned the techno-commercial viability of WTE incineration projects in India as burning under humid conditions produces less energy (Sambyal and Agarwal 2018). In a context where privatization of waste disposal has been encouraged by regulatory institutions, the prospect of deepening precarity for marginalized communities recovering and recycling plastic waste has also been highlighted (Gidwani 2015; Shankar and Sahni 2018; Dey 2020).

Nevertheless, controlled burning and other thermal technologies have been promoted widely and become conventional in waste management policy. As of 2020, NITI Aayog, the federal planning agency, projected to build more than hundred incinerators across India, with plans for a coordination council to oversee contracts and enable operations (Sambyal, Agarwal, and Shrivastav 2019). The incumbent solid waste management rules passed in 2016 also recommended the use of such technological solutions across the country (MoEFCC 2016).

The controversial incinerator at Deonar is among the controlled burning solutions pushed by local and federal governments and promoted, more generally, by petrochemical lobbies worldwide on grounds that they can control the proliferation of plastic waste and reduce harm from associated pollution.

“Open” Burning of Plastic

Incineration operations discussed so far are large scale, operationalized by local governments and private companies on their behalf, involving public infrastructures. By contrast, open burning tends to be smaller-scale initiatives by individuals and communities. This would refer to citizens setting fire to smaller piles of plastic accumulating in their vicinity: decentralized and frugal initiatives with minimal use of expensive technology. Citizens I met during my fieldwork described their practice in no way other than the verb, burning. The adjective “open” is predominantly attributed within policy circles. The term open burning is entrenched within academic, planning, and mainstream developmental literature (Cogut 2016; Jalshakti 2021; Velis and Cook 2021; Velis 2022).

In the three following sections, I present events of open burning, situated in context, describing some of their sociomaterial features—including local needs and affordances, knowledge, techniques, attendant spatial and social relations, practical roles, and (political) effects. As we shall see, there are attempts to contain the visibility and material emissions of the process, betraying a sense of control. In certain cases, I noticed a degree of organization, reproduction of practice, as well as a division of tasks, and burden of exposure. Communication at the level of household, community, and village is apparent, as are sociopolitical considerations around risk and accountability. In all the events of open burning presented below, there were attempts at containment across various levels but also improvization, ad-hoc freedoms, and complex redistribution of labor, emissions, and harm. These events of burning resist a neat binary of open/controlled.

The events are not presented innocently, but elaborated across three overlapping themes, which enable their cross-linking with controlled burning in Deonar, Mumbai. These themes pertain to interrelated aspects of technopolitics—practice, care, and violence, and raise uneasy questions and reflections to deal with, in both cases. I do not aspire to resolve these tensions. Instead, I demonstrate that, in practice, open and controlled burning events converge along a common pattern where harmful emissions and effects of the process are aspired to be localized within weakly contested sites. This empirical pattern of segregating material proliferation and harm is loosely defined as “contained redistribution” as it affords a stronger and specific conceptual critique of plastic burning events, moving beyond the categories of open or controlled. I therefore argue for a shift of focus from political–commercial claims of difference between open and controlled burning to foreground how technopractice enacts the politics of life in each plastic burning event. These include potential harm to bodies, communities, places, and ecosystems, reproducing entrenched forms of violence.

Practical Affordances

Rural populations are emerging, “bottom of the pyramid” markets (Cross and Street 2009), including for disposable products (Hawkins 2013; Pathak and Nichter 2019). Yet as more and more consumer items in plastic reach villages through a rapidly developing road network, local communities have limited means to safely dispose of the resulting waste. Rural commons and sites of habitation often emerge as plastic sinks (Dey 2021).

