Towards a care perspective on waste: A new direction in discard studies

Waste as a resource and property

Waste as a resource and property points to the politics of extraction and exploitation. Theorists on waste have shown how waste exists in a betwixt-and-between state of indeterminacy, neither valuable nor valueless (Alexander and Sanchez, 2019; Thompson, 1979). Yet, the process of transforming waste into valuable ‘non-waste’ demands human creativity to extract the use-value from or recognise inherent value in ‘waste’ (Reno, 2009). This framing, as Gidwani and Reddy (2011) have demonstrated, views waste as the corollary of indolence and the failure to make good use of resources. This conceptualisation of waste is enmeshed in property relations and reflects the idea that to add value to property, it ‘must be continuously acted upon and improved’ (2011: 1628). Understood as the result of ‘wastefulness’, waste becomes a relative concept that implies untapped resources that yearn for transformation, improvement, and recognition. Here, waste underlies a moral value against ‘wastefulness’. The attempt to realise the potential of things in turn engenders the economistic understanding of waste, that is, the ability to transform the surplus (waste) into value.

For Gidwani and Reddy (2011), the utilisation of waste then entails the interplay of moral and economic value. Driven by such an understanding of waste, improvement projects may precipitate uneven development and political-economic control across different human societies. For instance, the creation of the category, ‘wasteland’, shaped colonial policy, justifying colonial intervention as a benevolent gesture that created productivity out of idle land (Gidwani, 1992). The concept of waste as a resource thus empowered colonial governments to proclaim themselves the custodians of local resources. In this sense, waste was imbued with moral judgement, pointing to the ‘incompetence’ of colonial subjects who failed to preserve the ‘valuable’ objects from the perspective of colonisers.

Turning away from the colonial model of waste valuation, Gille’s (2007) exemplary work on waste regimes elucidates how specific types of waste, such as scrap metal, were first valued as useful resources and later devalued as toxic materials in socialist Hungary. Gille’s study helpfully underscores the important role of institutions in determining what is counted as waste and what is considered valuable. Presently, the rise of neoliberalism also brings about another form of institution that globally regulates and promotes the transformation of waste into resources. Turning waste into resources is increasingly intertwined with wider geopolitics and is met by legal regulation and standardisation imposed by international establishments (Alexander and Reno, 2012; Martínez and Beilmann, 2020). The circular economy (TCE), for instance, is now widely promoted as the new paradigm for sustainability and economic growth by global actors such as the United Nations and European Union (Anantharaman, 2021; Gregson and Crang, 2015). One common example of TCE is the implementation of waste-to-energy/resources treatment. In the case of the United Kingdom, Gregson and collaborators (2015) have illustrated how waste management industries ought to get past a set of standardised measurements, certification processes and an EU test concerning the level of pathogens, toxic elements, biogas potential and contaminants in order to convert waste into bio-fertiliser that can be traded across EU member states. This Eurocentric model of waste governance then not only determines what types of waste are considered valuable but also how waste can become a ‘proper’ resource.

Meanwhile, the adoption of neoliberal doctrines in the Global South has brought about a type of waste governance characterised by privatisation and marketisation to optimise revenue (Millington and Lawhon, 2019). Waste studies in the ‘south’ have shown that informal waste pickers have long played an important role in material recovery, contributing to urban sustainability and the economy (Dias, 2016; Millington and Lawhon, 2019). Nevertheless, their contributions are often being dismissed and deprecated with the rise of neoliberalism. In a study of the privatisation of a South African dumpsite, Samson (2015) illustrates how the private waste management company appropriates the resources waste reclaimers feed on by barring them from entering the landfill. The monopoly of waste management also disregards reclaimers as ‘epistemic agents’ who have established the dumpsite as a source of value (Samson, 2015: 824). The aforementioned examples highlight that waste as a resource or property is both economic and (geo)political, alluding to rampant resource exploitation and a circular temporality where different waste regimes attempt to recover waste time and again.

