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‘Federico Demaria has given us a gem of a book. . . . it is the kind
of book to which the reader tends to return to because yet another
element suddenly is in play. It is partly the complexity of the conditions
he has engaged and the vastness of the elements in play. It is the type
of book that helps us learn something we had not considered or
thought about. His analysis covers a large variety of elements, from
environmental conicts to giving voice, and presence to the poor
and forgotten. It is a must-read’.
—Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, New York, and author of Expulsions
Waste is increasingly a site of social conict. This book shows
how environments are shaped, politicized, and contested. It is
a book on the politics of waste management. It examines power
dynamics within recycling, focusing on the often overlooked informal
waste recyclers. Through two compelling case studies from India, it
unveils the socio-environmental conicts involving these recyclers.
The rst study explores the detrimental impact of shipbreaking on
local communities and workers, as global prots come at the expense
of social and environmental costs. The second study delves into the
conict surrounding waste management in Delhi, where recyclers are
deprived of their livelihoods while urban residents bear the burden
of environmental costs. Theoretically, the rst is an example of
capital accumulation by contamination, while the second involves both
dispossession and contamination. The struggles of informal recyclers
politicize waste metabolism by challenging techno-managerial
solutions, such as incineration, and fostering counter-hegemonic
discourses and praxis.
Federico Demaria is Associate Professor in Ecological Economics
and Political Ecology, University of Barcelona, Spain.
` 1495
9780192 869050
ISBN 978-0-19-286905-0
www.oup.com
Cover image: Shutterstock/Bell Ka Pang
The Political
Ecology of
Informal Waste
Recyclers
in India
Circular Economy,
Green Jobs, and Poverty
Federico Demaria
Demaria The Political Ecology of Informal Waste Recyclers in India
‘Demaria makes a timely and important contribution to political
ecology, demonstrating that neither the political economy nor
materiality can be considered as “context” since they are always
already co- constituted. e book’s rich analysis exposes how the
politics around social metabolism is intrinsically linked to the
struggle against exploitation, dispossession, and contamination’.
— Maria Kaika, University of Amsterdam, author of City of
ows: Modernity, nature, and the city and co- editor of Turning
up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency,
with Keil, Mandler and Tzaninis
‘is book delves deeply into unseen aspects of poverty in India,
discusses the environmentalism of the poor, and claries the de-
bates on the so- called circular economy. We know that the in-
dustrial economy is entropic. is book is a major contribution
to research on the economy of the Entropocene’.
— Joan Martinez Alier, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,
and author of Environmentalism of the Poor
‘Based on more than ten years of eld experience and two case
studies in India, Federico Demaria provides a perceptive and
compelling exploration of the power relations at the heart of
recycling in the global South. His detailed discussion of the
conicts that exist in the recycling sector, both locally and glo-
bally, not only highlights social, political, and institutional dy-
namics but sensitively tells the story of informal recyclers, or
waste pickers, whom he identies as important environmental
workers. Ultimately, Demaria makes an impassioned plea for
a fair and just evaluation of the contribution made by waste
pickers who stand at the front line of climate change resilience.’
— Libby McDonald, Lecturer and Inclusive Economies Lead;
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, D- Lab
‘How can we “repoliticize waste metabolism beyond techno-
managerial solutions”? What are the global and urban “social
relations of recycling”? What are the key concepts to under-
stand the recycling scape and the processes of dispossession
waste pickers are subject to? Under what conditions can in-
formal waste pickers be meaningfully engaged in complex sys-
tems such as circular and green economies? We need to critically
engage with the debates on sustainability, alternative models
for the economy, and development and explore in depth the
room for waste pickers inclusion in such systems— and this is
what precisely the book e Political Ecology of Informal Waste
Recyclers in India: Circular Economy, Green Jobs, and Poverty
does. Drawing from many cases but particularly from the Delhi
waste conict around privatization of waste and introduction
of incineration, the book traces back the struggles of workers
and allies and makes a powerful call for the recognition of the
crucial role informal waste workers make to the environment
and the economy. e book makes a critical contribution to
the growing knowledge of waste pickers by studying not only
through a poignant narrative of conicts and struggles but also
by introducing key concepts for understanding the threats and
the struggles for resistance. As Paulo Freire said: “Knowledge
emerges only through invention and re- invention, through the
restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings
pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” ’.
— Sonia Dias, Women in Informal Employment Globalizing
and Organizing (WIEGO)
e Political Ecology
of Informal Waste
Recyclers in India
Circular Economy, Green Jobs, and Poverty
FEDERICO DEMARIA
Associate Professor of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology,
Department of Economic History, Institutions, Politics and World
Economy, University of Barcelona (Spain); Senior Researcher, Institute
of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of
Barcelona (Spain); and Visiting Fellow, International Institute of
Social Studies (e Hague, Netherlands)
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s object ive of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Federico Demaria 2023
e moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023930679
ISBN 978– 0– 19– 286905– 0
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780192869050.001.0001
Printed and bound in India by
Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To the waste recyclers of the world,
to which I belong, since the ideas discussed here are also
the result of recycling.
Foreword
In this book, Federico Demaria discusses a world issue through case
studies in India. In particular, he looks at solid waste disposal conicts
that are related to recycling. We could say that he discusses the social and
political dimensions of the circular economy. Recycling tends to be al-
ways seen as positive, but what are its social and environmental costs?
Are we ready to use slaves and pollute local ecosystems in order to close a
little the circularity gap?
e industrial economy is not circular, it is increasingly entropic.
Energy from the photosynthesis of the distant past, fossil fuels, is burned
and dissipated. Even without further economic growth the industrial
economy would need new supplies of energy and materials extracted
from the ‘commodity frontiers’, producing also more waste (including ex-
cessive amounts of greenhouse gases). erefore, new ecological distri-
bution conicts (EDCs) arise all the time. Such EDCs are oen ‘valuation
contests’ displaying incommensurable plural values. ere are many ex-
amples of such conicts in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas.
org), for instance on the mining of coal, iron ore, and bauxite in India.
ere are conicts on extraction of materials, on their transport and on
the disposal of waste. Climate change is arguably the largest waste dis-
posal conict given the excessive production of carbon dioxide. Also the
pollution of water is a waste disposal conict.
e concept of ‘circular economy’ implies that material resources could
be increasingly sourced from within the economy, reducing environ-
mental impact by increasing the reuse and recycling of materials. e aim
would be to minimize waste and move towards a closed- loop economy.
However, this socio- technical ‘imaginary’ has no relation to reality as
revealed by biophysical, metabolic analysis. ere is an enormous ‘cir-
cularity ri’ that looks more like an abyss than a bridgeable gap. e in-
dustrial economy is not circular, it is entropic. ere is a huge ‘metabolic
gap’ between the ‘fresh’ material input and the recycled material input
into the economy. At the world level, the rst is about 92 Gt (gigatons
viii
or billion tons) per year (including the energy carriers, excluding water)
and the second about 8 Gt. Let us assume that the world economy grows
slowly and merely doubles the material input requirement in 70 years.
Of the material input of 200 Gt let us assume that 100 Gt are recycled.
An enormous improvement in the recycling rate from 8% to 50%, and
however still a small increase (from 92 Gt to 100 Gt) in the ‘fresh’ material
input required every year. If less than 10% of materials are recycled, where
do the other 90% come from? My answer is: from the new commodity ex-
traction frontiers and also to some extent from customary sources. us
aluminium may come to some extent from recycling, it may come from
bauxite from old mines which are used more intensively, or it may very
likely come from new bauxite mines.
ere is a new collective initiative for the historical study of ‘com-
modity frontiers’ and also a new journal with this title (https:// com modi
tyfr onti ers.com/ jour nal/ ). is concept (Moore, 2000) is becoming ever
more relevant. e industrial economy marches all the time to the ex-
traction frontiers in search of materials and it also travels to the waste
disposal frontiers. e waste is sometimes deposited anywhere (solid or
liquid waste, or GHG, greenhouse gases), and sometimes a small part of
it is economically valued again by recyclers, or in controversial REDD
schemes for ‘capturing’ carbon dioxide (Demaria and Schindler, 2015).
Both the expanding commodity extraction frontiers and the waste dis-
posal frontiers are oen inhabited by humans and certainly by other
species. Hence the growth in the number of conicts over the use of the
environment, and as a response the growing strength of the environ-
mental justice movement.
In my 2002 book e Environmentalism of the Poor, I discussed indi-
cators of urban unsustainability as indicators of social conict. e eco-
logical view of cities, today well known, has roots in the chemistry and
physics of the nineteenth century, as when Justus von Liebig lamented
the loss of nutrients in cities which did not return to the soil. Before the
Athens Charter and Le Corbusier’s inuence, the ecological view was
inuential in urban planning, most signicantly in Patrick Geddes’
work, and later in the work of Lewis Mumford in the United States and
Radhakamal Mukerjee, a self- described social ecologist, in India. Geddes
was a biologist and urban planner. Writing to Mumford from Calcutta
on 31 August 1918, he had made one main point regarding ecological
ix
city planning. In his City Report for Indore he wanted to break with the
conventional drainage of ‘all to the Sewer’ replaced by ‘all to the Soil’.
Today, we would refer to this as closing a little the ‘circularity gap’. Shiv
Visvanathan powerfully asserted that today’s Gandhi would not be so
uniquely concerned with the virtues of the rural village.
Gandhi would make . . . the scavenger the paradigmatic gure of
modern urban India . . . Gandhi argued that waste has not been fully
thought through by city science . . . sewage rather than becoming a
source of pollution would become a source of life and work. e classic
example of city sewage use was Calcutta. is much maligned city uses
its sewage to grow the nest vegetables . . . By focusing on waste, the city
sciences of today can recover an agricultural view of the world.
(Visvanathan, 1997: 234– 235)
Federico Demaria doesn’t discuss such scavenging but he discusses deeply,
aer many years of eldwork in both cases, the informal recyclers of both
industrial and urban solid waste, namely shipbreaking at Alang and recyc-
ling in Delhi. I have known Federico for over 15 years already, he came to
ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona aer studying economics
in Bologna and in Paris, already interested in degrowth of the economy but
without experience outside Europe. Aer securing a doctoral fellowship he
went on his own to Alang in Gujarat to research shipbreaking and metal re-
cycling, not an easy place for a rst contact with India. He came back safely
to Barcelona. Already struck by attraction to India, he went back to Delhi
and lived with urban recyclers and cooperated with their trade union, All
India Kabadi Mazdoor Mahasangh (AIKMM). Armed with these deep
personal experiences and with some concepts from ecological economics
and political ecology, he wrote several articles and a doctoral thesis, which
he has now converted into this readable book. It is a monograph on India
but the topic is relevant also for the rest of the world.
Joan Martinez- Alier
Emeritus Professor, Institute of Environmental Science and
Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain). His
most well- known books are Ecology and Economics (1984),
Environmentalism of the Poor (2005), Land, Water, Air and
Freedom (2023). He has been awarded the Balzan Prize in 2020.
Preface
Since I was a teenager I have always been concerned with justice. Being
born in a conservative small village in the Alps of the northwest of
Italy did not make political engagement too easy. e Catholic Church
was the only site for community activities. anks to my older brother
Daniele, and Radio Flash (an historical anarchist radio from Torino),
I was introduced in the late 1990s to the anti- globalization movement.
I was then lucky enough to obtain a scholarship for the United World
College of the Adriatic where I nished my high school, but more im-
portantly expanded my horizons. It was there that I started to study
economics, which then convinced me to learn and practise develop-
ment economics. However, the years spent in Bologna (Italy) for my
undergraduate degree in political economy, rather than shedding some
light, confused me a lot. e more I studied economics, the more I was
disappointed with it. is triggered an intellectual search that brought
me to degrowth, ecological economics, and political ecology. I spent
one year in Paris with Allain Caillé, an economic anthropologist and
leader of the MAUSS group (Anti- utilitarian Movement in the Social
Sciences), and then went to the Autonomous University of Barcelona to
study ecological economics and political ecology with Joan Martinez-
Alier and his team. I didn’t expect at the time that Barcelona would be-
come my new home.
How I became interested in waste, I don’t exactly know and might
have to be found in my subconscious, to be explored in other instances,
for instance with psychoanalysis. e initial idea for this book was
given to me by Joan Martinez- Alier. Back in 2008 he asked if I was inter-
ested in doing some research on shipbreaking in India. e interest for
waste pickers came from my friend Juan David Uribe, a post- industrial
designer from Colombia who had worked with recicladores in Medellin.
In 2009 I started my PhD thesis, on which this book is based, that I de-
fended in 2017.
xii
e perspective to work with some of the most impoverished social
groups in one of the most impoverished countries in the world, like India,
attracted me because of my original interest about development. What
I have learned about development, in India and elsewhere, is not entirely
explained in this book. e critique to development and the alternatives
to it has been my other research interest. In particular, the degrowth
movement and debate has been where I have engaged the most. is
should explain why it took me so long to actually nish this book. e rest
of the story is what I narrate in this book. In a nutshell, I argue that the
struggles of informal recyclers constitute an attempt to re- politicize waste
metabolism beyond techno- managerial solutions by fostering counter-
hegemonic discourses and praxis.
What are the main theoretical contributions of this book? Political
ecology understands every ecological issue as a political one. It aims at
politicizing environmental issues. To this end, there are fundamental
questions to be addressed: Who has access to the environment? How
and by whom is it managed? How are environmental goods and bads
distributed? How is nature socially constructed? How and by whom are
new socio- natures and spaces produced? Who benets and who loses?
Accordingly, along these lines, my research in general, and this book in
particular, aims to inform theory on how environments are shaped, pol-
iticized, and contested. is book contributes to our understanding of so-
cial metabolism in general (the use of energy and materials within the
economy), and waste in social metabolism in particular. First, I examine
the relationship between social metabolism and conict, looking from a
situated political ecology perspective, at how dierences in the structure
and nature of particular social metabolisms create dierent conict dy-
namics. Second, I shed light on an oen forgotten but very important part
of social metabolism which is the informal recycling of waste. I evaluate
the contribution of informal recycling, and I investigate how power in-
uences the social relations of production (or recycling), and how these
shi costs to informal recyclers. en, I make a case for the recognition
of the important contribution of informal recyclers in making social me-
tabolism more circular, and I call for due compensation of the services
they provide, instead of a dispossession from their means of produc-
tion, and a shiing of social costs of enterprises and consumers to them.
e latter is what I call accumulation by contamination. e case studies
xiii
help to explain what I mean with this new concept, and how it diers
from accumulation by dispossession (famously introduced by the geog-
rapher David Harvey). In the postface, I will contextualize this book in
my broader intellectual project that could be seen as a contribution to a
global political economy of environment and development.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I acknowledge the recyclers, both the ones that spent
time with me, and the ones that would have liked to, but were not allowed
and sometimes even threatened. I owe to them what I have understood
about the informal recycling sector (and beyond) that is here explained.
is is also true of the many activists that supported me throughout
my journey, in particular Shashi Bhushan (AIKMM), Gopal Krishna
(Toxic Watch Alliance), Dharmesh Shah and Neil Tangri (GAIA), Lucia
Fernandez (Global Alliance of Wastepickers, WIEGO), Kaveri Gill, Dunu
Roy (Hazard Centre), Ravi Agarwal (Toxic Links), Madhumita Dutta
(Corporate Accountability Desk), and Nityanand Jayaraman (Vettiver
Koottamaippu).