A recent survey of 700 villages in India concluded that most villages stood disconnected from formal waste management infrastructure. Some 90 percent of villages sold recyclables to informal buyers, who would not purchase most plastic items, so at least 67 percent of India’s rural households preferred burning plastic accumulating in their surroundings (Pratham 2022). Residents of these villages and ones I visited in West Bengal would be among the estimated 3 billion people worldwide lacking access to reliable waste management (United Nations Environment Programme 2015). This suggests that open burning—prevalent when waste management services are unavailable, especially in low- and middle-income countries—is often a necessity, rarely a choice. Burning affords a quick reduction in waste volume, with minimum use of (costly) technology.

As consumption residues accumulate in the environment, at times there are additional pressures that entail burning as a preferred means for waste disposal. In the seaside village of Amarabati, South 24 Parganas, efforts by the local administration to develop Amarabati as a tourist destination with “clean” streets, beaches, and public amenities complicated the effective disposal of waste. This reflected the political priorities of Clean India, a federal program promoted by the Prime Minister and currently in force across India, with a mission to remove “litter” from public places (Jeffrey 2015; Dey and Michael 2021b). The Amarabati panchayat committee (local government) responded by providing bins to commercial establishments to contain waste. Some shops were asked to use a bucket if they did not receive a bin. The containment was, however, temporary because bins filled up in a couple of days. They must be emptied to avoid overflow, else plastics would disperse in the strong sea wind to places the government did not want them to be. The panchayat lacked budget to organize regular waste collection. A residents-pay model did not suffice to run a community-based operation, owing to the small village population and lack of external funds. Waste dumping was not an option because it would attract penalties from authorities and risk environmental and reputational damage, affecting the place’s desirability for tourists. Burning plastics was the last resort. It took a matchstick for the garbage pile to light up, and within an hour most of the visible, tangible, material traces would dissipate in smoke.

At Sagar, another rural constituency and an island, there were spatial constraints to waste disposal. The island bears spiritual value as a key pilgrimage site, where the river Ganga meets the sea. Throwing rubbish into the river-sea was looked down upon (at least publicly) and hence was not an option. Dumping garbage on holy land was also avoided for aesthetic reasons. One tea-shop owner readily admitted to burning plastic waste but cited corruption and political collusion as a key reason why he felt obliged to do so. The public waste collection service was highly unreliable, he said; it had been contracted to a private operator who had provided bins for storage but faltered on the promise to collect them regularly. Only when a state official, an auditor, or a dignitary visited the place the contractor sent around “women with brooms for dyakhondari (performative) sweeping of streets and emptying of bins.” ⁷ As a result, authorities saw no evidence of mismanagement because during their visits, the place looked litter-free.

At other times, burning was the predominant means for waste disposal, especially for plastic objects. What about complaints by residents and shopkeepers, I asked. The man shrugged his shoulders and rued, “who cares about our complaints.”

At times, burning plastics enabled residents to respond to seasonal, climatic conditions and sanitary needs. During fieldwork over the summer monsoon in tropical Bengal, many residents spoke about the need to control garbage accumulation in their surroundings to control the mosquito population, which can transmit virus for diseases like malaria and dengue. Discarded objects offered convex forms where (rain) water would accumulate over time, offering habitat for mosquitoes to breed. Burning deformed these objects, turned them into brittle remnants and particulate ashes. The strong chemical smoke was even deemed beneficial by some in driving away mosquitoes. Indeed, many residents set their plasticated garbage piles on fire at dusk, when mosquitoes were believed to come out of hiding. Thus, efforts to prevent mosquito-borne illnesses seemed to overshadow the potential health risks of plastic burning.

Yet, plastic burning did not always derive from agonistic pressures. At times, burning was the more convenient of multiple available options, underlining a certain calculation, cunningness even, from practitioners. Residents burnt plastics even when formal waste removal systems were in place. Sometimes, this was to avoid paying waste collection fees to local authorities, which were deemed unaffordable or unreasonable. Arguably a difficult economic decision made in a subsistence context, the agency and opportunism underlying such acts cannot be ignored. Willful subversion would also unveil a situated history of garbage disposal by fire, foregrounding a guarded skepticism toward the tall promises (yet patchy realities) of modern waste management. Composting organic discards and burning more durable materials like clothes and paper have long been a feature of agrarian lifestyle in India (Dey 2021). Thus, for many, burning plastics was a continuation of older practical routines.