Waste as risk

Waste as risk signifies the politics of exclusion and violence that are embodied in (1) a specific form of labour marginalised by the global economy and (2) specific disadvantaged groups. In this framing, waste, as a trope, generates political value, as it warrants political controls in the form of social inequality and exclusion. Bauman (2004) points out how liquid modernity renders a particular group of people, those who cannot keep up with the changing political-economic model, superfluous. Very often, labour that fails to generate monetary value is treated as human waste that needs to be eliminated (Bear, 2015; Eriksen and Schober, 2017), as waste also poses a risk to the stability of the existing social structure (Douglas, 1966).

Although waste is commonly linked to environmental risk in discard studies (Bell, 2019; Hawkins, 2006), Furniss (2017) reminds us that waste is not necessarily perceived as an environmental problem. Instead, examining the municipal garbage collection system and anti-litter campaign in Egypt, Furniss (2017) observes that cleanliness and waste reduction are connected to the state’s vision of civilisation and modernity. The project of making a ‘modern’ society often comes part and parcel with urbanisation. Forced eviction and displacement in the name of cleaning the city uproots people such as slum dwellers and homeless people, who are seen as endangering the project of modernisation, for the sake of urban development (Boo, 2012; Doron and Raja, 2015). These cleaning campaigns and waste management practices constitute a system of ‘governance through waste’, which segmentalises and hierarchises citizens, branding a specific marginalised social group as waste generators who imperil the state’s development plans (Doherty, 2019a; Furniss, 2017; Fredericks, 2018). Thus, a so-called environmental campaign can be utilised by the state and elite members from a certain class or caste to achieve their political project of making responsible citizens (Doron, 2016). By advocating and maintaining cleanliness, these campaigns eliminate ‘unhygienic’ populations, enabling the local government to establish authority and extend power over the city (Doherty, 2019a; Fredericks, 2018).

Waste as risk not only categorises particular groups of people as threats to a capitalistic version of development, it also generates surplus populations, rendering some social groups redundant and reaffirming the power of the state through the medium of toxicants. Waste sites can evolve beyond human control, becoming reservoirs of diseases and toxic leachate that can leak into neighbouring areas (Kumar et al., 2019; Reno, 2016). Elsewhere, Eitel (2020) observes the rise of synthetic plastic products in Cambodia and the disintegration of these materials into nano-plastics. They eventually seep into agricultural soil, animals’ bodies and waterbodies, potentially jeopardising different beings and the productivity of land. Very often, lower-class labourers or specific ethnic-racial groups are more susceptible to toxic waste (Bullard, 1999; Vasudevan, 2021). As Gutberlet and Baeder’s (2008) have demonstrated, waste workers often develop respiratory, dermal and gastrointestinal infections due to close contact with microbial and chemical toxins. In India, waste labourers, most of whom are Dalits and members of disadvantaged communities, are subject to ‘double jeopardy’. Waste workers are stigmatised and excluded from accessing socioeconomic resources such as medical care, exposing themselves to toxic waste for long periods of time (Doron and Broom, 2019). Paradoxically, in Anantharaman’s (2015) study, elites and middle-class citizens also purposefully include informal waste workers in the lowest hierarchy of waste management systems to produce an environment-friendly city. Such a move in turn undergirds stratified citizenship where waste labourers are relegated to the lower echelons of society and are made vulnerable by handling toxic waste. Confronted by the toxic effects of waste, the state can decide to ‘let die’, rather than intervene, allowing the process of ‘slow violence’ to devastate both the environment and inhabitants for a continuous period of time (Ahmann, 2018; Davies, 2018; Nixon, 2011; Tironi, 2018).

Waste as risk involves the politics of violence and heightened social inequality. Furthermore, waste as risk also intersects with a particular temporal orientation in which the state’s idea of progress and entrepreneurs’ endless pursuit of future revenue comes at the expense of socially disadvantaged groups, which are seen as a threat to these political goals. Accordingly, all of the above examples demonstrate the ability of the state to generate political value from (not-)eliminating the possible toxicity of waste. By manufacturing risk, states exhibit their life and death power over populations.