Second, I acknowledge the help received by colleagues, students
and friends, at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology
(ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Research
& Degrowth (R&D), University of Barcelona (UN), Centre for Studies
in Science Policy (CSSP) at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),
International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and elsewhere. In par-
ticular, Giorgos Kallis for his intellectual clarity; Joan Martinez Alier for
his guidance; David Harvey for his encouragement; Seth Schindler who
has been an incredible research mate in Delhi; my good friend Giacomo
D’Alisa with whom I have grown intellectually and personally for the last
10 years; my researcher assistants D. & D. and Prerna Nair; my coach
Amalia because her guidance during the late stage of writing this book
helped me to overcome my mental barriers; last, but not the least, Brototi
Roy for the copy editing. I also want to thank for support and constructive
comments on previous dras of the manuscript Deepak Malghan, Ignasi
Puig Ventosa, John O’Neill, Julien Francois Gerber, Christos Zografos,
Giuseppe Munda, Richard Christian, Isabelle Anguelovsky, Arturo
Escobar, Melanie Samson, Lucia Fernandez, Rohan D’Souza, and the
three anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press. Since so many
people have participated in this research project, I have chosen to use
xvi
the subject pronoun ‘we’. In particular, the ideas about accumulation by
contamination presented in Section 2.4 were developed with Giacomo
D’Alisa. Moreover, Chapter 4 is co- authored with Seth Schindler, with
whom we also formulated the concept of waste- based commodity fron-
tiers discussed in Chapter 6.
ird, I am thankful for the support from all sta at Oxford University
Press, in particular the editors Moutushi Mukherjee, Chandrima
Chatterjee, and Dhiraj Pandey.
Fourth, I am grateful to my partner, son, and extended family for their
support.
Fih, I acknowledge support from the Serra Hunter programme,
the Maria de Maeztu Unit of Excellence ICTA UAB (CEX2019-
0940- M), the FP7 European project EJOLT (Environmental Justice
Organizations, Liabilities and Trade), the European Research Council
(ERC) projects EnvJustice (GA695446), led by Joan Martinez Alier, and
PROSPERA (GA947713), led by Mario Pansera; and last, but not least,
the Global Alliance of Wastepickers and the NGO Women in Informal
Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO).
Contents
1. Introduction: Waste Is Increasingly a Site of Social Conict 1
1.1 Why is Book: e Research Questions 1
1.2 How is Book Was Made: e Methods 11
1.3 What is Book Is About: A Preview of the Chapters 13
2. Theoretical Framework: Ecological Economics, Political
Ecology, and Waste Studies 19
2.1 Ecological Economics 20
2.2 Political Ecology 31
2.3 Waste Studies 38
2.4 eoretical Contribution: Capital Accumulation
by Contamination 56
3. Shipbreaking in Alang: A Conflict Against Capital
Accumulation by Contamination 67
3.1 Introduction: e Metabolism of a Global Infrastructure,
Namely Shipping 67
3.2 Methods and Study Region 70
3.3 e Shipbreaking Industry 72
3.4 Hazardous Waste and Socio- Environmental Impacts 85
3.5 Looking Closer at the Ecological Distribution Conict:
e Blue Lady Case at the Supreme Court (2006– 2007) 93
3.6 Conclusions: Capital Accumulation by Contamination
at Alang 101
4. Delhi’s Waste Conflict: An Unlikely Alliance Against Capital
Accumulation by Dispossession and Contamination 105
4.1 Introduction: A Political Ecology of Urban Metabolism 105
4.2 Materiality and the Making of Urban Metabolisms 107
4.3 Delhi’s Urban Metabolism 110
4.4 Conclusions: Contesting Urban Metabolism 130
5. Informal Waste Recyclers and Their Environmental Services:
A Case for Recognition and Capital De- Accumulation 133
5.1 Introduction: e Black Box of the Informal Recycling
Sector 133
xviii
5.2 Methods: Interviews, Focus Groups, Ocial Documents,
Direct and Participant Observation 134
5.3 Formal Waste Management and the Informal Recycling
Sector in Delhi, India 135
5.4 Proposed Methodology: Data from the Junk Dealers’
Record Books 144
5.5 Results: e Metabolism of the Informal Recycling Sector 146
5.6 Discussion: Policy Proposals in Relation to the Waste
Management and Environmental Services of Informal
Recyclers 151
5.7 Conclusions: Why Should Informal Recyclers Be Taken into
Account? 158
6. Conclusions: How Environments Are Shaped, Politicized,
and Contested 161
References 175
Postface: My Intellectual Project, and How is Book Fits into It 191
About the Author 199
Index 201
The Political Ecology of Informal Waste Recyclers in India. Federico Demaria, Oxford University Press.
© Federico Demaria 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780192869050.003.0001
1
Introduction
Waste Is Increasingly a Site of Social Conict
1.1 Why is Book: e Research Questions
Smithu and Akbar never met but they could have been brothers. Both
were born in rural villages of India, just like more than half of the
country´s population. eir families depended on subsistence agriculture
in two of the poorest states of India, Jharkhand and Bihar respectively.
However, they did not own enough land to obtain a decent livelihood.
ey migrated in search of better opportunities. Smithu now spends his
days cutting down the large metal structures of ships with a torch on the
beaches of Alang, Gujarat, some 1,800 km away from home. Meanwhile,
Akbar goes door- to- door collecting recyclable waste in a neighbourhood
of Delhi on his tricycle rickshaw with a cart. Both are a part and parcel
of the informal recycling sector. Both have found themselves obliged to
work in dangerous conditions, risking their lives for about US$100 per
month. Both are involved in an everyday struggle to survive and hope-
fully improve the working and living conditions for them and their fam-
ilies. ey are brothers in the struggle, together with other millions of
informal waste recyclers around the world. Here, we narrate their story in
an attempt to contribute to their struggle— making the invisible visible.
Informal waste recyclers are those people who collect and segregate
recyclable waste, in order to sell it to make a livelihood. Urbanization
has seen an increase in the consumption of recyclable materials, such as
plastic, paper, and metals and that has led to an increasing number of in-
formal waste recyclers. People that are living out of other people’s waste
are predominantly present in low- income countries, but on the rise also
in high- income ones due to increasing inequalities and urbanization.1
1 For example, see this recent article about informal recyclers in Barcelona (Spain), that fea-
tures our own research by Stephen Burgen published in e Guardian and titled ‘Chariots of
ere are no reliable estimates of the number of people engaged in waste
picking or of its economic and environmental impact. According to the
International Labour Organization (ILO, 2013), the informal recycling
sector is a way of making a living for 19 million to 24 million people in
the Global South. Similarly, the World Bank estimates that at least 1% of
the urban population in low- and middle- income countries works in this
sector (Medina, 2008). is means at least 30 million people worldwide,
and this number is on the rise. ese are workers exclusively dedicated
to collecting, separating, and selling recyclable materials from muni-
cipal solid waste. Apart from municipal solid waste, there are also other
important streams of recyclable waste, such as e- waste or shipbreaking,
which also employ millions of recyclers. Despite the recognition of the
existence of millions of informal recyclers, they have been neither prop-
erly investigated nor taken into account in formal waste management
policies. We argue for an urgent need for better understanding of the
informal recycling sector, so as to improve waste management under
economic, social, and environmental criteria. Calls for integrating the in-
formal recycling sector into the formal waste management systems have
mainly gone unheard. Improving our understanding of this sector is a
rst essential step if we intend to improve their conditions and the sus-
tainability of the economy.
e informal economy relates to ‘economic activities by workers
and economic units that are— in law or in practice— not covered or in-
suciently covered by formal arrangements’ (ILO, 2003). It plays an
important role in the overall economy of a country. In fact, for many coun-
tries across the globe, the informal sector employs more persons than the
formal one (ILO, 2012). For instance, in India, the proportion of persons
employed in the informal economy is more than 80%. e neoliberal re-
structuring of the global economy and wide- ranging policy reforms have
not resulted in the disappearance of this sector, which continues to rap-
idly expand. Whereas the sector provides livelihood to a large number of
so- called low skilled labour, there are concerns related to wage disparities
steel: Barcelona’s hidden army of scrap recyclers. 23 March 2021. Available at https:// www.theg
uard ian.com/ glo bal- deve lopm ent/ 2021/ mar/ 23/ chari ots- steel- bar celo nas- hid den- migr ant-
army- scrap- recycl ers (Accessed 28 October 2021).
3
between formal and informal sector workers, and the lack of any kind of
work or social security (Harriss- White and Sinha, 2007).
e informal recycling sector in low- income countries is part and
parcel of this economy. In the twenty- rst- century metropolis, it is a so-
phisticated web of waste workers who manage to autonomously make
a living and achieve high recycling rates, in the range from 20% to 50%
(Wilson et al., 2009). In fact, contrary to what many people think, waste
picking does not only take place at the landll, or randomly in the streets
of cities. In many cities, informal recyclers (commonly called waste
pickers) carry out door- to- door collection and separation of waste, while
municipalities oen do not have in place any eective formal recycling
program. e working conditions are normally precarious, unhealthy,
and dangerous. ey operate in hostile social environments and are vul-
nerable to exploitation by middlemen. Because the recycling industry
demands large volumes of materials that are processed (sorted, baled,
crushed, or granulated) it does not buy directly from individual recyc-
lers. Instead, middlemen purchase recyclables recovered by recyclers,
and then sell them to the industry. is intermediation places them at
the bottom of the recycling value chain, leading to further exploitation.
In fact, from a standard economics point of view, the informal recycling
sector resembles many of the characteristics of a free market where recyc-
lers are mere price takers.
Lacking social recognition, recyclers are much looked down on as
beggars, criminals, drug addicts, and alcoholics. Instead, a recycler
is a person who salvages reusable or recyclable materials thrown away
by others to sell it and obtain a livelihood. ey are (waste) workers in
search of a source of livelihood, in the absence of other employment
opportunities. e factors that push people into informal recycling are
fundamentally economic. Many belong to vulnerable groups: recent mi-
grants, the unemployed, the disabled, women, children, and the elderly.
For the urban poor in developing countries, informal waste recycling is a
common way to earn income.
Studies suggest that when organized and supported, waste picking can
spur grassroots investment by poor people, create jobs, reduce poverty,
save municipalities money, improve industrial competitiveness, conserve
natural resources, and protect the environment (Medina, 2008; Samson,
2009, 2020). Recyclers have self- organized in dierent ways to overcome
these barriers, from local groups in the form of associations and unions,
to national and international networks.2 e collective business model
includes micro- enterprises, cooperatives, and public- private partner-
ships. Working in collectives improves their bargaining power with
public authorities and business, potentially leading to more ecient re-
cycling and more eective poverty reduction.
Dierent names are used in dierent languages and regions of the
world, such as waste picker, scavenger, rag picker in English, 拾荒 in
Chinese, recicladores, pepenadores or cartoneros in Spanish, chionier in
French, and riciclatore, rigattiere, cenciaiolo, or straccivendolo in Italian.
In English other names include reclaimer, informal resource recoverer,
binner, recycler, poacher, and salvager. We propose to use the term ‘in-
formal waste recyclers’, or simply recyclers, because it seems to us the one
that more accurately describes their activity and the most respectful one.
In fact, as we will argue, recyclers play in society the role carried out by
decomposers in natural ecosystems. e obvious dierence lies in the
fact that, while nature is based on cyclical processes, industrial societies
are characterized by linear processes, where only a small percentage is
actually recycled (Haas et al., 2015). In biology, despite the fundamental
role played out by decomposers, they have been historically underesti-
mated in comparison to other biological organisms higher in the food
chain. e same could be said for recyclers in human societies. is is the
gap that this book attempts to ll. By evaluating recyclers’ contribution
to waste management, we argue that they should gain social recognition
and be compensated for their services.
e exact gures of global waste production are unknown. e World
Bank (2012) estimated that in 2012 the global average generation of mu-
nicipal waste was about 1.2 kg per person per day. In the same year, the
urban population generated about 1.3 bn tonnes, which is expected to
almost double by 2025. India alone in 2016 generated about 62 mn tonnes
of waste. However, according to estimations by Marín- Beltrán et al.
(2022), in our article titled ‘Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of
Waste’ and based mostly on data retrieved from Krausmann et al. (2018)
2 Formed in 2008, the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers is a networking process among
thousands of waste picker organizations with groups in more than 28 countries covering mainly
Latin America, Asia, and Africa. See: http:// global rec.org/
5
and Haas et al. (2020), the world generates at least 23.5 Gt of solid waste
(including both industrial and municipal) annually. is value is 10 times
higher than reported by e World Bank (Kaza et al., 2018)— which
only includes municipal solid waste, and does not consider, for example,
losses from minerals other than metals— but it is as the 20 Gt reported
by Krausmann et al. (2018). While municipal waste generated in lower-
income countries is mostly composed by food and greens, 51% of the
waste generated by high- income countries is dry waste, including plastic,
paper, metal, and glass (Kaza et al., 2018).
Peak waste does not seem to be happening soon, as long as auence
and urban populations are on the rise. ese gures are signicant for
the social, environmental, and economic complexities related to its man-
agement. For instance, the twenty- rst- century metropolis in the Global
South, given both its high population density and large surface, nds it
dicult to nd the space to dispose of its waste and increasingly reverts
to waste incineration. However, municipal solid waste is just a small per-
centage of the overall waste produced, probably less than 10%, in terms of
weight (EEA, 2000). Worldwide, there are very few comprehensive stat-
istics about industrial waste, despite it oen being hazardous. e lack of
reliable data sets constitutes the rst barrier for public authorities in their
attempt to carry out integrated waste management, which implies simul-
taneous strategies to reduce waste generation that include reusing, recyc-
ling, and composting, and implementing disposal methods that reduce
harm to the environment. A material assessment of the global economy
can be used to argue that currently the aggregate recycling rate is only
about 6%, compared to the total material input (processed materials)
(Haas et al., 2015). In this book, we will focus on the ‘social relations of
recycling’,3 which are the social relations that recyclers must enter into
in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. To
this end, from the perspective of situated political ecology, and based on
extensive eld work lasting a decade, the book discusses two case studies
3 Here, we suggest a parallelism with the Marxist concept of social ‘relations of production’,
which means the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order to survive,
to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. ese are specic to a certain mode of produc-
tion, meaning the constitutive characteristic of a society or social formation, based on the socio-
economic system predominant within it.
in India about both global and urban relations: ship breaking in Alang-
Sosiya, and solid waste management in Delhi.
Waste is by denition refuse, the unwanted. However, since it is pro-
duced, it generates problems, and something needs to be done about it.
e questions related to its management are not merely technical; what,
how, where, and by whom become intrinsically political questions. Waste
is a site of social conict. e costs related to its generation and man-
agement are oen shied from those with more power to those with
less. Most visible to ordinary citizens is the opposition faced by local
waste treatment and disposal facilities, such as incinerators and land-
lls (Pellow, 2007). In China, opposition to incinerators sometimes
turns violent.4 In high- income countries, this opposition together with
the rising management costs has given way to a rapidly changing and lu-
crative trade, global in nature, in which waste ows towards developing
countries or poorer areas of developed countries (Pearson, 1987; McKee,
1996). e case of Naples and its region Campania in Italy is probably
among the most emblematic (D’Alisa et al., 2010), together with the
Somali pirates, some of whom are self- declared coast guards against the
dumping of toxic waste (and illegal shing).5 Moreover, there is also a
shi from waste- as- externality to waste- as- resource, driven by new
waste- based commodity frontiers (Schindler and Demaria, 2020). In a
special issue, co- edited by Seth Schindler and myself, and tellingly titled
‘Garbage is Gold’, we argue that in fact there is a long history of realizing
value from waste. e papers in the collection demonstrate that attempts
to recongure socio- metabolic systems in order to create, enhance, and
capture value from waste continue to take place around the world. How
do these attempts happen? What are the driving forces? Are they con-
tested? ese are the issues which this book highlights, focusing on the
two case studies: shipbreaking and Delhi’s waste conict. Similar pro-
cesses happen elsewhere. In Bogota, Colombia, the Mayor Gustavo Petro
was removed aer his attempt to implement a Zero Garbage programme
that would have reverted the privatization of the waste management
4 e Economist. Keep the res burning. 25 April 2015. Available at: http:// www.econom
ist.com/ news/ china/ 21649 540- waste- incin erat ors- rile- pub lic- are- much- bet ter- land l l- keep-
res- burn ing (Accessed on 20 March 2017).
5 See EjAltas (2014) Somalia toxic waste dumping, Somalia. Available at: https:// ejat las.org/
con ict/ soma lia- toxic- waste- dump ing- soma lia (Accessed on 15 March 2017).