People would dump rather than burn waste if there was a viable site for garbage dumping—close enough for convenient access yet far enough not to be bothered by its sight and smell or by breeding mosquitoes. Many informal dumpsites emerged at uninhabited, unclaimed spots by the side of roads and highways or at village peripheries. In two villages, one by the river Matla in South 24 Parganas and another by an ox-bow lake in Nadia, garbage was thrown over high embankment walls facing the water body. Once dumped, waste was no longer visible. Waste got carried away by the high tide, making space for more waste to be dumped. While residents living closer to the embankment preferred dumping, those living further inland burnt their plastics. Again, if a particular technique raised more problems than solving them, say by complicating relations between neighbors due to burning smoke or trespassing, one resorted to other available options. Neighbors also cooperated, combining garbage and coordinating efforts, sharing labor and risk. This reiterates an earlier point about events of plastic burning being contingent and complex: with material, sanitary, as socioeconomic, spatial, and political dimensions. Open burning not only enables citizens to dispose accumulating plastics, but it also opens up burning practices to sociopolitical pressures and performances.

In the case at Deonar, Mumbai, the incinerator almost singlehandedly disposes of biomedical plastic garbage generated across the whole city. It enables the local government to respond to an urgent crisis: the volume, speed of accumulation, and material complexity of plastic waste. Burning appears as an attractive, quick, and effective solution to these problems. Burning is an increasingly popular disposal technology now that landfilling—once a cheap and de facto arrangement—is proving increasingly impracticable. Indeed, building new landfills involves acquiring costly peri-urban land, which is often met with resistance from local residents whose quality of life stands to be compromised. Though vital for urban economies, existing techniques and decentralized, informal, enterprises of mechanical recycling are time- and labor-intensive, requiring segregating plastics into many homogenous, recyclable categories (Kothari 2013; Gidwani 2015; Luthra 2017; Dey 2022). By contrast, municipalities partner with fewer large private companies for burning operations—delegating capital investment, technical expertise, and practical responsibility—responding to acute political, financial, legal, and temporal pressures (Chaturvedi and Gidwani 2011; Doron and Jeffrey 2018).

For waste management companies, large-scale, centralized facilities for burning like the one in Deonar offer options for making and measuring profit from waste. Contracted companies can receive state subsidies and be paid by private clients for each unit of garbage collected or each unit of energy projected to be produced via combustion. Profit projections look rather optimistic—at least on paper. Companies benefit from the continuity, if not technocommercial expansion, of their existing operations.

Plastic biomedical waste burning can guard other interests too. Burning potentially toxic plastic waste at a site with multiple, overlapping sources of pollution serves an agnotological function—evident in the legal stance adopted by Enviroclean in Deonar. Causal relations of harm are difficult to ascertain in such cases, bearing upon the deliberation of responsibility for remediation (Murphy 2008).

Incineration of plastic waste at scale also guards producers’ commercial interests and maintains codependent material and moral economies. With promises of quick and substantial volume reduction of waste, incineration caters—however clumsily—to market needs. Indeed, given the speed of production, use and disposal of medical equipment like plastic face masks, waste removal needs to be quick and comparable in scale. Burning also obliterates identifiable information (like brand names) from commercial products, making it difficult to hold producers accountable for pollution (Dey and Michael 2021b). Across both sets of events, plastic burning transforms visible, tangible, and legible objects into difficultly traceable—if not completely invisible, molecular residues. It shifts the registers of sensory lived experience, challenges methods, and techniques of knowing and obfuscates a politics of responsibility.