Waste as prosperity

Waste as prosperity relates to the process through which people are transformed by, instead of just deriving value from, waste. Here, waste is a vibrant matter with the political potential to enact social change (Bennett, 2010) and is interwoven with the practice of meaning-making. Recently, Retsikas and Marsden (2018) urge scholars to move beyond the economistic paradigm to consider alternative modes of prosperity that are based on, for example, the accumulation of blessings and moral achievements in life. In this regard, I propose that waste can be understood as prosperity in two senses: (1) on the surface, waste brings unexpected (im)material wealth that sustains and enriches the life of society and individuals, and (2) waste also results in unworldly rewards and moral entailments, enabling individuals to fulfil family responsibilities and live ethically.

While a large body of literature has illustrated how informal waste workers generate livelihoods and make significant environmental and economic contributions to society by deriving value from waste materials (Dias, 2016; Herod et al., 2014; Millington and Lawhon, 2019; Nagle, 2013; Samson, 2015), an expanding body of ethnographic studies has pointed out that waste work is not a mere survival strategy or means to livelihoods but a way of life that is consciously chosen by individuals (Millar, 2018; Nguyen, 2019; Reno, 2015). As a way of living, waste work may provide people with social mobility in addition to the opportunity to capitalise on waste. Nguyen’s (2019) ethnography takes us into the complex relations between waste, labour, gender, family care and class among migrant waste traders in post-socialist Vietnam. These waste labourers endeavour to build their lives and social position in the face of uncertainty brought about by the constantly fluctuating global economy. Embracing the ‘ethics of risk-taking’ and the ‘ethics of striving’, they engage in a lucrative yet precarious waste trade that can enable labourers to live their desired lives and attain a higher social status in the community. In a similar fashion, Knowles (2017) points out that some migrants from the countryside work as trash pickers in the municipal landfill in Addis Ababa to gain access to urban life and earn the opportunity to migrate to other countries. In other words, waste gives the trash pickers the hope of improving their lives and building networks of trans-locality in cities (Gregson and Crang, 2010; Wu and Zhang, 2019). However, attaining prosperity and a higher social class through waste work remains difficult, as social norms still very much condition the way people perceive waste work: as socially undesirable and morally repugnant (Nguyen, 2019). That said, the above examples demonstrate the affordance of waste, by which I mean that waste work offers some opportunities for waste workers, in spite of structural constraints.

Waste not only generates opportunities for waste labourers but can affect people in its own right by effecting social change and nurturing individuals’ relations with material objects. The affective quality of the materiality of waste makes waste picking an act of treasure hunting, during which labourers find enjoyment and fulfilment by scavenging valuable discarded objects, such as rare old coins, illicit goods, expensive earrings, or wearable second-hand clothing (Reno, 2009, 2014, 2016). Likewise, Millar (2018) observes the affective force of the Jardim Gramacho dumpsite, which produces attachments instead of separation between catadores (garbage collectors) and waste. The site is not just a place saturated with economic opportunities; instead, it provides food, generates sociality and offers an alternative way of living and labouring for the catadores, who enjoy ‘relative autonomy’ in the landfill.

Prosperity thus speaks to a form of social capital generated by the waste site, as labourers establish and depend on social relations to sustain their desired way of life. Waste itself is not ‘a fixed substance’ or a static site, it is constantly being created and is hence multiplying (see Barad, 2003: 822). The materiality of waste is fluid and will decompose within a particular timeframe, emitting biogases that can be used to generate electricity, which in turn sustains society (Knowles, 2017; Reno, 2016; cf. Chalfin, 2020). Waste as prosperity alludes to the relation between humans and waste that allows the accumulation of material wealth, social connections and pleasure in life.