7
system and formally integrated thousands of informal recyclers.6 e
Environmental Justice Atlas, that is the world’s largest inventory of envir-
onmental conicts, reports a few hundred cases of social mobilizations
related to waste management (see ejatlas.org). No one knows how many
such contestations exist worldwide, but there is no doubt that waste is
conictive. It is a question of justice, to be more precise of environmental
justice. Political ecology investigates who loses and who wins from the
processes that lead to these contestations. Conicts, in fact, give visibility
to the contradictions between capital accumulation and life reproduc-
tion. is is why studying them is so important. ey are like a lighthouse
in the dark.
e world is producing more and more waste, with serious health and
environmental consequences. In urban areas, domestic waste is accu-
mulating fast and landlls ll up quickly. Public authorities are trying to
manage this problem in new ways. In the Global South these tend to in-
volve private corporations and expensive technology rather than waste
pickers. is policy shi towards realizing value from waste is limiting
waste pickers’ access to recyclable materials. is is happening despite
the fact that waste pickers are responsible for a very high percentage of
recycling.
Side- lining informal recyclers is leading to conicts. Our Barcelona
Research Group on Informal Recyclers7 has been tracking them, in col-
laboration with researchers and activists from EnvJustice (envjustice.
org), the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers (globalrec.org), and Women
in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO).
Together, we documented more than 100 socio- environmental conicts
in cities of the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) related to
waste pickers. ey can be consulted by visiting the thematic map ‘Waste
pickers under threat’, which includes a 1,000- word description for each
of them, along with coded variables on the environmental, health, and
6 Costanza Vieria. Zero Garbage Plan Tied to Fate of Ousted Bogotá Mayor. IPS News. 13
December 2013, http:// www.ipsn ews.net/ 2013/ 12/ zero- garb age- plan- tied- fate- ous ted- bog ota-
mayor/ (Accessed on 20 March 2017).
7 e Barcelona Research Group on Informal Recyclers, founded and coordinated by my-
self, has counted contributions from Nina Clausager, Max Stoisser, Marcos Todt, Rickie Cleere,
Benjamin Irvine, Chandni Dwarkasing, Laia Guardiola, Valeria Calvas, Javier Lujan Gutierrez,
Daniele Vico, Julian Porras, Anna Karin Giannotta, Michael Rendon, and Josep Espluga Trenc,
with the support of Lucía Fernández Gabard and Federico Parra (WIEGO- GlobalRec).
socio- economic impacts, the social actors and their forms of mobiliza-
tion, and the outcomes of the conicts (available by clicking on the con-
ict sheet; see https:// ejat las.org/ featu red/ waste pick ers).8
Historically, waste pickers have been confronted with dangerous
working conditions, social marginalization, and persecution. e map
shows how this precarious situation is getting worse. In the past decade,
threats to waste picker livelihoods in the Global South has been intensi-
ed by shis in public policy towards realizing value from waste at the
benet of private corporations. A preliminary analysis of the 100 con-
icts suggests that threats seem to have taken three main forms: inciner-
ation, privatization, and urban space restrictions.
First, incineration technologies get large public subsidies, for example
as emissions reduction projects from the Clean Development Mechanism
of the Kyoto Protocol. e rst incinerator in Africa was built in Ethiopia
in 2018 with Chinese investment and Danish technology. National bans
on incineration are being challenged from the Philippines to Mexico. But
research shows that recycling is always preferable to burning.9 is is true
both socially in terms of the livelihoods of waste pickers as well as en-
vironmentally for CO2 emissions and risks of air pollution. As we will
discuss in detail in Chapter 4, in Delhi waste pickers and residents have
allied against incineration.
Second, in the case of privatization, corporations have become in-
creasingly interested in waste as a resource. For example in Johannesburg
(South Africa), the Genesis landll was privatized and waste pickers
were violently evicted. Formal criteria for contracting municipal waste
management services that are being put in place end up excluding waste
pickers, for example in Egypt and Ghana. e closure of problematic
landlls has oen led to the simple shiing of environmental damage in
places like Belém and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) as well.
8 See our article published at e Conversation and titled ‘How waste pickers in the global
South are being sidelined by new policies’. Available at https:// thec onve rsat ion.com/ how- waste-
pick ers- in- the- glo bal- south- are- being- sideli ned- by- new- polic ies- 132 521 (Accessed on 23
October 2021).
9 e main reasons why recycling is better than incineration are (1) it saves energy; (2) it is
more protable; (3) it creates more job; and (4) it is more exible and dynamic. See https:// zero
wast eeur ope.eu/ 2017/ 09/ 4- reas ons- why- recycl ing- is- bet ter- than- incin erat ion/ (Accessed on
18 October 2022).
9
ird, restrictions in urban space can aect waste pickers, and their
livelihoods. An example is the prohibition of animal or human- drawn
vehicles. Such examples can be seen in Porto Alegre (Brazil) and
Montevideo (Uruguay). Another example is the installation of ‘anti- poor’,
‘smart’ containers in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Bogota (Colombia).
And, in the name of modern, beautiful and hygienic city centres, waste
pickers are denied access to certain urban areas, like in Phnom Penh
(Cambodia).
Informal recyclers are increasingly taking action to oppose policies
that exclude them from their source of livelihood. e main areas of
focus are social rights and formal inclusion into municipal waste man-
agement. ey also organize to make their environmental services vis-
ible, ght discrimination, and empower their communities. is is
happening mostly in Latin American countries. But it’s also happening
in South Africa and India, among others. e Global Alliance of Waste
Pickers, supported by the nongovernmental organization Women in
Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), works
with organizations in more than 28 countries. eir aim is to include
waste pickers in decision- making, improve their working conditions, de-
velop their capacity, and achieve recognition for their work. Civil society
groups have also formed a network in the Global Alliance for Incinerator
Alternatives (GAIA). Recognition of the contribution that waste pickers
make is growing in some countries. But the vast majority still face social
marginalization, highly unsuitable working and living conditions, and
most recently a global trend of capital accumulation through realizing
value from waste that threatens to deprive them completely of their live-
lihood. In reaction, informal recyclers ght for social and environmental
justice.
In this book, we focus on two case studies in India about the social
relations of recycling. ey are related to two dierent geographical
scales: global and urban. e rst, shipbreaking, is related to shipping, the
key infrastructure of global trade. e second, Delhi’s waste metabolism,
exemplies the processes just mentioned in other twenty- rst- century
metropolises of the Global South. We use these case studies to contribute
to the further understanding of the ways societies’ metabolism (that is
the ows of energy and materials) works and changes. More precisely we
want to shed light on the relationship between social metabolism and
political economy, or else materiality, power relations, and social con-
icts, with a focus on waste.
First, and in line with previous research on social metabolism and
ecological distribution conicts (Martinez- Alier, 2002; Temper et al.,
2018; Scheidel et al., 2018), we want to follow a situated political ecology
perspective and explain how dierences in the structure and nature of
particular social metabolisms create dierent conict dynamics. Social
metabolism leads to environmental conicts, but how and what type of
metabolism, when and where?
Second, we want to shed light on an oen forgotten but very important
nal component of global and urban social metabolism: the informal
recycling of waste. We want to evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively
the contribution of informal recycling to a local ecological economy,
investigating the power relations that govern the production and disposal
of waste, and explaining why and how these shi costs to informal recyc-
lers. en, we intend to build a case for the recognition of the important
contribution of informal recyclers in making social metabolism more cir-
cular, and we call for a recognition and due compensation of the services
they provide, instead of a dispossession from their means of production,
and a shiing of social costs of enterprises and consumers to them and
other vulnerable social groups.
e research questions are as follows:
(1) How and why does the metabolism of waste cause social conicts,
where and under what conditions?
Our main argument will be that metabolism causes conicts because
it involves the dispossession of resources and/ or a shiing of costs. Waste
is unwanted and there is a tendency to shi its costs from those who have
more power to those who have less. We investigate two cases at two dif-
ferent geographical scales, and dierent types of waste: rst, shipbreaking,
where the metabolism of a global infrastructure shis the costs to very
localized communities; and second, waste metabolism in a twenty- rst-
century metropolis which simultaneously shis costs to the urban resi-
dents, and dispossesses recyclers of the access to recyclable waste.
11
(2) How do capitalist dynamics and power relations shape waste me-
tabolisms unevenly?
Apart from the materiality, we should understand the political
economy of these processes, be they at the global or urban level. is can
help to clarify why the metabolism changes in the way it does, so as to
determine its driving forces. We discuss the concept of capital accumula-
tion by dispossession, and argue that there is an additional strategy that
needs more attention, which could be called ‘lower costs of output’ via
cost- shiing, namely capital accumulation by contamination.
(3) What is the role of informal recyclers in the metabolism of waste?
How and under what conditions might their work and contri-
bution be valued and compensated? How do power relations re-
duce them to invisible subjects? How do they resist and attempt to
transform their role in waste metabolism?
We will look at the power relations in recycling. Waste recyclers are in-
visible for both waste studies and public policy. eir struggle, sometimes
in alliance with other actors, aims to transform this situation.
1.2 How is Book Was Made: e Methods
From the perspective of situated political ecology, we aimed at a research
that was theoretically broad but empirically situated. is was meant to
expand the range of local experiences and, in doing so, inform theory on
how environments are shaped, politicized, and contested.
We have carried out extensive eld work in India from 2009 to 2019,
with several visits summing up to more than two years. Data from inter-
views, ocial documents, direct and participant observation have been
combined using the case study research methodology (Yin, 2003). Semi-
structured, in- depth interviews, and focus groups were conducted in
English, most of the time with the help of local translators (mainly in
Hindi but also in other Indian languages, like Gujarati and Bengali).
Interviewees were selected to represent a broad spectrum of interests
and knowledge, using both random and snowball sampling methods. We
combined qualitative and quantitative methods. In each chapter, we fur-
ther present in details the methods, while here we only intend to give an
overall evaluation.
For shipbreaking, we carried out eld work from April to July 2009. e
access of researchers to the industry site is strictly regulated and workers’
freedom of expression is limited. is was a major challenge which, in
the end, we were able to partially overcome thanks to a local guide and a
translator, a lot of patience, and perseverance. During our stay, we never
felt that our personal security was at risk. However, our guide and trans-
lator were threatened aer we le, and we decided not to go back. eir
names are kept condential.
In Delhi, I have been a visiting researcher at the Centre for Studies in
Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, under the guidance of envir-
onmental historian and political ecologist Rohan D’Souza. We collabor-
ated very closely with the waste pickers union AIKMM (All India Kabadi
Mazdoor Mahasangh). We used to live at their headquarters, a tiny oce
in East Delhi, that allowed us to draw interesting insights. e research
design and implementation, especially for the last chapter, was developed
together with them. We established a close relationship with both waste
pickers and junk dealers, and accompanied them regularly throughout
their working days. At times, we were helped by a research assistant. We
also kept regular relations with local experts, both scholars and activists,
among others Gopal Krishna (Toxic Watch Alliance), Kaveri Gill, Dunu
Roy (Hazard Centre), and Ravi Agarwal (Toxic Links). We also collab-
orated with the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, and took part in their
2012 Global Strategic Workshop in Pune, South India.
One of the major limitations was our inability to speak the local lan-
guages linked to the fact of being a foreigner. Our appearance, as white
foreigner, did not easily allow for camouaging, which was a major
problem in Alang and Sosiya. We partially overcame the language bar-
rier with the help of local translators, but this made at times communi-
cation with interviewees rather dicult. We shall also admit that there
were cultural barriers, and at times we were not able to evaluate properly
dierent situations. We are grateful for two major characteristics of the
Indian culture: (1) the fact that it is mainly a patient (if not peaceful) one;
and (2) a great sense of hospitality. One aspect that was of help, is that we
kept visiting the dierent sites regularly, for several years. is helped us
13
to build some kind of trust because it showed that we were truly inter-
ested. In the case of Delhi, we actively took part in the AIKMM activities,
supporting them at times. In this case, we developed a reciprocal relation.
ey helped us to understand their sector, and we tried to help them,
for example with draing texts in English (such as yers, press releases,
funding application, and letters to the authorities).
Last, in this book there is no pretence of objectivity. We normally take
a position that is explicit, but with the intention of it being a critical and
informed one.
1.3 What is Book Is About:
A Preview of the Chapters
e book is structured as follows. We introduce the theoretical frame-
work (Chapter 2), and then the two case studies: shipbreaking in Alang-
Sosiya (Chapter 3) and waste management in Delhi (Chapters 4 and 5). In
Chapter 6, we draw some conclusions.
Chapter 2. eoretical Framework: Ecological Economics,
Political Ecology, and Waste Studies
Chapter 2 provides the theoretical framework explaining, rst, how the
contribution is situated in the common ground between three elds: eco-
logical economics, political ecology, and waste studies; and second, the
main theoretical contribution, namely the concept of capital accumu-
lation by contamination. First, ecological economics provides a frame-
work to understand the relationship between the environment and the
economy, with concepts such as social metabolism (that is the ows of
energy and materials), and cost- shiing (VS externalities). Second, pol-
itical ecology brings into the picture the political dimension, or else the
power relations. e focus is on ecological distribution conicts, born out
of an unequal distribution of benets and burdens, due to an uneven dis-
tribution of power. ird, it contextualizes the case studies within waste
studies explaining why waste management, and in particular recycling,
has been chosen to be the focus of this book. In particular, it proposes to
extend the metaphor of metabolism between biology and economics, and
view waste recyclers in societies playing out a role similar to decomposers
in natural ecosystems. Last, the chapter explores key political economy
concepts (such as capitalism, and capital accumulation), that allows me
to introduce the new concept of capital accumulation by contamination,
and explains how it diers from the one of accumulation by disposses-
sion. is is dened as the process by which capitalism socializes costs,
through successful cost- shiing, which degrades the means of existence,
and bodies of human beings (as well as of other species) in order to nd
new possibilities for capital valorization. is will be of help to clarify
what are the driving forces which inuence the way social metabolism
changes.
Chapter 3. Shipbreaking in Alang: A Conict Against
Capital Accumulation by Contamination
Chapter 3 investigates the management of ocean- going ships as waste.
e shipping industry constitutes a key element in the infrastructure of
the world’s social metabolism. In fact, more than 80% of international
trade in goods by volume is carried by sea. Ocean- going ships are owned
and used for their trade by developed countries but are oen demol-
ished, together with their toxic materials, in developing countries. Ship
breaking is the process of dismantling an obsolete vessel’s structure for
scrapping or disposal. e Alang- Sosiya yard in India, one of the world’s
largest shipbreaking yards, is studied with particular attention to toxic
waste management. Ship owners and ship breakers obtain large prots
dumping the environmental costs on workers, local farmers, and shers.
e latter see their means of existence and bodies degraded, at the eco-
nomic benet of the former. is unequal distribution of benets and
burdens, due to an international and national uneven distribution of
power, has led to an ecological distribution conict. is is exempli-
ed by the controversy at the Indian Supreme Court in 2006 over the
dismantling of the ocean liner Blue Lady, that shows how the dierent
languages of valuation expressed by dierent social groups clashed and
how a language that expresses sustainability as monetary benet at the
national scale, dominated. Shipbreaking in the developing world is not
15
just an externality but a successful case of cost- shiing, or else, capital ac-
cumulation by contamination. In this case, capital accumulation by con-
tamination takes place thanks to the indirect prots due to saved costs
(i.e. indirect subsidies).