Eventuations of Care

To deny us access into its premises, Enviroclean representatives cited the hazards associated with biomedical waste. Keeping us away was justified as an event of caring, keeping Faiyaz, Umer, and I safe, protected from potentially biohazardous exposure. Similar reasons have been cited over the years to deny access to residents into the plant, even though the latter live with its emissions and seek to scrutinize the operation of the facility. An ethics and politics of care is thus performed, claiming to protect those less equipped (with protective gear or relevant training) to come in contact with potentially contagious matter. The Enviroclean operation was also justified in court for being indispensable to the city’s waste management; its continuity would ensure that citizens—bodies, homes, healthcare facilities, and streets—continue to be cared for, especially during a pandemic.

Plastic burning—and various related processes of control—are mobilized as a “matter of care,” interpreted as a somewhat benevolent act, an ethico-political obligation. Yet the intricate interpenetration of plastic (including plastic objects and biomedical waste) within multiple, overlapping, networks of interest, including unequal relations of (or, access to) power, would problematize the processes of care and the politics of caring. Indeed, as STS theorists have cautioned, care is always concurrent—at times co-opted and instrumentalized, therefore almost always noninnocent, unsettling (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015; Murphy 2015). As Dey and Michael elaborate, caring for a plastic event routinely folds into other networks, needs, demands, and practices of care, rendering its politics somewhat plastic—full of possibilities but rife with conflict, tension, and violence (Dey and Michael 2021a). Though necessarily aspirational and problematic, care may be a useful orientational device to be mindful of those who enact alternative, concurrent, practices of care, their abilities, and interests and also to be reflexive about one’s own relationality in practice (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011).

At the Enviroclean controlled plastic burning facility, I observed limited attempts to perform care for people living close by. The towering presence of a tall smoke chimney is testament to that. Its height is a careful tactic of distantiation, devised to reduce chances of exposure to emissions for workers and local residents on the ground (Chatterjee 2020). Enviroclean is also seen responding to public orders; following MPCB and court directions, the company reduced operations at Deonar, and diverted nearly half of its feedstock to another industrial facility. The management modified operation timings to avoid emissions during mornings and evenings, when local residents tended to be home, not away at work. As the MPCB (2020) report attested, the company had installed furan and dioxin control systems to filter emissions. The company had put in place emission checks and reporting systems too—as the road-facing emissions display would suggest.

It may also be argued that such performances of care—strategic retro-fitting, load reduction, diversion, time modification, and so on—were noninnocent: a means for the company to appease public agencies, reduce public scrutiny, deflect yet claim responsible action, thus protecting company interests, and securing continuity for its operation. These are, arguably, exercises in self-care for the company—foremost, rather than benevolent care for those living with hazardous emissions.

For events of open burning in the villages I visited, various means were adopted to mediate exposure to the act or its material–chemical issues. Across occasions, there were situated relations of labor, obligation, and expectations, with (frugal) technological devices, techniques, tacit understandings, sites, and times, enrolled into these events. These lent the burning arrangements an infrastructural character, ensuring a regularized, almost unremarkable, remediation of plastic (Larkin 2013). The burning events prompted interdigitated forms of care—environmental, domestic, social, cultural, sanitary, and political.

If openness refers to physical witness and exposure to the act and its by-products, then events of plastic burning took care of these. Households and shops burnt plastics when neighbors tended to be indoors, and open spaces (streets, road-corners, roadsides, fields, village center, market-place alleys, and thoroughfares, etc.) were nearly empty, with few or no bystanders.