Prosperity also goes beyond individual monetary and emotional gains, encompassing divine blessings. Halvorson (2012), studying a Lutheran aid agency in America that recycles and sends medical technologies to Madagascar, shows that aid workers consider recyclables as God’s gifts to the Malagasy community. By recycling and reducing the production of medical waste, for example, aid workers in an NGO would gain moral or divine rewards for their volunteer work and devotion to God (Halvorson, 2012). Here, waste is conceptualised as the source of social, moral and divine value to be accumulated as intangible wealth. In all of these cases, waste as prosperity also refers to the everyday politics of life, where different social groups seek to revalue waste materials and are, in turn, remade and transformed by the vitality of waste. For those who recognise their dependence on discarded objects, the process of acquiring prosperity from waste generates anticipation for what is possible in the future (Adams et al., 2009).

The productivity and vitality of waste

The above framings all allude to the generative or transformative capacity of waste. As a resource and risk, waste is productive. People generate economic resources from waste, derive power by determining when and how to intervene, and manufacture political values by producing surplus populations and risks that allow them to exert control and authority over specific social groups. This style of thought is fundamentally grounded in the dialectic relation between waste and value, where the ‘untapped potential’ of waste can be recovered for human consumption (Gidwani, 2012: 283). Although this discussion no doubt problematises the structuralist understanding of waste as simply ‘a matter out of place’ (see Douglas, 1966) and shifts our focus to the social inequality materialised in the value creation and destruction of waste, stressing the productivity of waste tends to assume that there is an endless cascade of waste material transformations (Herod et al., 2014). This assumption resonates with the logic of capitalism, which foregrounds the power of generativity and the extraction of human and non-human life-forces, treating people and nature as means to produce capital (Bear et al., 2015). Therefore, it is presumed that waste, bestowed with the ‘vitalism of growth’, can always be converted into something useful and valuable through human labour (Bear, 2018). As scholars have shown, materials do have limited lives in terms of their chemical compositions and cannot be recycled repeatedly (Herod et al., 2014; McGrath-Champ et al., 2015). Further, those materials that are not deemed profitable enough to be recycled are often precluded from entering the waste recovery process. Such a focus on the endless possibility of material transformation thus seems limited.

In contrast, recent scholarship on waste, influenced by new materialism, embraces another dimension of the generative potential or ‘livingness’ of waste (Bell, 2019; Hawkins, 2006; Jackson, 2012). The emphasis on the vitality of waste turns our attention to the material agency and ways in which everyday lives are shaped by abandoned objects (Bennett, 2010). As a source of prosperity, waste has the capacity to affect and animate our lives, enacting ethical practices and subjectivities. The plasticity of waste also implies the processes of ‘becoming’ through which waste materials generate (in)tangible wealth that nurtures generations of people. Although this theoretical approach transforms our understanding of human-waste relations by advancing the materiality of waste, it tends to leave out the susceptibility of the vitalism of waste, thereby failing to engage with the enduring obsolete material debris that is not always productive but provocative or even ruinous (see Stoler, 2008).

Waste can remain on the ground for a long period of time before breaking down, provoking scholars to observe the trails and scales of the multifarious material disintegration (Eitel, 2020; Gille, 2007). Waste can become a damaging form of attachment when people’s lives are harmed by working with it (Bear, 2018; Fredericks, 2018). Waste can be ruinous and lifeless, rather than vital (see Petryna, 2003). That said, it is equally dangerous to emphasise only the negative and toxic effects of long-lasting waste materials on humans and the environment. Romanticising this ‘damage-based’ research neglects the mediating social structures and material infrastructures that can either perpetuate or thwart these destructive consequences to humans and the environment (Murphy, 2017).

Though focussing on the productivity of waste has limits, my aim is not to displace this line of inquiry. Thinking along with the above scholars, I mean to offer a way where scholars of waste can hold the tension between the productivity and ruination of waste materials without merely dwelling on the indeterminacy of waste which still accentuates value creation, transformation and/or temporarily suspension (Alexander and Sanchez, 2019). Waste does not simply undergo self-transformation and become valuable. Instead, there are all kinds of things vying to spring alongside waste. Returning to the example of TCE (Gregson et al., 2015), one can recall the emergence of standardisation in regulating the microbial processes in recycling. Such rigid measurements also stem from political concerns about environmental and health care, drawing people’s attention to other pathogens and microbes in the transformation of waste.