Chapter 4. Delhi’s Waste Conict: An Unlikely Alliance
Against Capital Accumulation by Dispossession
and Contamination
Chapter 4 investigates the struggles related to municipal solid waste man-
agement in Delhi, the capital of India. We focus on a conict that has
erupted as authorities have progressively privatized the city’s solid waste
management system in response to an increase in the volume and meta-
bolic density of waste, as well as a change in its composition. Authorities
have embraced waste- to- energy incinerators hoping it would be a magic
bullet, but encountered opposition from those who lose from this policy
shi. Workers in the informal waste sector fear that these changes
threaten their access to waste, while middle- class residents oppose waste-
to- energy incinerators because of their deleterious impact on ambient
air quality. e Delhi waste conict shows resistance against both cap-
ital accumulation by dispossession (recyclers are dispossessed of their
livelihood source, namely recyclable waste), and capital accumulation
by contamination (environmental costs are shied to urban residents).
e chapter narrates the emergence of an unlikely alliance between these
groups, whose politics opposes the production of a waste- based com-
modity frontier within the city, as well as the imposition of exposure to
waste on an everyday basis. Recent scholarship on the materiality of cities
has been criticized by critical urban scholars for being overly descriptive
and failing to account for political economy. e chapter argues that in
order to understand cities in the Global South whose metabolisms are
subject to erce contestations, it is necessary to incorporate materialist
and critical perspectives. It concludes that the materiality and political
economy of cities are co- constituted, and contestations over the cong-
uration of urban metabolisms span these spheres as people struggle to
realize situated urban political ecologies.
Chapter 5. Informal Waste Recyclers and their
Environmental Services: A Case for Recognition and
Capital De- Accumulation
Informal waste recyclers are those people that segregate and collect re-
cyclable waste, in order to sell them to make a livelihood. Despite the in-
formal recycling sector employing about 1% of the urban population in
developing countries, their contribution to waste management has nei-
ther been evaluated nor compensated. is chapter lls this gap. First, it
provides an assessment of the current available data set on waste man-
agement in Delhi, leading to a rst approximate estimation of recycling
rates. It also discusses a taxonomy of informal recyclers based on their
means of transport and their area of collection, as well as how their abso-
lute number can be estimated. Second, it suggests a new methodology to
evaluate their contribution. is aims to reliably estimate how much they
recycle, what type of materials, and how much they earn. To this end, data
for 100 informal recyclers for one year were collected from junk dealers’
ledgers. Results show that in Delhi informal recyclers collect approxi-
mately 50 kg of recyclable material per day, mostly plastic and paper (60%
and 30% of their income, respectively), but also metals, hair, and organic
materials. ey earn roughly 8,000 Indian Rupees per month (about
US$125). is is close to the minimum wage, but as recyclers themselves
claim, public authorities should compensate them for their services. e
chapter develops two policy proposals that suggests a monthly payment
for collection as well as recycling services, respectively 4,200 Rupees
(about US$65), and 1,500 Rupees (US$25). is would increase informal
recyclers’ monthly income to US$215.
Chapter 6. Conclusions: How Environments Are Shaped,
Politicized, and Contested
We conclude by showing how the case studies provide a new under-
standing to the three research questions mentioned above. In particular,
we show how they present a range of experiences to inform theory on
how environments are shaped, politicized, and contested. We shed light
on the relationship between social metabolism and conicts, with a
17
focus on recycling and looking from a situated political ecology perspec-
tive. First, a situated understanding of waste shows that there is a com-
plex relationship between its materiality and political economy; they are
co- constituted and produce dierent socio- metabolic congurations.
Ultimately, the co- evolution of materiality and political economy (in-
cluding social and institutional dynamics) shapes metabolisms and as a
result political opportunities are fostered and foreclosed. Changes in the
social metabolism are mediated by the social, economic, and institutional
logics at play. ey ultimately lead to socio- metabolic recongurations
which, in turn, eventually lead to ecological distribution conicts. People
struggle to defend, or realize, desirable situated urban political ecologies.
Second, we show that examining the political economy of these processes,
be it at the global or city level, can help to clarify why the metabolism
changes in the way it does, meaning its driving forces. In particular, we
argue that capital accumulation takes place at waste- based commodity
frontiers through extra- economic means, namely both dispossession and
contamination. ird, we attempt to investigate the social relations of re-
cycling, which means the social relationships that recyclers must enter
into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life.
ese are inherently intertwined with the waste metabolism. We suggest
that recyclers play in human societies a similar role to the decomposers
in natural ecosystems. en, we evaluate the contribution of informal re-
cycling and call for a due compensation of recyclers’ waste management
and environmental services, instead of a dispossession from their means
of production, and a shiing of social costs of enterprises and consumers
to them, and other vulnerable social groups. e struggles of recyclers
constitute an attempt to re- politicize waste metabolism beyond techno-
managerial solutions by fostering counter- hegemonic discourses and
praxis.
The Political Ecology of Informal Waste Recyclers in India. Federico Demaria, Oxford University Press.
© Federico Demaria 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780192869050.003.0002
2
eoretical Framework
Ecological Economics, Political Ecology,
and Waste Studies
Our contribution is situated at the interface of three elds: ecological eco-
nomics, political ecology, and waste studies (see Figure 2.1).
First, ecological economics provides a framework to understand the re-
lationship between the environment and the economy. Aer explaining
the origins of this approach, we present the concept of social metabolism
that examines the energy and material ows within the economy. From
this perspective, waste is seen as an unavoidable feature of production due
to thermodynamics. We then briey review how ecological economics
has investigated both waste in general, and recycling in particular. is
helps to understand the roots of waste generation and the complexities
related to its recycling. Last, we put emphasis on the fact that the social
and environmental costs emerging out of the metabolic ows are not ac-
counted for in the balance sheets of enterprises, but instead are shied to
third persons. is is what is called cost- shiing, and diers from what
environmental economists mistakenly call externalities.
Second, political ecology brings into the picture the political dimension,
or rather the power relations. Aer outlining the dierent ways in which
it is understood, we focus on ecological distribution conicts. ese social
conicts are born out of an unequal distribution of benets and burdens,
due to an uneven international and national distribution of power. We
discuss both the roots of these conicts, as well as the dierent languages
of valuation in which they are expressed.
ird, we contextualize our case studies within waste studies ex-
plaining why waste management, and in particular recycling, has been
chosen to be the focus of this book. We start by discussing dierent den-
itions and categories of waste, both in general and in particular in Indian
legislation. en, we discuss waste generation at the global level, in par-
ticular in India. is is followed by a discussion of the functional elem-
ents of waste management. Last, we propose to extend the metaphor of
metabolism between biology and economics, and view waste recyclers in
societies playing out a role similar to decomposers in natural ecosystems.
We call for both ecological economics and political ecology to pay more
attention to waste recyclers because (1) they contribute to improving the
sustainability of waste metabolism, and (2) they are involved in ecological
distribution conicts.
2.1 Ecological Economics
Ecological economics (hereaer EE) is a transdisciplinary eld that aims
to improve and expand economic theory to integrate the earth’s nat-
ural systems, but also human values, health, and well- being. In conven-
tional economics, the primary goal is to increase the goods and services
produced by humans; the gross domestic product (GDP) is a national
measure of the total value of goods and services produced annually, in
monetary terms. Conventional economics assumes that ever- increasing
GDP is desirable, possible, and that everyone benets from it. EE takes
a dierent stand. In a nutshell, it addresses the current conict between
positive economic growth and negative environmental consequences
(Spash, 1999).
Political ecology
– Ecological distribution
conflicts
– Power relations
Waste studies
– Definition
Ecological economics
– Social metabolism
– Generation
– Management
– Cost-shifting
WAST E
RECYCLERS
Figure 2.1 e theoretical framework.
21
Martinez Alier (1987) provides a history of the early attempts to introduce
energy analysis into economic thinking. European conceptual founders in-
clude Nicholas Georgescu- Roegen (1971), K. William Kapp (1950), and
Karl Polanyi (1944). Costanza (1989), right aer the ecological economics
community was founded in Barcelona in the late 1980s, argued that EE is
concerned with ‘the relationships between ecosystems and economic sys-
tems’. ese relationships, he argued, are where the problems with sustain-
ability will be located, problems that at that time were not covered by any
existing disciplines.
A decade later, EE has become a broader ‘science of sustainability’
(Dodds, 1997). Exactly what sustainability means has been contested.
However, there is a consensus that EE stands for strong sustainability, the
idea that there are certain functions that the environment performs that
cannot be duplicated by humans. is is diametrically opposed to the weak
sustainability perspective of Environmental Economics. EE also stands for
the weak comparability of values, implying incommensurability of values
(Martinez Alier et al., 1998). EE has also been called an ‘economics for sus-
tainable development’ (Soderbaum, 2004). Issues debated cover a wide
range such as resilience and evolution in socio- ecological systems, the me-
tabolism of society, trade and globalization, income growth and environ-
mental impacts, environmental sustainability and social welfare (Martinez
Alier and Røpke, 2008).
Røpke (2004 and 2005) provides a history of EE as a eld of research
outlining its characteristic cognitive features at the time of its birth, and
how it has then been inuenced by broader social factors and shaped
by the inow and outow of dierent researchers. Røpke (2005) argues
that central topics include: (1) the roots of the eld, such as the rela-
tion between the environment and growth, trade and/ or technology;1
(2) the scale issue deriving from the embeddedness of the economy in
nature, including the resilience perspective (i.e. ‘the calculations in na-
ture’, such as social metabolism); (3) valuation and decision- making (e.g.
1 is included a series of debates on controversial issues such as the questions of: substitution
between natural and man- made capital, growth and the environment, trade and the environ-
ment, technological change, quality of life, the view of nature.
cost- shiing);2 and (4) some of the tensions that emerge, concerning in
particular, but not only, the relationship with neoclassical economics.
Despite hopes about dematerialization, industrial economies based on
economic growth constantly need to extract and process new resources
(energy and materials), that— sooner or later— because of thermo-
dynamics, will end up as waste. e system is therefore deemed to en-
counter limits to growth, not only for its inputs (e.g. peak oil), but also
in relation to the assimilative capacity of its sinks, or ecosystems (e.g.
climate change). In this book, we are concerned with this second set of
limits. Hereaer we present and discuss some of the central issues de-
bated in EE that are of relevance for this book: social metabolism, waste
and recycling, and cost- shiing, the last being the least explored in recent
developments in the eld.
2.1.1 Social Metabolism
Sustainability depends largely upon the interactions of humans with bio-
geochemical cycles, having thus an intrinsically biophysical component
that needs to be understood. Similar to how biologists study the metab-
olism of living organisms, ecological economists and industrial ecolo-
gists study the metabolism of societies (Fischer- Kowalski and Hüttler,
1999; Fischer- Kowalski and Haberl, 2015). e biological analogy grew
out of the observation that biological systems— that is organisms, but also
higher- level systems such as ecosystems and socio- economic systems,
that is human societies, economies, companies and households— depend
on a continuous throughput of energy and materials in order to main-
tain their internal structure (Fischer- Kowalski and Haberl, 1993). So, so-
cial metabolism is understood as the manner in which human societies
organize their ever- growing exchanges of energy and materials with the
environment (Fischer- Kowalski, 1997), or else, the energy and material
ows within the economy. It refers to the processes of appropriation,
2 is includes a series of debates on social structures and institutions, the motivations and
behaviour of human beings, values and their incommensurability, social processes of change as
evolutionary and dynamic, social change as characterized by conict rather than harmony, so
the existence of power and privilege are at the centre of interest.
23
transformation, and disposal of material and energy by society in order
to maintain and evolve (Scheidel and Sorman, 2012).
Dierent schools of thought have developed dierent accounting
methods aiming to quantify material inputs and outputs, and capture
the biophysical processes that result in relation to economic and soci-
etal processes, as resources are assembled and transformed, and waste is
produced. ese empirical analyses of the biophysical structure of econ-
omies are based upon a number of standardized accounting methods
(Gerber and Scheidel, 2018). Most notably, the Vienna school focuses
on the quantication of energy and material ows (material and energy
ow accounting, MEFA), and the Barcelona school looks at the relation-
ship between the ows and fund, that is, the agents that transform input
ows into outows, while preserving their own identity (e.g. multi- scale
integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism, MuSIASEM).
Dierent approaches lead to dierent metabolic indicators, like the ma-
terial intensity/ eciency of our economies or the energy input per hour
of labour.3 In this book, we will not carry out a detailed accounting
(mainly because of a lack of reliable data), but we will mobilize its concep-
tualization and apply it to the informal recycling sector.
Dierent societies have distinctive metabolisms. Compare, for in-
stance, hunter- gatherer, subsistence agriculture or industrial societies,
and the many forms within these broad categories. ey sometimes co-
exist and surely evolve over time. eir metabolism can be characterized
by both their material dimension, that is, the amount and composition of
materials and energy they consume, as well as by their immaterial dimen-
sion, that is, their political economy and the institutions of society that
dene their sources, type of extraction, distribution and disposal models
of materials and energy across the members of a society.
Here we propose to use the term ‘socio- metabolic congurations’ to
refer to both material and immaterial dimensions of society’s metab-
olism (Demaria and Schindler, 2015). For instance, as discussed later in
Chapter 4, the metabolization of waste in Delhi (India) has to do with
3 Beyond MEFA and MuSIASEM, further methods related to the concept of Social
Metabolism include life cycle analysis (LCA), life cycle inventory (LCI) and life cycle impact
assessment (LCIA), input- output analysis (IOA), the human appropriation of net primary prod-
uctivity (HANPP), energy return on energy input (EROI) and Virtual Water, as well as related
concepts such as ecological rucksacks (Weisz, 2006).
the production, throughput, and processing of waste. e materiality re-
lates to the quantity, composition and caloric value of waste. e pol-
itical economy has to do with how, where, and by whom it is managed
(private, public, or informal sectors; recycling, incineration, or landll,
etc.) (2015). To understand the sustainability and dynamics of social me-
tabolism, one must not only look into the quantication of metabolic
ows, but also into the power relations that shape the reconguration of
metabolism(s), that is, the political economy. Ultimately, the co- evolution
of materiality and political economy, including social and institutional
dynamics, shapes and transforms metabolisms and as a result political
opportunities are fostered and foreclosed.
As we will argue below, ecological distribution conicts do not only
emerge out of an increase in the volume of social metabolism (i.e. in-
creased extraction of materials; Martinez Alier, 2002), but also out of
socio- metabolic re- congurations. In this sense, the rst objective of
this book is to explore the relations between social metabolism and en-
vironmental conicts. We intend to investigate what metabolisms, how,
when, and where they lead to environmental conicts and why. e focus
is on waste.
2.1.2 Waste and Recycling in Ecological Economics
If waste is undesirable, why don’t we just avoid it? Mainstream economists
consider waste as an externality, due to a market failure that could be in-
ternalized in theory. Instead, for ecological economists waste is an un-
avoidable feature of production due to thermodynamics (Baumgartner,
2002). As Georgescu Roegen explained: ‘given the entropic nature of the
economic process, waste is an output just as unavoidable as the input of
natural resources’ (Georgescu- Roegen, 1975: 357). Waste outputs are an
unavoidable by- product in the industrial production of desired goods
and services. e quantity of waste generated depends upon the degree
of (in)eciency with which these processes are operated, although there
is a thermodynamic minimum required. If our society intends to operate
within sustainable levels of metabolism, Baumgartner (2002) suggests
that the following rules should apply:
25
(1) Do not use material fuels as a source of exergy,4 but only sunlight.
(2) Keep matter in closed cycles, that is, heat should be the only waste.
(3) Carry out all transformations with thermodynamic eciency.
ermodynamics is a purely descriptive science, while sustainability
is a normative one since it involves value statements. erefore, in rela-
tion to waste, ecological economics has also considered the following
aspects: (1) Dierent attitudes towards waste (Bisson, 2002), including
throughout history (Winiwarter, 2002); (2) Ecological economic valu-
ations of waste, including life cycle assessment, cost- benet analysis
(CBA) and multicriteria evaluation (Powell et al., 2002); (3) Waste law
(Wilkinson, 2002); and (4) e classication of waste— municipal, toxic,
and nuclear (Barata, 2002; Adeola, 2002; Proops, 2002). Dening waste
can be a very contentious issue, which involves waste for whom, where,
and when? What is waste for someone can be a resource for someone else.
e issue that interests us here, recycling, has been explored in EE, both
in its theoretical dimension, as well as in its practical implementation. e
former has taken the shape of a long controversy regarding whether the
entropy law applies only to energy, or does it also extend to material re-
sources (to be precise, matter of macroscopic scale). Georgescu- Roegen
introduced the fourth law of thermodynamics stating that complete re-
cycling of matter is impossible. e purpose was to substantiate his initial
claim that not only energy resources, but also material resources, are sub-
ject to general and irreversible physical degradation when put to use in
economic activity. In addition, he introduced the term ‘material entropy’
to describe this physical degradation of material resources.