One shopkeeper, who had a common grass field behind his shop, would carry his bin far out into the field past midnight and burn its plastic contents, standing there for up to thirty minutes, when nobody else was around. His long trudge with the heavy bin into the middle of the field was to ensure distance—away from habitation and other shops. He expected the issues of burning to redistribute over an expansive aerial volume over time—through the night. Scientific evidence on health issues from plastics-associated chemicals has debunked several dose-makes-the-poison hypotheses, as even trace exposure to certain chemicals—say, endocrine disruptors are potentially harmful (Liboiron 2016). Yet, this shopkeeper’s physical efforts, including his mobilization of time and open space, toward smoke dispersal and minimization of exposure should not be dismissed because it operationalizes a situated epistemology of risk and care, however problematic. When asked about personal exposure, the shopkeeper—a middle-aged man—said he covered his face with a gamchha (cotton towel) and moved his face away while burning. By making himself vulnerable, the man reduced the labor and chemical risks of the task from his wife and daughter, who would have had to take care of the plastics if he did not step up.

Open burning involved open conversations and calculated risks, also adjustments and cooperation in community. Neighbors tended to combine and burn plastic waste together. A site, equidistant from both premises, would be chosen for dumping the plastic mound and setting it on fire, with the assumption that both parties would be equally exposed to the fumes and residual ash. These arrangements demonstrate a certain situated epistemology of the effects of plastic burning, mobilized in careful, calculative, and collective action. However, such exposure-sharing arrangements do not always work as planned because contingent physico-material and environmental conditions, like wind and the location of house windows, lead to an uneven redistribution of smoke.

If too much waste accumulated at shared dumping sites, resulting in the wind blowing some of the objects or odor back into the community, someone stepped up and threw in a matchstick to let the dump burn for a bit, reducing volume. Such work was recognized and reciprocated between neighbors in a shared sense of responsibility. During monsoons, the relative dampness of air and object surfaces led residents to use kerosene as fuel, which is usually available at the state’s public distribution system, subsidized for domestic use in cooking, cleaning, and so on.

Open burning events may involve a degree of organization and embeddedness in the everyday routines of rural life. In most villages I visited, there were shops selling essentials along the central pathway. Shopkeepers gathered paper and plastic litter, set them on fire in a small pile, brooming away the ashes. Burning typically occurred early in the morning as part of the shop-opening ritual—when premises were cleaned and a deity was worshipped before commerce began or else at night while closing down shop. Sometimes, neighboring shops combined and coordinated efforts, identifying a nearby equidistant spot for trash-piling and burning.

Haats are bi-weekly temporary markets ubiquitous across agrarian Bengal, with producers, traders, and residents from neighboring villages coming to trade. As gatherings take place on open fields, the local traders’ union tended to intervene in matters of waste remediation. Discards were collected at the end of the event, accumulated at one end of the field, far enough from any individual stall, and set on fire. The union employed a worker to perform the removal and burning tasks. On a couple of occasions, burning was preferred at dusk so the smoke could act as mosquito repellant, offering convenient respite for traders and shoppers alike. Regular eventuations of care are evident in these cases, including caring to reduce exposure, even though smoke is mapped onto other forms of care (pest control).

In coastal Amarabati, local entrepreneurs sell snacks to tourists on the beach. Such commerce leads to plastic packaging discards: bottles, wrappers, aluminated polythene for crisps, teacups, and so on. The traders’ union has offered a bin to each business, collected at the end of each business day—late at night. Polythene terephthalate (PET) bottles are stored separately in a secluded part of the beach, sequestered within makeshift containers erected with mosquito nets. PET is traded to aggregators and recyclers against cash. The other plastics, not worthy of salvaging, are burnt at the back end of the beach, on the side of an unused public park, behind shops and stalls, late in the quiet afternoon or deep into the night. The system was funded by individual businesses, whose trash was taken care of. Despite discontents and occasional tension, a basic organization was in place: open burning was the centerpiece within this technopolitical arrangement. The openness of plastic burning derived from it being a well-known and widely accepted local technique to remediate plastics accumulation. It sustained the community, kept the place “clean” and acceptable for tourists who supported the local economy.