Meanwhile, I am cautioned to talk about the decaying waste materials merely in the rhetoric of destruction and death that so often evokes a sense of lamentation and despair (Stoler, 2008). Although mismanaged decaying waste materials are no doubt toxic and destructive to human lives, such toxicity also activates acts of care that may translate into somewhat hopeful collective actions (Liboiron et al., 2018; Nading, 2020). Temporally, these toxic discards can linger around and appear ironically as a ‘para-site’, the contact zone in which different species, human labourers and non-human infrastructures come into being and interact with each other (Doherty, 2019b; De Wolff, 2017; Gandy, 2013; Reno, 2014). Thus, there is a need to question how other human-non-human beings coexist with and emerge from potentially toxic waste sites.

Ruminating on the life and death of waste draws my attention to the matter of care. If waste is increasingly embroiled in the discussion of microbial interventions and political actions pertaining to ‘care’, thinking with care is empirically important to shift focus from ‘wasting’ and the productivity of waste to various human-non-human ‘caring’ practices. Further, if scholars acknowledge that people can never really get rid of different forms of ‘waste’ and their non-human companions (see Hawkins, 2006), care matters theoretically since care is essentially a practice of maintaining and repairing a life-sustaining world for all beings (Puig De la Bellacasa, 2012), helping us consider ways to cohabitate with waste materials and other life forms without assuming that one can always eliminate or capitalise on them (see Haraway, 2016).

Such an idea of ‘care’ thus goes beyond the vernacular definition of care as mere virtuous provision and concern. Drawing inspiration from and building upon feminist STS, I now expound how care may generate new insights to conceptualise and reconfigure the existing waste situation.

Waste and care: The feminist STS perspectives on waste

Until recently, research on care has often been confined to the study of kinship (Thelen, 2015) and has seldom been explicitly analysed in relation to the scholarship on waste. However, waste management, I argue, fundamentally embodies some elements of care. For instance, waste workers need to carefully consider where, when and how waste should be disposed of. Additionally, the establishment of a waste infrastructure demands attentiveness and care, as it requires the constant practice of repairing and maintaining. Characterising these activities as care is to recognise both material and ethical dimensions of repairment and maintenance in waste management since such practices not only restore material qualities but also entail questions of why and for whom these materials matter (Isenhour and Reno, 2019). In her ground-breaking work on the history of consumerism and waste in America, Strasser (1999) subtly introduces the idea of care to think about waste by illustrating the importance of ‘the stewardship of objects’ in waste reduction. Taking the pre-twentieth century practices of repairing old clothes and furniture, serving leftovers and passing down heirloom as examples, Strasser (1999) points to the virtue of these ‘forgotten’ household practices, advocating for the urgent need to prolong what we have before they are discarded.

The growing concerns about resource depletion and ecological crisis have extended the study of repair and care beyond the domestic realm (Alexander and Reno, 2012; Isenhour and Reno, 2019). Studies show that the ‘informal’ economies of repairing and second-hand goods often provide a safety net for those who lack purchasing power (Cross and Murray, 2018; Doron, 2012; Ta, 2017) and facilitate a moral economy that preserves the damaged planet (Herrmann, 2019). Repairing also involves another valuation process. Pioneering the term ‘Global Destruction Network’, Herod and collaborators (2014) observe that value is also added through dismantling and reassembling the devalued subcomponents of waste materials. Corwin’s (2018) study of the repair economies in Deli details how workers tear down different discarded electronic commodities and reuse and reassemble various unrelated parts of that e-waste to repair clients’ broken goods. This repair process ends up remanufacturing a ‘Frankenstein’ electronic product. The ‘informal’ process of destruction and reassemblage can therefore be integral to the ‘formal’ commodity production where the former waste materials find entrance into the global market (McGrath-Champ et al., 2015). Thus, for Martínez (2017: 349), ‘brokenness is never final’; instead, it reveals possibilities of forming, or uncovering, new relationships with abandoned objects. Shifting focus to how discarded things are repaired, redistributed and reconstituted from abandonment may unsettle the existing linear economic model that precipitates massive waste disposals (Martínez, 2017).