Leaving aside the details of this debate involving physicists and eco-
logical economists, we can simplify by saying that energy cannot be re-
cycled, and materials can be only up to a certain extent. e possibility
of a complete and perpetual recycling of all material resources, in fact,
is a theoretical one since it would require a signicant amount of en-
ergy, time, and information (Ayres, 1999; Craig, 2001). Despite the
4 Exergy is a thermodynamic concept. It is dened as the maximum useful work which can be
extracted from a system as it reversibly comes into equilibrium with its environment. In other
words, it is the capacity of energy to do physical work, or else that it is available to be used. Aer
the system and surroundings reach equilibrium, the exergy is zero. Determining exergy was also
the rst goal of thermodynamics.
theoretical possibility of complete recycling, there is a practical impossi-
bility (Bianciardi et al., 1996).
e practical dimension has been explored by ecological economists
looking at issues such as analysis of the environmental eects of recycling,
for example, CO2 emissions (Nakamura, 1999); cost analysis of recycling
compared to other waste management options (Nakamura and Kondo,
2006), household behaviour investigating individual motivation, for ex-
ample the importance of social norms (Berglund, 2006; Abbott et al.,
2013; Alpízar and Gsottbauer, 2015; Ari and Yilmaz, 2016), the cycle of
specic materials in certain areas, like copper in Europe or aluminium
in the United States, estimating their recycling eciency (Bertram et al.,
2002; Chen and Graedel, 2012); the eectiveness and eciency of dif-
ferent public policies, such as quantity- based pricing for waste collec-
tion services and recycling programs (Bohara et al., 2007; Ulli- Beer et al.,
2007; Usui, 2008; Abbott et al., 2011). e study of recycling in EE has
been characterized by a focus on high- income countries, formal waste
management systems and municipal but not industrial solid waste. e
informal recycling sector, to which we want to draw attention in this
book, has been ignored up until now. It is surprising that the few studies
concerned with recycling in middle- income countries, like Costa Rica
and Turkey, do not even mention the existence of the informal recycling
sector (Alpízar and Gsottbauer, 2015; Ari and Yilmaz, 2016). ere are
only two exceptions where waste picking is mentioned but it is certainly
not the focus of the analysis. e rst is a paper that explores the possible
connections between the green economy and the informal economy in
South Africa (Smit and Musango, 2015). e second is a paper revisiting
‘Environmentalism of the Poor’ and arguing that ‘waste pickers contest
the expropriation of waste by commercial rms and incineration oen
disguised as “energy valorization”, as this expropriation jeopardizes their
livelihoods. [ . . . ] In Delhi, middle income residents support the plight of
recyclers of waste against the possible creation of waste- to- energy plants’
(Schindler et al., 2012).
In conclusion, there seems to be a mismatch in EE between the theor-
etical and practical dimensions. While the former focuses on the macro
picture, that is, the possibility of complete recycling, the latter focuses
on the micro one, that is, proving that recycling rates are low, exploring
why this is the case and how it could be improved. EE, when discussing
27
recycling in practice, doesn’t seem to take into account the overall socio-
economic structure, and limits itself to incremental improvements that
do not necessarily lead to the sustainability of waste metabolism per se.
is leads us to argue that the recycling sector, despite its important role
in social metabolism, has not been properly investigated by EE and lacks
a theoretical framework. is is the gap that we intend to ll with this
book, paying particular attention to the informal sector.
In the following section, we argue that externalities are preferably
seen not as market failures but as cost- shiing to future generations, to
the poor and to other species. is will help us to link ecological eco-
nomics with political ecology. Mainstream economists would argue that
if the price for pollution or the extraction of resources is zero, then it is a
market failure. Instead, here we argue that this fact signals uneven power
relations, and therefore it is intrinsically political.
2.1.3 Cost- Shiing, Not Externalities
EE generally rejects using the term ‘externalities’ from conventional eco-
nomics, and proposes instead the term cost- shiing (Kapp, 1963). Spash
(2010) has argued that externality theory wrongly assumes environ-
mental and social problems are minor aberrations in an otherwise per-
fectly functioning economic system. Internalizing the odd externality
does nothing to address the structural systemic problem and fails to rec-
ognize the all- pervasive nature of these so- called externalities. In fact,
from a business point of view, externalities are not so much market fail-
ures but cost- shiing successes (1963). In this sense, the modern business
enterprise operates on the basis of shiing costs onto others as normal
practice to make prots.
K. William Kapp (1910– 1976) has been a leading institutional
economist and one of the inuential gures of ecological economics
(Martinez Alier, 1987). Before his seminal work, social science frame-
works were formulated without referring directly to environmental is-
sues. At the time, he was an exception with his very early application
of an institutional perspective to environmental issues, including ideas
of pervasive and systemic ‘externalities’, basic uncertainty and inter-
dependencies of environmental and social systems— ideas basically
in accordance with the foundational premise of ecological economics
(Røpke, 2005).
His most well- known work and the one that concerns us here is e
Social Cost of Private Enterprise (1950), later extended and republished
in 1963. Kapp highlighted the shortcomings of the market system and
was particularly concerned with social costs, meaning any costs incurred
by business activity which falls, at any point in time, upon third persons
or the community at large and is not therefore accounted for by business
accounting. He critiqued modern welfare economics and went on to ex-
plain social costs and thus enable society to create a social system that is
free of them. e book is a ‘detailed study of the manner in which private
enterprise under conditions of unregulated competition tends to give rise
to social costs which are not accounted for in entrepreneurial outlays but
instead are shied to and borne by third persons and the community as a
whole’ (Kapp, 1963: XXIX). is conception arose from a critique of ex-
ternalities, what he called ‘external diseconomies’, in relation to Marshall’s
concept of external economies. Elsewhere, Kapp explained that ‘the term
“external” refers to the fact that the diseconomies (costs) or economies
(savings or benets) are outside the frame of reference which serves as
the foundation of micro- economic cost analysis, namely entrepreneurial
costs’ (Kapp, 2011: 273).
Kapp rejected such terminology as it suggests that such costs are ac-
cidental and infrequent. Instead, he agreed with neoclassical econo-
mists that social costs are a form of non- market interdependencies, but
underlined that ‘the output of a rm is not independent of its ability
to shi part of its costs to other sectors of the economy or to the indi-
vidual’ (Kapp, 1963: XXV). It is instead strictly dependent on it, meaning
that cost- shiing is not a minor aberration but a regular practice used
by business enterprise to make prots. Rather than being external to the
(market) system, environmental damages are in reality a normal part of
business practice, despite their absence from its accounting books. us,
the problem is inside the system, not outside it.
Further, Kapp argued that ‘uncompensated costs are both pervasive—
the rule rather than the exception— and systemic— predictable and wide-
spread rather than incidental’ (Swaney and Evers, 1989: 8). On these lines,
later on, Martinez Alier and O’Connor (1999) argued that externalities
should be seen not as market failures (e.g. the failure of the price system
29
to indicate environmental impacts), but as cost- shiing successes which
depend on power relations. Reality is far from the realms of perfect com-
petition where no cost escapes the market’s accounting and all market
participants are price takers (having no economic power). Externalities
by private activities were (and are) seen by welfare economists, such as
Arthur C. Pigou (1920), as ‘exceptions’ that can be remedied within the
framework of private enterprise. Instead, for Kapp, these social costs are
major, typical and regular occurrences. In his view, ‘despite the shi in
the balance of power, the main body of neoclassical value theory has con-
tinued to regard social losses as accidental and exceptional cases or as
minor disturbances’.
Social costs are ‘external’ and ‘non- economic’ in character, but to be
dened as such they should present two characteristics: rst, it must be
possible to avoid them; second, they must be part of the course of pro-
ductive activities and be shied to third persons or the community at
large. For example, water or air pollution caused by industrial activities
are social costs, but not damages from an earthquake.
Kapp was highly concerned that social costs were not suciently
recognized in society. He therefore argued in favour of the importance
of their assessment and quantication at the same time that called for
prudence on their monetization (i.e. cost- benet analysis, CBA) and
warned not to make a fetish of precision and measurement. In his view,
social costs and social benets could not be measured in money terms
because they are extra- market phenomena. For instance, social bene-
ts are public goods (non- rival) and therefore have no market values.
For this reason, externalities could not be internalized by a Pigovian tax
or through Coasian bargaining (a negotiation between impactors and
impactees).
For Kapp, the remediation of social costs remains a political issue as
he explained that ‘society must be prepared to translate social costs into
private costs by political action’. In fact, he continued indicating that ‘e
history of economic and social legislation as well as economic history
could well be written as the history of the success or failure to make sure
that private interests are not pursued at the cost of collective interests’
(Kapp, 1963: 45). He therefore explicitly recognized the conictive nature
of social cost remediation, and its relation with power, as the ‘political
history of the last 150 years can be interpreted as a revolt of large masses
of people (including small business) against social costs [ . . . ] an integral
part of the gradual access to political power by groups formerly excluded
from such power’. Where, on the one hand, ‘pressure groups and vested
interests have been able to distort and abuse the legitimate struggles for
a more equal distribution of social costs, to the detriment of society’.
However, on the other hand, a counter- movement (in Polanyi’s terms)
arises with ‘the emergence of an “anti- capitalist” mentality and an intense
quest for greater security by large masses of people who have to bear the
brunt of the social losses of rapid change’.
Kapp went even further and noted that social costs, such as water and
air pollution, ‘do much more than shi some of the costs of production to
people living outside of a given area. ey create a new physical environ-
ment for man.’ In the words of today’s political ecology, social costs create
a new socio- nature (Swyngedouw, 2004). Kapp, highlighting the uncer-
tainty associated with it, continued arguing that ‘instead of the natural
environment in which man has lived for centuries, the permanent revo-
lution of technology has created a man- made environment the full im-
plications of which, for human health and human survival, are far from
being fully understood. We are only at the threshold of the realization
that his man- made environment may be exceedingly detrimental to all
life on this planet’. In other words, the industrial revolution has disrupted
the ‘natural balance’ dened as the ‘delicate system of interrelationship
between the land and its vegetative cover’.
In conclusion, Kapp’s concept of cost- shiing suggests, contrary to
neoclassical economics, that capitalism contains an intrinsic tendency
to reduce costs, not only through improved management or technology,
but also through any other means available, including deliberate
shiing of costs to less powerful social groups (e.g. the workers), the
environment, or society at large (Swaney, 2006). is is what led Kapp
to conclude that ‘capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid
costs’, and what we will propose to call Accumulation by contamin-
ation. We will argue that unfair ecological distribution is inherent to
capitalism, and this represents a major driving force leading to con-
icts. Political ecology in turn, discussed in the following section, pro-
vides a good vantage point to explain the conictive power relations
that are at the heart of cost- shiing.
31
2.2 Political Ecology
Political ecology (hereaer PE) is the study of the relationships between
political, economic, and social factors with environmental issues and
changes.5 To be more precise, PE is at the conuence between ecologically
rooted social science and the principles of political economy. It explicitly
aims to represent an alternative to apolitical ecologies (Forsyth, 2008).
PE understands every ecological issue as a political one. Politics has to
do with the distribution of power and resources within a given group,
community, and society; within and across generations. According to
Wikipedia,6 ‘the academic community of PE oers a wide range of studies
integrating ecological social sciences with political economy (Peet and
Watts 1996, p. 6) in topics such as degradation and marginalization, en-
vironmental conict, conservation and control, environmental identities
and social movements (Robbins, 2004, p. 14)’. Scholars in PE are drawn
from a variety of academic disciplines, including geography, anthro-
pology, development studies, political science, sociology, forestry, and
environmental history.
e origins of the eld in the 1970s and 1980s was a result of the de-
velopment of radical development geography and cultural ecology
(Bryant, 1998: 80).7 Historically, PE has focused on phenomena in and
aecting the developing world; since the eld’s inception, ‘research has
sought primarily to understand the political dynamics surrounding ma-
terial and discursive struggles over the environment in the third world’
(Bryant, 1998: 89). Since the 1980s, political ecology came to mean a
combination of ‘the concerns of ecology and a broadly dened political
economy’ (Blaikie and Brookeld, 1987: 17), the latter understood as a
concern with eects ‘on people, as well as on their productive activities,
of on- going changes within society at local and global levels’ (1987: 21).
is strand of political ecology had the advantage of seeing land manage-
ment and environmental degradation (or sustainability) in terms of how
political economy shapes the ability to manage resources (through forms
5 Political ecology. Available at: http:// envi ronm ent- ecol ogy.com/ politi cal- ecol ogy/ 407- politi
cal- ecol ogy.html (Accessed on 23 February 2017).
6 See https:// en.wikipe dia.org/ wiki/ Politi cal_ ecol ogy (Accessed on 30 September 2021).
7 Political ecology. Available at: http:// envi ronm ent- ecol ogy.com/ politi cal- ecol ogy/ 407- politi
cal- ecol ogy.html (Accessed on 30 September 2021).
of access and control, of exploitation), and through the lens of cogni-
tion (one person’s accumulation is another person’s degradation). But in
other respects it was demonstrably weak, it oen had an outdated notion
of ecology and it was oen remarkably silent on the politics of political
ecology as well as on gender. From the 1990s onwards, these weaknesses
have been overcome. For example, a number of studies address the ques-
tion of politics, focusing especially on patterns of resistance and struggles
over access to and control over the environment (notably with the debate
on environmental justice) and how politics as policy is discursively con-
structed (Neumann, 1998; Martinez Alier, 2002). More recently, there has
been a proliferation of studies on the political ecology of cities, commod-
ities and of forms of green rule and subject formation (Agrawal, 2005;
Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2004) and violence
(Peluso and Watts, 2001). For example, the concept of ‘urban metabolism’
has now become central to critical explorations of urban nature (Heynen,
Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 2006). However, the focus of political ecology
remains the dialectical relations between nature and society that the early
studies identied.
PE’s broad scope and interdisciplinary nature lends itself to multiple
denitions and understandings. However, common assumptions across
the eld give it relevance. According to Tom Bauler, Bryant and Bailey
(1997) have developed three fundamental assumptions in practising PE.8
(1) ‘Costs and benets associated with environmental change are
distributed unequally. Changes in the environment do not aect
society in a homogenous way: political, social, and economic dif-
ferences account for uneven distribution of costs and benets.
Political power plays an important role in such inequalities.’
(2) ‘is unequal distribution inevitably reinforces or reduces existing
social and economic inequalities. In this assumption, political
ecology runs into inherent political economies as any change in
environmental conditions must aect the political and economic
status quo (Bryant and Bailey, 1997, p. 28)’.
8 See the entry on political ecology by Tom Bauler at the EJOLT Glossary. Available at: http://
www.ejolt.org/ 2013/ 02/ politi cal- ecol ogy/ (Accessed on 30 September 2021).
33
(3) ‘e unequal distribution of costs and benets and the reinforcing
or reducing of pre- existing inequalities holds political implica-
tions in terms of the altered power relationships that are produced’.
is understanding resonates with the denition given by Martinez
Alier (2002): PE is the study of ecological distribution conicts, meaning
the study of conicts on the access to natural resources and services and
on the burdens of pollution or other environmental impacts that arise
because of unequal property rights and inequalities of power and income
among humans (both international and internal to each state).
In addition, PE attempts to provide critiques as well as alternatives in
the interplay of the environment and political, economic, and social fac-
tors. Robbins asserts that the discipline has a ‘normative understanding
that there are very likely better, less coercive, less exploitative, and more
sustainable ways of doing things’ (2004: 12). PE does not aim to neces-
sarily generate policies, like environmental politics does, but to under-
stand the phenomenon and eventually engage with social mobilization.