Yet the care work is preconditioned by socioeconomically embedded arrangements for redistributing labor and violence (of exposure). Indeed, the actual burning was localized at a semi-disclosed, background site, far from the main beach and market, away from tourists and traders. Yet the people tasked with the burning would be in close proximity, unevenly exposed to the physicochemical harms of burning a range of plastics mixed with other objects. They were also paid poorly and irregularly, I was told. These workers were, invariably, Dalits; their disadvantaged position in this case being grounded in history and social obligation. ⁸ Their limited agency was in salvaging and selling PET bottles, thus supplementing a poor income.

Recalling from the previous section, the obligation to free villages from litter draws largely on administrative pressures from regional and federal governments, especially under the Clean India program, promoted as the Prime Minister’s personal project of care for clean nation-building (Doron and Jeffrey 2018; Dey and Michael 2021b). Localized responses of litter removal, as operationalized above, mobilize open burning as a key and convenient technology practiced routinely by citizens and local authorities. Therefore, in the situated eventuations of state care, hazardous exposures persist, and already disadvantaged sections of the population may get routinely enrolled, endangered, and their interests undermined.

Enactment of Violence

Burning does not destroy matter. It entails rearrangements at the molecular level, creating new compounds and states of being, redistributing materials across environments. Burning some plastics like polyvinyl chloride, or Styrofoam, can produce toxic substances, including carcinogens. Burning residues and by-products may linger in the air—breathed by many, flow with water—drunk and used, leach into soil—imbibed by flora and fauna. Persisting across these biogeologies, passing on intergenerationally, plastic—perceptible or not—charts unpredicted, unpredictable, and ontological trajectories. Material emissions are evident across the “open” and “controlled” burning events described above, and these can have harmful health effects. Although correlations between chemical concentration and harm may be complex and nonlinear, we encounter attempts across events to localize and locally redistribute matter, with uneven implications for body, community, environment, and politics.

In Mumbai, biomedical plastic discards from nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals are relocated by regiments of municipality trucks and private vehicles from every quarter of the metropolis into the eastern peripheries of Deonar, by the creek, at the site of the historical open dump. Here, they are burnt if not dumped alongside other municipal plastic waste. Thus, much of the city’s plastic waste is localized to one neighborhood through organized civic infrastructure. In practice, smoke and chemical issues run wild; they do not follow strict perimeters and dissipate despite containment measures. Irrespective of how much residues and burning by-products get filtered, they end up dissipated with plant effluents into the air, water, and soil of the plant’s surrounding areas. Attempts to contain plastics residue within a smaller territory and geospatial volume lead to creating a sink. ⁹ I have called this a “contained redistribution” to afford a situated concept and specific, stronger critique of plastic burning than either the “open” or the “controlled.”

At Deonar and its surroundings, where Mumbai’s biomedical (and other) plastic remains are re-dissipated, these chemicals combine and accumulate with petrochemical emissions, slaughterhouse sludge, landfill leachate, and fires. Though health impacts of compound chemical cocktails are often difficult to ascertain, the disproportionately high rate of incidence of illnesses in these neighborhoods is an anomaly within Mumbai (TISS 2015; Acharya 2022). As discussed above, these neighborhoods are home to socially, economically, and religiously marginalized populations, who are disenfranchized in different ways. Many live in cramped spaces, in poor sanitary conditions exacerbated by incineration smoke and other chemical rejects, with limited access to healthcare. These bodies and lungs have accumulated toxic chemicals and experienced institutional apathy for years, as Sharma (2022) has documented in relation to local landfill politics.

As citizens continue to protest through legal and political means (residents recently threatened to boycott a civic election; Singh 2022), on social media, and on the streets, there are wider relations of violence and responsibility at play and at stake. I am pointing here to the contained redistribution of potentially toxic matter in a spatial sense—and also to harm localization within peripheralized bodies, lineages, and communities, along historically socialized patterns (Davies 2022). Harm reduction through waste management leads to harm redistribution along persisting social hierarchies (of gender, caste, class, ethnicity, and religion), compounded by colonial and postcolonial histories of domination and neglect. Under the neoliberalized technopolitical regime of “control,” plastic smoke and other emissions compound a long history of violence and corporal, spatio-social, violation.