However, waste does escape containment and repairment (Hird, 2012). Waste like plastic can decay into micro- and nanoparticles and/or leaches out as toxic leachate, entering animals’ bodies like rats and fish and turning them into ‘toxic transmitters’ that threaten human lives (Eitel, 2020). As such, if scholars of waste seek to promote the flourishing of human beings, they inevitably need to care about all these non-human entities in the politics of waste management in which human beings are entangled. To capture such entanglements, one cannot merely consider repairing a materialistic restoration and value transcendence. Specifically, repairing should be understood as more than just a set of human-centric practices or as a radical critique of and a celebratory alternative to the logic of capitalism. To extend Martínez’s approach, if repairing is just a dimension of caring, scholars ought to situate repairing in the larger caring process, that is, the repairment, renewal and maintenance of human-and-non-human relations that can sometimes be affectively exasperating, ethically challenging and politically restrictive (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Sevenhuijsen, 2003; see Haraway, 2016).

The feminist STS scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012: 197) defines care as the assemblage of ‘a vital affective state, an ethical obligation, and practical labour’. Together, they constitute an ethico-political commitment to sustaining a liveable world. I will now flesh out how these dimensions of care may help develop an analytical lens of care that not only broadens scholars’ discussion on the practices of repurposing waste, but also illuminates the politics of the stewardship of waste.

Affective engagement with waste

Ruminating on the affective quality of care illuminates the complex moral emotions and intimate knowledge of waste labourers. It raises questions about the types of affective engagement with waste in space and how they are organised in response to the difficulty of managing waste. The affective dimension of waste is no stranger to discard studies. Hawkins (2006) has long highlighted how waste evokes various visceral feelings, stimulating people to reflect upon their relations with waste and thereby enabling habitual changes. Yet, affect does not just generate actions; instead, in the practice of caring, these feelings can also be frustrating and burdensome. If care values all kinds of emotions that alerts people to respond to moral indignation (Held, 2005), scholars must pay attention to the affective registers and conditions from which these feelings emerge, and how and when these feelings shape waste management practices.

Observing how deteriorating garbage trucks arouses feelings of fear and insecurity as it causes accidents and severely jeopardises the safety of waste collectors, Fredericks (2018) explains the consequences of poorly-maintained waste infrastructure. The worries and frustration emerged from the risk of working with waste in turn galvanise workers into actions such as garbage strikes and dumping waste on the front door of the municipality. However, garbage strikes are not merely an act of claiming citizenships and labour rights. They are also embroiled in what Fredericks (2018) calls the ‘communities of affect’ where marginalised workers and residents, systematically excluded by the state’s neoliberal policy, join forces to dispose garbage in public space and contest government negligence. But apart from forging a worker-residents alliance through disposal, the piles of rotten garbage dumped on the street also form an affective space that evokes a sense of abandonment as if no one cares about the well-being of communities. These affective feelings point to the ‘uncaring’ state and its failure to serve citizens, urging the government to assume responsibility, repair relationships with the communities, and care a little more about the lives of waste labourers. The strike can therefore be interpreted as an attempted act of re-building the state’s affective engagement with citizens and workers through waste disposal. In this regard, care prompts us to consider who is most burdened by the care of waste and who bears the consequences when, as in this case, the state deliberately ignores the conditions of those working with waste. If the study of ‘wilful ignorance’ reveals techniques of deflecting attention away from the materiality of waste (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020), thinking about care opens up possible ways to re-affect people’s relation with waste.