One could identify dierent school of thoughts within PE, like fem-
inist political ecology or urban political ecology. is book draws from,
and is meant to contribute to, the ‘Barcelona School of Political Ecology’
(Villamayor and Muradian, 2023). is is a distinctive type of PE, dif-
ferent from that of Anglo- Saxon geographers or anthropologists. Giorgos
Kallis has outlined the following characteristics (Personal communica-
tion, 2016):
— e study of conicts not just for the academic sake of studying
them, but because we want to give voice to those involved and bring
their own theories and concepts to academia;
— e book that environmentalists are those who are poor and have a
small metabolism, and not the post- materialist rich with their huge
metabolisms;
— Criticizing capitalism and its unquenchable metabolism, but not
only always engaging also with the potential and conditions for
transformative alternatives (degrowth, alternative economies,
commons, post- extractivism, etc.);
— An eclectic use of theory (from Gramsci to Kapp to Polanyi etc.),
again not for the sake of using theory, but because we want to ex-
plain conicts, and empower political alternatives.
Along these lines, this book is meant to contribute to a better under-
standing of the relations between social metabolism and environmental
conicts. For this purpose, in the following section, we review the litera-
ture on ecological distribution conicts, paying particular attention to
both the roots of these conicts and how they are expressed in the polit-
ical arena.
2.2.1 Ecological Distribution Conicts
According to Conde and Martinez- Alier9: ‘e denition of polit-
ical ecology as the study of Ecological Distribution Conicts (hereaer
EDCs), refers to conicts over access and control of natural resources.
e term EDCs was introduced by two economists, Joan Martinez- Alier
and Martin O’Connor (1996), to describe social conicts born from the
unfair access to natural resources and the unjust burdens of pollution.
Environmental benets and costs are distributed in a way that causes
conicts. e terms socio- environmental conict, environmental con-
ict or EDC are interchangeable’.
Joan Martinez- Alier and Martin O’Connor (1996), trained as econo-
mists, were making an extension from political economy as the study of
‘economic distribution conicts’ about class distribution of wealth, in-
come and assets (e.g. conicts between capital and labour— prots vs.
salaries— , or on prices between sellers and buyers of commodities, or on
the interest rate to be paid by debtors to creditors) to the eld of ecology
(Martinez Alier, 2002). Later, Escobar (2008) introduced the concept of
cultural distribution conicts, considering those ontological conicts
that manifest themselves in the relative power, or powerlessness accorded
to various knowledges and cultural processes. e three typologies of
9 See the entry on Ecological Distributions Conicts by Marta Conde and Joan Martinez-
Alier at the EJOLT Glossary. Available at: http:// www.ejolt.org/ 2016/ 04/ eco logi cal- distr ibut ion-
coni cts/ (Accessed on 11 January 2022).
35
conict (cultural, ecological, and economic) are intertwined, but the idea
is that oen there is a prevalent cause. e term EDCs stresses the idea
that the unequal or unfair distribution of environmental goods and bads
is not always coterminous with ‘economic distribution’ as, for instance,
rents paid for by tenant farmers to landlords, or the international terms
of trade of a national economy, or claims for higher wages from mining
unions opposing company owners.
ere are local as well as global ecological distribution conicts; whilst
many of them occur between the Global South and the Global North (a
Canadian or Chinese mining company operating in Brazil), there are also
many local conicts within a short commodity chain (e.g. on local sand
and gravel extraction for a nearby cement factory) (Martinez Alier, 2002).
From a social metabolic perspective one can classify EDCs through the
stages of a commodity chain; conicts can take place during the extrac-
tion of energy carriers or other materials, transportation and produc-
tion of goods, or in the nal disposal of waste. e Environmental Justice
Atlas documents and catalogues EDCs (ejatlas.org).
Research on EDCs links up with several concepts in ecological eco-
nomics, political ecology and related disciplines; for instance, the eco-
logical debt and ecologically unequal exchange between the North and
the South, the acknowledgement of environmental liabilities; also social
ecofeminism that highlights gender in the study of environmental im-
pacts and activism (Agarwal, 1992), the notion of environmental justice,
a term originating in the United States and linked to the struggle against
‘environmental racism’ (Bullard, 1993), and the environmentalism of the
poor and the indigenous (Guha and Martinez Alier, 1997). Here we want
to discuss more in detail rst, the roots of EDCs, and second, the issue of
valuation, or else, the value of nature.
2.2.1.1 e roots of ecological distribution conicts (EDCs)
e movement to accumulate capital by expanding the frontiers of capit-
alism is resisted by a counter- movement (as Karl Polanyi explained in e
Great Transformation in 1944) to protect nature and humans. In environ-
mental conicts, the protagonists are not labour unions or nature conser-
vation societies. ey are Environmental Justice Organizations (EJOs),
indigenous groups, citizens and peasant groups, and women activists.
ey deploy their own values against the logic of prot making.
Ecological distribution conicts refer to struggles over the burdens of
pollution or over the sacrices made to extract resources, and they arise
from social asymmetries in the distribution of political and economic
power, property rights, and income (Martinez Alier and O’Connor,
1996). e roots of the conicts lie not only in failures of governance and
in maladapted institutions, or in inadequate pricing but in the appetite
of the world economy for inputs coming from the commodity frontiers,
and the resulting release of waste to the sinks, well beyond their assimi-
lative capacity (Martinez Alier et al., 2010). Most notably, Martinez- Alier
(2002) has been argued that ecological distribution conicts emerge from
the expansion of social metabolism where powerful actors shi the costs
to vulnerable ones (Martinez Alier, 2002). Metabolic processes are gov-
erned by regimes that determine the social relations of production, div-
ision of labour, distribution of resources, and ultimately produce what
Swyngedouw calls ‘socio- nature’ (Heynen et al., 2006; Swyngedouw and
Heynen, 2003). However, the open question is what drives the expan-
sion and changes of metabolism that, in turn, drives environmental con-
icts? Martinez Alier et al., (2010) has been argued that it is economic
and population growth. But then, what is it that drives such growth? For
Marxists, the expansion of the economy is due to the need to compensate
the ‘decreasing marginal prots’ and takes place with two complementary
commodication strategies: expansion (e.g. spatial x) and deepening
(e.g. search for new markets) (Harvey, 2003). In relation to the latter, in
the discussion of this book, we will argue that contamination, meant as
cost- shiing, is a strategy that needs more attention, apart from capital
accumulation by dispossession. We will propose that it is capital accumu-
lation that has to be seen as the principal driving force of social metab-
olism, which brings up questions of political economy.
2.2.1.2 e value of nature
EDCs emerge out of socio- metabolic re- congurations, and therefore are
oen of material origins. However, they are expressed in terms of valu-
ation languages, meaning the vocalization of disputes about values, and
shaped by cultural discourses. As discussed in social movement theory,
diagnosing a problem turns out to be a very contentious process, where
the dierent actors try to arm and impose their interpretative frame
to the detriment of representations proposed by the others (Snow et al.,
37
1986). e construction of reality is inextricably linked to asymmetries
of power (Della Porta and Diani, 2006). In this sense, EDCs can be com-
pared to cultural distribution conicts that arise from the dierences in
eective power associated with particular meanings and practices.
‘Ecological distribution conicts’ is a term for collective claims against
environmental injustices. For instance, a factory may be polluting the
river (which belongs to nobody or belongs to a community that manages
the river). e same happens with climate change, causing perhaps sea
level rise. Yet this damage is not valued in the market and those impacted
are not compensated for it. Unfair ecological distribution is inherent to
capitalism, dened by Kapp (1963) as a system of cost- shiing, and leads
to conicts. PE, together with EE, advocates the acceptance of dierent
valuation languages to understand such conicts and the need to take
them into account through genuine participatory processes in natural re-
source management and environmental problem solving (Agarwal, 2001;
Zografos and Howarth, 2010).
e environment is oen a site of conict between competing values
and interests represented by dierent classes and groups, such as con-
servation of nature, livelihood, sacredness, money, or aesthetics (Healy
et al., 2013: 103). In order to solve such valuation conicts, economics
proposes to reduce all values into a single unit of measure, namely money.
is monetary valuation can be used for cost- benet analysis (CBA), an
approach used to calculate benets and costs of a decision (be it a policy
or a project), so as to estimate the strengths and weaknesses of alterna-
tives. is approach, rooted in utilitarianism, assumes the existence of
value commensurability, meaning that there is a common measure of the
dierent consequences of an action based on a cardinal scale of meas-
urement. In simple terms, all values can be translated into money (e.g. a
monetary compensation for damages in a court of law in a civil suit).
However, values are oen incommensurable (e.g. How much for your
god? How much for someone’s life?). is simply means that they cannot
be measured in the same units. erefore, as alternative to conventional
economics, Martinez Alier et al. (1998) proposed weak comparability of
values as a foundation of ecological economics. Weak commensurability
refers to a common measure based on an ordinal scale of measurement,
and is derived from weak comparability where irreducible value conict
is unavoidable but compatible with rational choice employing practical
judgement. Instead of cost- benet analysis (CBA), multicriteria evalu-
ation oers the methodological and mathematical tools to operationalize
the concept of incommensurability at both macro and micro levels of
analysis (Munda, 1995, 2008). is approach of EE highlights the exist-
ence of a conict between competing values and interests. erefore, it
recognizes the existence of multiple, and incommensurable, languages
of valuation (Martinez Alier, 2002). In fact, in environmental conicts,
there is oen not only a discrepancy but also incommensurability in valu-
ation (Martinez Alier, 2003).
Apart from PE, also for EE, social change is characterized by conict
rather than harmony, so the existence of power and privilege is at the
centre of interest (Røpke, 2005). Ultimately, as Martinez- Alier (2002) has
argued, the fundamental question is who has the power to simplify com-
plexity? Or else, who has the power to impose the economic language of
valuation? In decision- making processes, economics becomes a tool of
power in the hands of those who know how to wield it. Against the eco-
nomic logic, the languages of valuation used by vulnerable groups go un-
heeded. is will also be the case of the EDCs that we discuss in this book.
In the following section, we introduce waste studies discussing: (1)
waste denition and legislation, (2) waste generation, (3) waste manage-
ment, and (4) recycling. We conclude by theorizing waste recyclers that
we compare to decomposers in natural ecosystems, stressing why and
how both ecological economics and political ecology should pay more
attention to these important actors.
2.3 Waste Studies
Waste is a quintessentially ecological economic issue (Bisson and Proops,
2002). It deals with the thermodynamics of production processes, hence
the generation of waste is rooted in the very laws of nature. However,
waste is also a social construct, and what we understand to be waste has
evolved with human societies. From the viewpoint of political ecology,
waste is ‘socio- nature’, both medium and outcome of social struggles
and the complex reorderings of nature- society relations (Swyngedouw,
2004: 25). What Perrault (2012: 5) argues for water, could be said for
39
waste: ‘the ways that water ow, quality, and quantity, as well as access and
rights to water, both reect and reproduce relations of social power’.
is book focuses on waste management. First, today there is a
growing call for scholars to expand their inquiry from resource extrac-
tion, through production processes and consumption, to the disposal of
waste (Bridge, 2011; Martinez Alier et al., 2010).
Second, waste is a growing problem for the pollutants released into the
ecosystems, for the need of new disposal space, for the resulting social
problems related to localization of the facilities and for the loss in terms
of resources and energy. ese issues are being amplied by economic
development, demographic change, technological developments, and
socio- environmental conicts related to specic social contexts oen re-
sulting from locally undesirable land uses (LULUs).
ird, waste management involves a wide range of actors, from in-
formal waste pickers to multinational corporations, and present simul-
taneously dierent levels of industrialization at dierent places in the
world. Integrated sustainable waste management involves much more
than perfectly matched technical options of waste treatment. Waste
management should be addressed more also as a social and political
process, and not only as a technical matter (Bisson and Proops, 2002;
Winiwarter, 2002).
Fourth, capital looks at waste management as a new emergent global
market, where a rentier position can be acquired and prots realized.
Waste management is a multi- billion dollar industry that is increasingly
attracting the attention of large- scale institutional investors (e.g. Bank of
America Merrill Lynch, 2013). Indeed, capitalists consider waste man-
agement as one among several economic spaces to be occupied for the
expansion of the scale and scope of capital accumulation (Harvey, 2003).
is leads to the emergence of waste- based commodity frontiers. As we
will see, the complexity of waste management represents nowadays an
opportunity for prot making, else a very tempting market for the over-
accumulated capital looking for new protable business to seize hold
of (Harvey, 2003). Our hypothesis is that that the appropriation of a
‘common bad’ such as waste is one of several strategies for expanding the
scale and scope of capital accumulation as Prudham (2007) explains for
the case of biotechnology.
Last, this book can be seen as a contribution to Critical Discard
Studies,10 an emerging interdisciplinary sub- eld that takes waste
and wasting, broadly dened, as its topic of study. Its tasks rely on
interrogating how waste comes to be, and oers critical alternatives to
popular and normative notions of waste.
Hereaer we present dierent denitions and categories of waste, and
how this is reected in the Indian legislation.
2.3.1 Dening Waste and Its Legislation
In ecological economics, waste is the output of social metabolism in all
its forms: liquid, solid, and gas. Hereaer, when referring to waste, we
will mean just solid waste. Broadly, solid waste can be classied into two
major categories depending on the way it is generated: (1) those gener-
ated as undesired by- products in the production process such as mining
or industrial waste, and (2) those originally produced as goods but turned
to waste with the passage of time, such as old paper or discarded con-
sumer durables (Nakamura, 1999). e rst category is generated in the
places of extraction, production, and transportation. e second is the
result of consumption, the place of nal use, and therefore tends to be
distributed over a wide geographical area. Simplifying, we propose to call
the rst production waste and the second consumption waste. In relation
to waste management there is a paradox: while production waste is much
more important in terms of weight, volume and toxicity, it is also the least
well known and safely managed. is is exemplied by the lack of com-
prehensive data sets and a proper legislation that would ensure proper
treatment, resulting in serious social and environmental consequences.
In this book, an example for each one of these categories is explored,
with a focus on recycling. For the rst one, we discuss a case of infra-
structure waste, namely the management of ocean going ships at the end
of their useful life. For the second one, we investigate the struggles over
municipal solid waste management in Delhi, the capital of India. In both
cases the management of waste is carried out in India, but it involves
dierent geographical scales: shipbreaking occurs on a global scale,
10 See: https:// dis card stud ies.com (Accessed on 16 October 2022).
41
involving international trade and multinational corporations, while the
second takes place at the urban scale.
Both in the academic literature and in the dierent legislations, there
are many denitions of waste. ey normally depend upon dierent con-
cepts such as collection (e.g. municipal), source (e.g. domestic activity,
commercial, industry or mining) and type (e.g. paper, plastic, and glass;
or hazardous and non- hazardous). If classied by the source, as we pro-
posed above, the legislation normally uses a more detailed classication,
like in the United States: (1) residential, (2) commercial, (3) institutional,
(4) construction and demolition, (5) municipal services, (6) treatment
plant sites, (7) industrial, and (8) agricultural (Tchobanoglous and Kreith,
2002). Municipal Solid Waste would include residential, commercial, in-
stitutional, and industrial (but only non- processes waste); this is what we
called above consumption waste. Other types of waste are oen treated
dierently, such as hazardous (special or not) waste or biomedical waste.
e most well- known form of solid waste is municipal waste, infor-
mally called trash or garbage and technically municipal solid waste (here-
aer MSW). e concerned Indian legislation is the Municipal Solid
Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 1999. e law claries that
‘municipal solid waste includes commercial and residential wastes gen-
erated in a municipal or notied areas in either solid or semi- solid form
excluding industrial hazardous wastes but including treated bio- medical
wastes’. is law has been updated in 2016, and now mentions the inte-
gration of recyclers from the informal sector to the formal sector by the
state government. e implementation of this is another matter, as we
shall see.11
In India, waste is regulated in general by the Central government with
e Environmental Protection Act, 1986 (with general principles, like the
Polluter Pays Principle), but then specic legislations are concerned with
dierent types of waste, namely:
— Bio- medical Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 1998: it aims
to ensure that bio- medical wastes are safely disposed of, dened as
11 Swati Singh Sambyal, ‘Government noties new solid waste management rules’. Down to
Earth, 5 April 2016. Available at: https:// www.down toea rth.org.in/ news/ waste/ solid- waste- man
agem ent- rules- 2016- 53443 (Accessed on 16 October 2022).
any waste or by- product generated during treatment, immuniza-
tion and treatment of human beings or animals or in medical re-
search activities.