Citizen-led open burning practices are not necessarily benign. Burning events involve calculations of harm (trade-offs), agency and mobilization that draw, problematically, upon under-remunerated, under-acknowledged caste and gendered bodies, whenever possible or convenient. Burning may lead to unpredictable reactions and by-products, and unforeseen consequences and risks are weathered by more vulnerable people—socioeconomically and politically—who may not be able to measure or mitigate harm. This is another form of redistribution (expected to be) contained within bodies and lineages of marginalized caste members. Again, in household-based initiatives, that is, within a homogeneous caste group, I observed socialized patterns of work and risk play out in different ways. Though women played a major role handling and dumping everyday waste, the men of the house stepped up in their patriarchal protective roles when plastic waste needed to be burnt outdoors. This would seem to draw upon estimations of risk (tinkering with fire and filthy matter), but also upon a certain masculine image of fighting fire and other hazards, catering to the outward and the spectacular. In contrast, feminine labor focused on tending silently to the mundane.

Although open burning is not inherently rural, its ubiquity within rural contexts reveals wider patterns of plastic waste localization, redistribution of violent issues, and a politics of neglect. As rural populations in India—as elsewhere across low- and middle-income countries—are targeted for plastic packaged bottom-of-the-pyramid commerce, their environments and bodies end up accumulating residue and plastic rejects, however unevenly. While the production, industrial uptake, and commercial circulation of plastics are maintained, together with projects of economic growth, the flooding of rural retail markets with cheap plastic products is another instance of contained redistribution, enacted through a localization of waste and vulnerability.

Thus, we encounter the unevenness of infrastructure development: the rapid expansion of rural connectivity and retail commerce contrasts with persistent challenges and underdevelopment in rural waste management, which brings into question both the state’s priorities (and cares) and that of international regimes of governance. Though federal policy aims to “clean” India, including rural constituencies, its practical focus on litter removal limits—even distracts from—its goal of prioritizing citizen and environmental health. As demonstrated above, litter-removal goals favor open burning as a quick, convenient, and contextually grounded technology, enabling bureaucrats to tick off cleanliness goals on paper, and politicians to claim easy wins. This does not deny the limited agency afforded to communities that mitigate plastic accumulation, making their surroundings somewhat livable under conditions of political abandonment. But it does redistribute plastics and their chemical issues in complex ways, making them harder to trace.

Conclusion

Plastic continues to be produced and burnt. Controlled burning of plastic continues to be cited as a safer and more efficient alternative to open burning. Yet the plastic events discussed above demonstrate the slipperiness of the controlled/open burning distinction, because the events overlap thematically. By foregrounding materiality and practice, I problematize the affordances of plastic burning, situated epistemologies, relations and responses of care, and embedded tensions.

In particular, I identified how sociomaterial elaborations of containment (control) and redistribution (openness) proliferated across the plastic burning events considered. These involved material emissions of plastic burning and measures to limit exposure, combined with other kinds of management—say of information, people, public relations, as well as a range of technolegal, commercial, administrative, sanitary, and political relations held together in an uneasy status quo. As such, plastics continued to leak and events of pollution control routinely went beyond matters of material containment. This article proposes the notion of “contained redistribution” to visibilize and critique embodied, emplaced patterns of reallocation of matter, historicized harm, abandonment, and violence enacted—if not re-entrenched—with situated practices of plastic burning.

To put things into perspective, while some places and bodies (are made to) stand more exposed, plastic residues and chemicals routinely subvert containment, leaking into more territories and bodies, with complex effects entailed globally. Remediation will need to prioritize harm reduction, equitably, across local and global scales of practice. As the world becomes a plastic sink, more ambitious, longer-term policy responses should involve concerted efforts to “close the tap” to reduce plastic production and use of toxic chemical additives.