The ethics of care

As an ethical obligation, care is the responsibility of looking after others and being accountable for the consequences of caring activities (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). The ethics of care is inclusive rather than exclusive, acting as a gathering force that draws people to caring activities (Puig De la Bellacasa, 2011). It compels scholars to cultivate attentiveness so that they may take time to engage with differences and otherness in ways that do not cause exclusion and domination (Barlow and Drew, 2021). Commenting on a staged dialogue in which Bruno Latour imagines himself talking to an environmentalist angry about the widespread use of sport utility vehicles (SUVs), Puig de la Bellacasa (2011: 90) notes that criticising the use of SUVs is unproductive, since this cuts off dialogue with those with whom we disagree. Consequently, one will disregard ways to deal with the already-existing non-eco-friendly objects, and how they are assembled and produced. To avoid this theoretical and empirical negligence, scholars can begin with widening their research to consider not only the workers involved in repurposing discards, but also the labour committed to engaging people to care about the kind of waste that may not generate infinite possibilities of transformation.

Hawkins’ (2009) careful analysis of the politics of bottled water is a case in point. Instead of lambasting the rise of commodified plastic bottles, Hawkins traces how business industries connect bottled water with health and purity by advertising their use of natural uncontaminated water sources. This marketing strategy conceals the dire environmental impacts of plastic waste. As a counterpoint, Hawkins also cites an example where a water filter company that advocates ‘ethical consumption’ re-assembles our understanding of the formation of bottled water. Displaying startling pictures of the massive amount of petroleum used to make water bottles, the company redirects our attention to the origin of plastic bottles and the lasting toxic effects of plastics on the environment and people’s health. Whilst Hawkins is interested in the political potential of material actants, my interest is in the attentiveness to the production and mobilisation of knowledge about the materiality of waste, and how one may gather and re-engage the public in the discussion of the relationality and afterlives of objects. Thinking with the ethics of care further encourages waste researchers to attend to the ethico-political entailments of and the techniques used in reconfiguring and renewing people’s relations with waste materials, and thereby allows us to ponder and formulate a better way of caring about or approaching different waste-related (environmental) crises.

Interdependency

The analytical lens of care helps us uncover the more-than-human interdependent relations and analyse how these relations are structured in waste management. Care, as a form of practical labour, entails a political commitment to ‘maintain, continue, and repair our “world”’, with the understanding of ‘our world’ as extending beyond humankind to include care for the environment (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40). Critiquing the understanding of care that restricts it to the domestic sphere of family and kinship (Hochschild, 2000; Thelen, 2015), feminist scholars have sought to collapse the binary public-private domains by rejecting the gendered assumption of care work as women’s work (Held, 2005; Sevenhuijsen, 2003; Tronto, 1995). Conversely, care compels us to ask what other forms of human and non-human labour are involved in making a liveable, shared world, and how the material conditions and practices of caring may foster alliances with different beings that may enable inequality and/or flourishing relationships (Lawson, 2007; Puig De la Bellacasa, 2012; see Butler, 2015; cf. Tronto, 1995).

Scholars have already demonstrated that effective waste management depends upon cooperation between diverse types of labour and nongovernmental organisations (Doron and Jeffrey, 2018). The emergence of organised recycling cooperatives is one example of how solidarity between recyclers improves working conditions and expands environmental contributions (Gutberlet, 2012). Such cooperatives, however, need not to be humancentric if one recognises the ‘hybrid’ or shared labour of nature and human beings (Battistoni, 2017). Doherty’s (2019b) study of waste infrastructure in Uganda demonstrates the value of animals in managing waste. At his field site, marabou storks play an important role in reducing the large amount of waste in the landfill, and yet the storks are very often eliminated by the waste management company. The attention to care will point us in the direction of coalitions between human and non-human labour in waste management. Going beyond the utility of non-human beings, one could also question the competence of our stewardship of waste when the animals, such as marabou storks, involved in taking care of our waste are stigmatised and ostracised. In other words, caring illuminates the power relations and tension in waste management, often materialised in the subordination of non-human entities to human beings. Adding care to discard studies invites us to conceptualise how and the condition under which the collaboration between human and non-human entities is achieved, as well as the ways in which one may cultivate new types of interdependent relations, despite the unequal power relations in waste management.