— e Hazardous Wastes (Management, Handling and Transboundary
Movement) Rules, 2008: it denes hazardous waste as any waste
which by virtue of its physical or other characteristics (described
as chemical, toxic, inammable, reactive, explosive, etc.) cause or
can cause danger to health or environment, either standalone or
in combination with other substances. It is also concerned with
the trans- boundary shipment of hazardous waste regulated by the
Basel convention, of which India is a signatory.
— e Batteries (Management and Handling) Rules, 2001: it is meant
to set up a mechanism in place to deal with the disposal of lead acid
batteries.
— e E- waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2011: it is meant to
put in place a system which manages e- waste in an environment-
friendly way by regulating the issue of recycling and disposal of e-
waste (including the imported e- waste, mostly illegally).
— e Plastic Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2011: it is a
regulatory framework set up to control the manufacture, usage and
recycling of plastic waste.
— Construction and Demolition Waste Management Rules,
2016: it grants the responsibility of every waste generator to re-
cover, recycle and reuse the waste generated through construction
and demolition.
Demonstrating what we argued above, in India there is no specic le-
gislation that comprehensively deals with ‘production waste’, for example
non- hazardous industrial waste. is is then reected also in the national
statistics.
In India,12 the Ministry of Environment and Forests estimates that in
2016 the country generated 62 mn tonnes of waste, out of which 5.6 mn
tonnes was plastic waste, 0.17 mn tonnes was biomedical waste, 7.90 mn
12 ‘Solid Waste Management Rules Revised Aer 16 Years; Rules Now Extend to Urban and
Industrial Areas’: Javadekar. By Ministry of Environment and Forests. Available at: http:// pib.
nic.in/ news ite/ Print Rele ase.aspx? relid = 138591 (Accessed on 15 March 2017).
43
tonnes was hazardous waste generation and 15,000 tonnes was e- waste.
Out of 62, only 43 mn tonnes was collected, 11.9 mn was treated and 31
mn was dumped in landll sites, which means that only about 75– 80%
of the municipal waste was collected and only 22– 28% of this waste was
processed and treated in 2016. Waste generation is expected to increase
from 62 mn tonnes to about 165 mn tonnes in 2030.
Hereaer we present the background for consumption waste, namely
Solid Waste Management, which has been the main focus of both re-
search and legislation. I focus on MSW generation and management.
2.3.2 Waste Generation
Waste generation encompasses those activities in which materials are
identied as no longer being of value and are either thrown away or gath-
ered together for disposal.13 is is an identication step and it varies with
each individual. Waste generation is, at present, an activity that is not very
controllable. In fact, waste generation is steadily increasing, especially in
low- income countries where it is approaching the levels of high- income
countries. e World Bank (2012) has estimated that in 2002 the global
average generation was about 0.64 kg of MSW per person per day (pppd),
while in 2012 it had increased at 1.2 kg pppd. is is expected to increase
to 1.42 pppd by 2025. Urban population is also on the rise, so that if in
2012 there were 3 bn urban residents (leading to 1.3 bn tonnes per year),
they are expected to be about 4.3 bn by 2025 (2.2 bn tonnes per day).
Every two hours humans generate enough waste to ll the world’s largest
containership, 12 ships every day and 4,380 every year.
Obviously, global averages are broad estimates, rates vary consider-
ably by region, country, city, and even within cities. For example, urban
residents produce about twice as much waste as their rural counter-
parts. Overall, the higher the income level and rate of urbanization, the
13 If not specied, data presented in the following two sections comes from the 2012 World
Bank report ‘What a waste’. ese data should be considered with a degree of caution due to
global inconsistencies in denitions, data collection methodologies, and completeness. us,
their reliability is limited and comparison across income levels and regions is dicult. Many
countries do not even collect waste data at the national level. However, they are useful to provide
a general picture and show certain trends.
greater the amount of solid waste produced. In fact, OECD (Organisation
for Economic Co- operation and Development) countries produce al-
most half of the world’s waste (with an average of 2.2 kg/ capita/ day),
while Africa and South Asia produce the least waste, with respectively
an average of 0.65 and 0.45 kg/ capita/ day (see Table 2.1). e range from
the lower to the upper boundary varies more as inequality is higher, so for
example, in Latin America it goes from 0.11 to 5.5 kg/ capita/ day, in India
from 0.2 to 0.6. Generally speaking, the richer you are, the more waste
you generate (see Table 2.2). So that one could argue that waste gener-
ation varies as a function of auence and, to a lesser extent, population.
e same World Bank report (2012: 3) explicitly admits that ‘In most
Table 2.1 Waste generation projections for 2025 by region
Region Total urban
population
Per capita
(kg/ capita/ day)
Tota l
(Tonnes/ day)
Africa 260 0.65 169
East Asia & Pacic 777 0.95 738.15
Eastern & Central Asia 227 1.1 249.7
Latin America & the
Caribbean
399 1.1 438.9
Middle East & North Africa 162 1.1 178.2
OECD 729 2.2 1603.8
South Asia 426 0.45 191.7
Tota l 2980 1.2 3569.45
Source: World Bank, 2012.
Table 2.2 Average Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)
generation rates by income
Income level Average MSW generation
(kg/ capita/ day)
Low- Income 0.6– 1.0
Middle- Income 0.8– 1.5
High- Income 1.1– 4.5
Source: World Bank, 2012.
45
cities, the quickest way to reduce waste volumes is to reduce economic
activity— not generally an attractive option’. is resonates clearly with
the debates on degrowth (D’Alisa et al., 2015).
A recent comment in Nature argues that ‘Waste production must peak
this century’ (Hoornweg et al., 2013). However, the authors show that—
if current trends continue— ‘peak waste’ will not happen this century.
OECD countries could peak by 2050 and Asia- Pacic countries by 2075,
but would be fast- growing in other regions. Using ‘business- as- usual’
projections, they predict that, by 2100, solid- waste generation rates will
exceed 11 mn tonnes per day— more than three times today’s rate.
e gures given here for MSW are signicant for the problems related
to its management, and expected to increase. However, this is just a small
percentage of the overall waste produced. For example, for the United
States, as a percentage of industrial waste, MSW is 3%.14 In the EU, muni-
cipal waste corresponds to only approximately 10% of the total amount of
the overall waste generated, in terms of weight (EEA, 2000). Worldwide,
there are very few comprehensive statistics about industrial waste. is is
also because regulations oen do not require industries to report on their
non- hazardous waste. e GrassRoots Recycling Network (2000) has re-
ported that ‘Few studies have documented how much manufacturing,
mining, and energy related wasting could actually be eliminated for every
ton of municipally generated discards reduced or recovered’.15
is mismatch is conrmed by assessments of the world economy me-
tabolism. Hass et al. (2015) estimated the material ows, waste produc-
tion, and recycling in the European Union and the world in 2005. e
processed materials account for 64 Gt per year, including energy, bio-
mass, and materials. e total output was about 41 Gt per year (28 for
energy, 4 for waste rock and 13 for end of life), of which 13Gt per year
were recyclable and only 4 Gt per year actually got recycled, meaning
just 6% of the total. e study distinguishes between domestic processed
output (DPO) and end of life (EOL). DPO comprises all wastes and
emissions (including CO2) that leave the socio- economic system (SES).
EOL accounts for the materials that are used within one year, mainly
14 e United States produces 250 mn tonnes of municipal solid waste every year, but 7.6 bn
tonnes of non- hazardous industrial waste per year.
15 https:// zerow aste usa.org/
consumables. e largest part of this fraction is potentially available for
recycling aer use. Typically, these are consumer goods, such as pack-
aging, newspapers, batteries, plastic bags, and so on. In other words, this
is what corresponds, more or less, to municipal solid waste. In contrast to
these consumables, by far the largest amount of materials is used to build
up and maintain long- life stocks of buildings, infrastructures, and other
long- life goods, which remain in the socioeconomic system as in- use
stocks for more than a year. Once these materials leave the SES, they are
accounted as DPO. e global average per person of DPO was 6.3 tonnes
per year, meaning about 17 kg per day. For EOL it was 2 tonnes per year,
meaning 5.5 kg per day. In order to compare these results with the data
provided above, since DPO also includes emissions from energy produc-
tion, we should account only for waste rock and EOL, which is about 7 kg
pppd. is is about 11 times the global average of waste generation esti-
mated by the World Bank (2012) for 2002 (0.64 kg pppd), or 6 times the
values of 2012 (1.2 kg pppd). is is the dierence between consumption
and production waste.
Filling this gap would require a life cycle assessment (LCA) analysis
for every product or service. is would allow to account for the eco-
logical rucksack, meaning the total quantity (in kg) of materials removed
from nature to create a product or service, minus the actual weight of the
product. It considers the entire production process, from the cradle to the
point when the product is ready for use. e rucksack factor (MI) is the
total amount of natural materials used (kg) to make 1 kg of the resource,
raw or starting (e.g. wood, iron).
Five dierent rucksacks have been delineated by the Wuppertal
Institute to describe the overall natural resource intensity of products.
ese correspond to the ve environmental spheres of water, air, soil,
renewable biomass, and non- renewable (abiotic) materials (Schmidt-
Bleek, 1999). On average, industrial products carry non- renewable
rucksacks that are about 30 times their own weight. Only about 5% of
non- renewable natural material disturbed in the ecosphere typically ends
up in a technically useful form. is is consistent with saying that MSW
is only about 3% of the overall waste generated. In the case of a Personal
Computer, the ecological (abiotic) rucksack weighs at least 200 kg per
kg of product. For base materials (such as iron, plastic or copper), MI
values allow the comparison of technical starting materials regarding
47
their resource intensities and thus allow the computation of the rucksack
of products, so long as the material compositions of these products are
known. MI values (rucksack factors) for non- renewable resources of base
materials are, for example, round wood = 1.2, glass = 2, plastics = 2– 7,
steel = 7, paper = 15, aluminium = 85, copper = 500, platinum = 500,000
(Schmidt- Bleek, 1999). ese are just broad estimation, since the gures
can vary signicantly based on the methodology used.
e existence of the ecological rucksack raises issues of responsibility al-
location, for instance if it should be the responsibility of the producer and/
or the consumer. For example, for a computer sold in Europe, who should
be held responsible for its management once it becomes waste, and the end
of its useful life? Plus, who should be held responsible for the waste gener-
ated during its production? e principle of extended producer responsi-
bility (EPR) tackles the rst question. It is a strategy designed to promote
the integration of environmental costs associated with goods throughout
their life cycles into the market price of the products. EPR may take the
form of a reuse, buy- back, or recycling program. e rationale beyond
EPR has to do with nancial incentives to encourage manufacturers to de-
sign environmentally friendly products by holding producers responsible
for the costs of managing their products at end of life. is is based on the
idea that producers (usually brand owners) have the greatest control over
product design and marketing, and that therefore they have the greatest
ability and responsibility to reduce toxicity and waste. Instead, the second
question remains oen untackled, but is of great relevance given we live in
a globalized world with high levels of international trade. e same holds
true for other forms of waste, like greenhouse gases (GHG). For example,
who should be held responsible for GHG emitted in China to manufacture
products sold in the international market?
In the next section we present the most important aspects of any waste
management systems.
2.3.3 Functional Elements of a Solid Waste
Management System
Solid waste management is a fundamental service provided to residents
by the city government, and serves as a prerequisite for other municipal
action. Here we briey review the dierent functional elements of a solid
waste management system.
— Composition. Waste is broadly classied into organic and inorganic.
For planning purposes, the categories used are oen organic, paper,
plastic, metals, and others (e.g. textile, rubber, or ash). e lower
the income of countries, the higher the proportion of organic waste,
ranging between 30% and 80%. Waste composition depends upon
many factors including economic development, cultural norms,
geographical location, energy sources, and climate conditions.
— Waste handling and separation, storage, and processing at the source.
is involves the activities associated with managing wastes until
it is collected. On- site storage is of primary importance because of
public health concerns and aesthetic considerations. e fact that
waste is separated into categories at source inuences also how it
can then be managed (e.g. if paper is mixed, or not, with organic
matter inuences whether it can be recycled, or not).
— Collection (including transport and transportation). e average
waste collection rates are directly related to income levels. Low-
income countries have low collection rates, around 40%, while
high- income countries have higher collection rates averaging 98%.
e dierence between the waste generated, and the waste col-
lected and managed is sometimes called ‘ghost waste’ (Armiero
and D’Alisa, 2012). is phenomenon is of particular importance
in case of toxic waste since it is a dangerous practice intentionally
carried out by businesses to save the costs of proper management.
— Separation, processing, and transformation of solid waste. is
stage depends on whether waste has been separated at source or
not. ese operations normally occur at materials recovery facil-
ities, transfer stations, combustion facilities, and/ or disposal sites.
Transformation processes are used to reduce the volume and
weight of waste requiring disposal and to recover conversion prod-
ucts and energy (e.g. composting or incineration).
— Disposal. Landlling or land spreading is the ultimate fate of all
solid wastes, despite of their source or type. A modern sanitary
landll diers from a dump, since it is a method of disposing of
solid wastes on land or within the earth’s mantle without creating
49
public health hazards or nuisances. Landlling is the most common
method of MSW disposal in all countries, generally over 50% (see
Table 2.3). e exception is high- income countries where recyc-
ling (22%), composting (11%), and incineration (21%) account for
more than 50%, and landlling about 42%. In low- income coun-
tries, if we sum up open dumps and landlls, then this accounts for
up to 80% of waste disposal. However, in low- and middle- income
countries there is an important aw recognized by the World Bank
(2012: 22): ‘compostable and recyclable material is removed before
the waste reaches the disposal site and is not included in waste dis-
posal statistics’. Chapter 5 of this book attempts to ll this gap, and
discusses how the informal recycling sector could be taken into
account.
— e economic cost of waste management. Solid waste management
costs are expected to increase from today’s annual $205.4 bn to about
$375.5 bn in 2025. is is equivalent to China’s military expend-
iture ($215 bn, and half of the US one, $596 bn). Waste management
costs represent a large share of a municipality’s budget: 10% in high-
income countries, 50% to 80% in middle- income, and 80% to 90% in
low- income countries. Most of this budget goes in to collection, and
the proportion allocated toward disposal increases from low- to high-
income countries. ere are important social and environmental
Table 2.3 Total Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) disposed of worldwide,
million tonnes per year
Types of waste disposal Million tonnes/ year Percentage
Landll 340 47
Recycled 130 18
Incineration 120 17
Dump 70 10
Compost 60 8
Other 40 8
Total MSW disposed of
worldwide
720 100
Source: World Bank, 2012.
costs related to MSW management that are not accounted for, and
that— as we will show— are shied to vulnerable groups.
— Integrated Solid Waste Management. e accepted hierarchy for
waste disposal options, from the most to the least preferred option,
is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover (digestion and composting),
Incinerate (with energy recovery), Landll and Controlled Dump.
is is considered to be the policy aim and is based on four prin-
ciples: (1) equity for all citizens to have access to waste management
systems for public health reasons; (2) eectiveness of the waste man-
agement system to safely remove waste; (3) eciency to maximize
benets, minimize costs, and optimize the use of resources; and
(4) sustainability from a technical, social, cultural, economic, nan-
cial, institutional, and political perspective (van de Klundert and
Asnschutz, 2001).
UN- Habitat (2009) has identied three key system elements in ISWM:
(1) Public health: Waste not properly managed can be a breeding
ground for insects, vermin and scavenging animals; thus can pass
on air and water- borne diseases.
(2) Environmental protection: contamination of groundwater and
surface water by leachate as well as air pollution from burning
waste. Moreover, MSW is reported to account for about 5% of total
greenhouse gas emissions (1,460 mtCo2e).