Politics of care and waste

The practice of care is indeed vulnerable. Although the word care is often associated with warmth and affection, in practice it does not always possess these qualities. Anthropologists have elucidated how the practice of care is constantly entwined with control and discipline (Johnson and Lindquist, 2020; cf. Doherty, 2019a). Notably, Rose (2007), following a Foucauldian framework, observes the rise of ‘vital politics’, in which citizenship is configured based on biology and health technology, and techniques of control and management are increasingly developed to shape and reshape the experience of selfhood and life. Accordingly, individuals are responsible for the care of the self, making conscious moral choices as they regulate and learn about the health and (bio-)value of their bodies. In a similar vein, Doron (2016) notes how the biopolitics of waste has subjugated middle-class Indian youths to a moralising public health and cleaning campaign that aims to combat waste generation. Meanwhile, the clean-up project propagated by the state delegates youths from the middle-class to implement cleaning practices and excludes the urban poor from participating in the campaign simultaneously, reinforcing hierarchised exclusionary caste and class stratification. The biopolitics of waste thus renders particular social group(s) as the self-less environmental carer and makes caring vulnerable or unequal by stipulating who has the right to care and how to care. This, perhaps, buttresses Hawkins’ (2006: 12) concern that waste campaigns ‘driven by the logic of moral imperatives can trigger victimization or despair’. In other words, the project of care could easily reproduce a moralising rhetoric that, in turn, controls rather than transforms the way people conduct their lives and habits.

However, scholars need not view care only as a mask hiding inequality and bounded moral rules. The practice of care is always ambiguous and conflictual and can produce frustration, confusion and resentment for both caregivers and care-receivers when people have different assumptions of how care should be practised (Goodwin-Hawkins and Dawson, 2018; Mol, 2008). The ethics of care may not always lead to positive effects, but it does reveal power dynamics and vulnerabilities in the implementation of various notions of care (Martin et al., 2015; Mol et al., 2015; Murphy, 2015). These vulnerabilities of care can also be politically productive and reflexive, with the potential to build solidarity and cultivate responsiveness to public policy and projects (Jakimow et al., 2019). The late Graeber (2018: 237) reminded us of the empathetic nature of humans where we ‘constantly cast ourselves imaginatively into each other’s shoes and try to understand what others are thinking and feeling’. This is not to suggest that control does not exist in the labour of care; instead, the empathy of care evinces the essence of communication whereby we seek to know each other more and thereby cultivate a better way of caring as time passes. If we extend and infuse Graeber’s insight into our understanding of waste and think about care not only in terms of empathy between humans but also between humans and non-humans, we may realise the vulnerabilities and partiality of our waste handling practices that necessitate collaboration with other social groups and non-human entities. Specifically, scholars may consider increasing waste generation, forms of waste materials and/or the toxic effects of waste as signals that communicate with us to find or experiment with different ways to take care of waste (cf. Keck, 2020).

Such a process also entails a temporality of slowness since caring requires patience and constant interpretation of what these signals may suggest. In Phnom Penh Cambodia, waste materials seep into the poorly-maintained sewage system and converge with the city’s wastewater, passing through agricultural land, lakes and rivers (Eitel, 2020). The wastewater is highly contaminated but paradoxically nutritious, enabling the growth of edible water plants like morning glory (Jensen, 2016). While these floating plants act as a natural infrastructure and labourer that absorbs and cleanses the effluent before entering the river, they are extremely toxic (Jensen, 2016). Very often, plants are harvested and sold in the market as commodities. Consumed by citizens, the plants lead to the rise of diarrhoea and protozoan disease in the city (Jensen, 2016). Here, waste sends signals by ‘looping back’ in a hybrid form of water plants and pathogens, bringing about a range of diseases and affective concerns regarding food safety and health. Caring about waste can be fraught with tension since such signals indicate not only the shortcoming of the existing waste management system but also the conflictual more-than-human entanglements where water plants can at once be detrimental and beneficial to society. Responding to these signals may entail repairing and maintaining ‘working’ relationship with, instead of commodifying, non-human entities (e.g. the plants) (see Battistoni, 2017). It may also involve tracking those who are more susceptible to such lethal entanglements and imagining and tinkering with different waste handling practices that promote a politics of waste which enables the flourishing of all beings.