(3) Resource management: MSW can represent a considerable poten-
tial resource. e global market for recyclables is signicant (400
mn tonnes of scrap metal and 175 mn tonnes for paper and card-
board per year). Recycling in low- and middle- income countries is
taken care of by the informal sector, with relatively high recycling
rates, for example estimated to be about 20% in China (Hoornweg
et al., 2005). Secondary markets present a high volatility of the
prices. e relative value of secondary materials is expected to in-
crease as the costs of virgin materials and their environmental im-
pact increases.
In the next section we discuss in more detail the issue of recycling.
51
2.3.4 Recycling
Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials
and objects. Mainstream economists argue that, if the cost of waste man-
agement options reected their true environmental and social costs, then
market forces could achieve the optimal mix of waste management op-
tions in eciency terms. However, this is not the case, because prices are
not correct (and it is arguable whether they could be). In the current situ-
ation, waste reduction, reuse, recycling, and recovery are too low, while
incineration and landlling are too high.
e benets of recycling are many: conservation of resources, savings
in landll space and emissions associated with landll and incineration,
energy saving in manufacturing, and transport of waste. Recycling has
signicant public support, but there many barriers to it, rst of all the
nancial cost. Capital cost for recycling in the United States varies from
$10,000 to $40,000 per tonne of capacity per day (Tchobanoglous and
Kreith, 2002: 1.16– 1.18), while operation and maintenance costs vary
from $20 to $60 per tonne. Materials for recycling need to be collected,
sorted, and transported to oen distant processing units. Recycling can
also cause problems if it is not done in an environmentally responsible
manner. e economics of recycling depends upon many factors, in-
cluding the prices of other waste management options and primary ma-
terials, as well as the markets for secondary materials (meaning recycled
materials), characterized by high volatility. Fostering recycling requires
proper public policies,16 stable markets, and public education.
ere are three main methods that can be used to recover recyclable
materials from MSW (Tchobanoglous and Kreith, 2002):
1. Collection of source- separated recyclable materials by either the
generator or the collector, with and without subsequent processing.
16 Policy choices that can impact market demand include: commodity- specic procurement
standards, entity- specic procurement plans, equipment tax credits, tax credits for users of
secondary materials, mandated use of secondary materials for certain government- controlled
activities (such as landll cover or mine reclamation projects), use of market development
mechanisms in enforcement settlements, recycled content requirements for certain commod-
ities, manufacturer take- back systems, virgin material fees, and labelling requirements.
2. Commingled recyclables collection with processing at centralized
materials recovery facilities (MRFs).
3. Mixed MSW collection with processing for recovery of the recyc-
lable materials from the waste stream at mixed- waste processing or
front- end processing facilities.
However, these are methods common in high- income countries,
while in low and middle (but also to a certain extent in high) income
countries there is an informal recycling sector, the focus of this book.
In the next section, we argue that waste recyclers— in terms of their
function in social metabolism— could be compared to decomposers in
natural ecosystems. is can help us to better understand why they are
important, as well as to contextualize them within the realm of both EE
and PE.
2.3.5 Understanding Informal Waste Recyclers from the
Perspective of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology
In this section we intend to propose a theoretical framework for the
recycling sector. We do this by extending the metaphor used in eco-
logical economics to compare the metabolism of natural ecosystems to
the ones of human societies with industrial processes, by comparing
waste recyclers to decomposers. We argue that, as it has happened in
biology, EE and PE have not paid enough attention to these actors. e
role played out in our societies by waste recyclers (or else, the decom-
posers) is not necessarily good per se, and not for the recyclers if done
under apprehensive conditions. However, (1) from the viewpoint of EE,
recyclers do play an important role in social metabolism, in particular
for waste; and (2) from the viewpoint of PE, they are involved in eco-
logical distribution conicts.
2.3.5.1 Ecosystems
In natural ecosystems, the energy to drive processes of change comes
almost exclusively from the sun. e transformation of solar radi-
ation into chemical or mechanical energy, in order to sustain a struc-
tured non- equilibrium state of plants and animals, requires at least one
53
material cycle. In nature the cycle of synthesis and respiration involves
not just one, but usually ve dierent cycles of chemical elements and
compounds, namely water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulphur
(Ricklefs and Miller, 2000).
Numerous species of plants, animals, and microbes move matter in
cycles. According to their role within ecosystems they may be classied
as producers, consumers, and decomposers (Folke, 1999). Producers are
those organisms which use sunlight as the only source of energy. In the
process of photosynthesis they build up complex and energy- rich mol-
ecules from simple constituents taken from soil or the air. Green plants
are the most important producers in most terrestrial ecosystems. Animals
that feed on green plants or other animals are called consumers. ey
make their living on the chemical energy and nutrients stored in other or-
ganisms. e so- called decomposers, mainly bacteria and fungi, break up
the ‘wastes’ and the dead material from producers and consumers. ey
bring the nutrients back into the material cycle. Like consumers, they
rely on the chemical energy provided by producers as their source of en-
ergy. To be more precise, and simplifying, we could distinguish between
two categories of decomposers: physical and chemical. e rst, called
scavengers, are animals that eat organic matter from dead plants or ani-
mals (e.g. insects or worms). By eating, they break them into small pieces.
Subsequently chemical decomposers (e.g. bacteria or fungi) intervene by
breaking down the materials into its chemical composites that become
nutrients for the producers.
As almost all matter involved in processes of transformation in natural
ecosystems stays in closed cycles, the dominant form of waste is waste
heat. e latter is radiated into space.
2.3.5.2 Human societies
In natural ecosystems, the waste of a process constitutes the input of an-
other process. is is a model that is certainly not reproduced by the in-
dustrial companies despite the eorts of industrial ecology (which tries
to emulate ecosystems by closing the loops of industrial processes). e
most commonly used example is the eco- industrial park Kalundbork in
Denmark, an industrial symbiosis network in which companies in the
region collaborate to use each other’s by- products and otherwise share
resources. Societies’ economies do not close the loop, and therefore are
not circular. is has also been called the metabolic ri, or more recently
the circularity gap. Energy cannot be recycled, and materials only up to a
certain extent.
Nature is based on cyclic operation, therefore potentially innite (at
least as far as there is sunlight (see Figure 2.2). Instead, industrial soci-
eties are based on linear processes, therefore unsustainable by denition
(see Figure 2.3). Ecosystems, in order to close the loop of life cycles (via
the trophic chain) require organisms, called decomposers (such as fungi,
bacteria or worms), which degrade both the dead organisms (plants and
animals) and the organic waste.
Historically underestimated to other biological organisms higher in
the food chain, decomposers play a fundamental role in any ecosystem.
If they did not exist, the plants would not get essential nutrients and dead
matter would accumulate (such as plastic in a landll).
It is therefore possible to continue the parallelism between ecosystems
and industrial processes, or human societies. In fact, society’s recyclers
play a similar role to nature’s recyclers, or else the decomposers. Unlike
ecosystems, in industrial processes the waste of one industry doesn’t al-
ways become a resource for another one, so that it should be discarded
at the same time that new materials introduced. Energy from fossil fuels
and some materials cannot be recovered (e.g. polystyrene) or, although
physically possible, it is economically unviable; other materials can be
SUN
PRODUCERS
Plants
CONSUMERS
Animals
Natural
ecosystem
DECOMPOSERS
Fungi and bacteria
Heat
Space
Figure 2.2 e life cycle of the food chain (or food): A circular process.
55
recycled only for a limited number of times (e.g. paper), and others po-
tentially indenitely (e.g. aluminium), assuming they don’t get lost. In
case it is possible to recycle materials, the decision whether to do it or
not, depends on many factors including the energy and economic costs.
We can imagine a public policy that shis taxation from labour income to
resources (so- called green tax reform), and that therefore both fosters the
creation of jobs, and the preservation of materials. Otherwise, recycling
tends to be expensive (compared to newly extracted materials) or car-
ried out by those who are extremely poor, because it tends to be a sector
with high labour intensity, for example, because the segregation can be
mechanized only up to a certain point. erefore, one could call decom-
posers those workers in society dealing with recycling. e recycling in-
dustry plays the function of chemical decomposers, while those workers
involved with the collection, segregation, and processing of materials are
the physical decomposers.
In this book, we present two cases of (physical) decomposers of
waste of human society in India, the rst involved in the dismantling
of ships for recycling the steel, and the second with the recycling of
municipal solid waste. In the next section we discuss the main theoret-
ical contribution of this book that emerges out of the analysis of these
Extraction of energy
and materials
PRODUCERS AND
CONSUMERS
Waste
DECOMPOSERS: Recycling
Economy
Natural
ecosystem
Figure 2.3 e relationship between the economy and the ecosystem: A
linear process.
two case studies. We frame our contribution within debates in polit-
ical economy regarding capital accumulation showing how my case
studies suggest the need to introduce the concept of Accumulation by
contamination, along with the one of Accumulation by dispossession
(Harvey, 2003).
2.4 eoretical Contribution: Capital
Accumulation by Contamination
‘Accumulate, accumulate!
at is Moses and the prophets!’
Karl Marx (Capital I, ch. 24, sect. 3)
In this section we draw mainly from Marxist theory and critical geog-
raphy, but with an explicit link both with political ecology and eco-
logical economics.17 We propose a detailed exploration of key political
economy concepts, that allows us to introduce the new concept of accu-
mulation by contamination and explains how it diers from the one of
accumulation by dispossession. is will be of help to clarify what are
the driving forces which inuence the way metabolism changes. is
discussion relates in particular to our second research question: How
do capitalist dynamics and power relations shape unevenly waste me-
tabolisms? ese reections were formulated aer we conducted our
research and are meant to constitute a central part of our theoretical
contribution.
17 e ideas discussed in this section have been developed together with Giacomo D’Alisa,
that should be considered a co- author. Early thoughts have been published in this short art-
icle: Demaria, F., D’Alisa, G. (2013) ‘Dispossession and contamination. Strategies for capital ac-
cumulation in the waste market’. Special Issue: Garbage and Wastes; Lo Squaderno 29: 37– 39. e
term ‘accumulation by contamination’ was rst proposed by Joan Martinez- Alier in a seminar at
the University of Manchester in 2010 on the nancialization of the environment. With Giacomo,
we had the chance to discuss our ideas at length with David Harvey in the Syros summer school
of 2013 organized by the ENTITLE project, and we are grateful for his support. ere are many
other people with which we have discussed these ideas in the last ten years. ey are too many
to mention them all, but special thanks to Giorgos Kallis, Massimo De Angelis, Susan Paulson,
Erik Swyngedouw, Maria Kaika, Diego Andreucci, Marco Armiero, Stefania Barca, Emanuele
Leonardi, Julien Francois Gerber, Christos Zografos, Seth Schindler, Dianne Rocheleau, Silvia
Federici, Lourdes Beneria, Ariel Salleh and all members of the European network of political
ecology (ENTITLE), and political ecology network (POLLEN).
57
e multidimensional crises that our societies are facing show the
instability and the crisis tendencies of capitalism. is oers the oppor-
tunity to revitalize the Marxist theory of over- accumulation, meaning
that economic crises are due to a lack of protable investment opportun-
ities for capital. Potential ways out are found in the search for lower costs
of input (i.e. land, raw materials or labour) and widening of markets (i.e.
trade with non- capitalist formations). Capitalist development appears
in need of something ‘outside of itself’ and for this reason continuously
opens up ‘territories’ (Harvey, 2003), for example colonies, or new realms
of accumulation such as ecosystem services. We will argue that there is
an additional strategy that needs more attention, which could be called
‘lower costs of output’ via cost- shiing, namely contamination.
Marxists have highlighted the importance of capital accumulation
as the driving force of capitalist societies. Ecological economists have
highlighted the systematic tendencies of enterprises to cost- shi the en-
vironmental damages generated by the running of their business. We
intend to attempt a synthesis looking at the role and importance of cost-
shiing for capital accumulation, or else ‘how capital is made to circulate
through biophysical nature’ (Prudham, 2007: 407). For this, we need to
clarify what we mean by Capitalism, capital accumulation (CA), primi-
tive accumulation (PA) and accumulation by dispossession (AbD). is
will allow us to propose and properly dene accumulation by contamin-
ation (AbC). is concept will hopefully help to shed some light upon the
driving forces behind the cost- shiing taking place in both case studies
presented: shipbreaking in Alang and waste management in Delhi.
2.4.1 Accumulate, Accumulate!
Capitalism is understood here as a social production relation where la-
bourers have no control over the means of production. So, among the
dierent approaches to capitalism, we follow the ‘classical’ one, meaning
that it exists when ‘direct producers are separated from the means of pro-
duction and proletarianized, while the means of production are held by
capitalists as private property’ (Hall, 2012: 1191). e separation is oen
referred to as dispossession or expropriation, while the proletarianiza-
tion means that wage labourers (previously producers) have nothing to
sell but their labour power. e state provides the legal infrastructure,
enforcing the institutions, like private property and wage labour, without
which capital social relations cannot exist.
Capital accumulation is the maintenance and production of the
(capitalist) social relations. It refers to the generation of wealth in the
form of capital, where capitalists produce commodities for the purpose
of exchange, and therefore for the self- expansion of capital. For Marx
accumulation is the essence of capital. It is the process in which the
separation between wage labourers and their means of production is
continuously reproduced. In this sense, capital accumulation emerges
from expanded reproduction, when surplus value is reinvested into
the production process and the scale of production increases (i.e. pro-
duction and trade). e essence of capital is that it must be accumu-
lated. Marx put it with a religious metaphor: ‘Accumulate, accumulate!
at is Moses and the prophets!’ (Capital I, ch. 24, sect. 3). Because of
competition, the mere preservation of capital is impossible unless it
is, in addition, expanded. Capital accumulation is thus an economic
process through which capitalists realize the value of the production
and exchange. us, accumulation is rst and foremost a relationship
between the production and capitalization of surplus value, meaning
the appropriation of what is produced by the workers but not paid back
as wages.
However, accumulation is also a relationship of reproduction. e ac-
cumulation process is never simply an economic process but also involves
the general development of social relations (i.e. institutions like private
property and wage labour) and changing roles for the state. For Marx, the
process would never be a smooth, harmonious or simple expansion; at
times it would be interrupted by crises and recessions. For instance, over-
accumulation crises are the result of the accumulation process which
generate exceeding capital capacity that does not nd protable oppor-
tunities if new dispossession processes do not take place (Harvey, 2003).
For this reason, accumulation does not only take place via ‘expanded re-
production’ (i.e. production and trade), but also via ‘primitive accumula-
tion’ (i.e. expropriation).
In relation to the origins of the surplus that made the rst process of
capitalist accumulation possible (how capitalism historically established
itself), Marx proposed the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ (Capital
59
I, pt. VII; hereaer PA). Primitive accumulation is, for Marx, ‘the his-
torical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’,
transforming ‘the social means of subsistence and of production into
capital’ and ‘the immediate producers into wage labourers’ (1967: 714,
cited by Glassman, 2006). e classical example would be the enclosure
of land that expels the resident population of farmers rendering them a
landless proletariat. is changes the social relations of production and
releases both means of production (land) and surplus labour for capital
accumulation. It’s therefore a process of privatization and proletarian-
ization, which involves changes in property relations (Glassman, 2006).
In this case, the transformations in human- environment relations are its
by- product. Examples of primitive accumulation for Marx include, apart
from enclosures, colonialism, slave trade, modern taxation, usury, and
the national debt.
In Marx’s theory, primitive accumulation of capital by enclosures
and colonial robbery would be substituted in due course by the exploit-
ation of labour as the capital/ labour ratio in the economy increased,
and new technologies enhanced labour productivity together with new
methods of disciplining wage labour. erefore, the processes of capital
accumulation would progressively overcome in importance primitive
accumulation.
However, there is a long- lasting debate among Marxists on whether
primitive accumulation is a historical process (in this sense Marx called
it primitive or original) or a continuous process (De Angelis, 2001). In
the rst case, primitive accumulation is a clear- cut historical process
that gave birth to the preconditions of a capitalist mode of production
(what De Angelis, 2001 calls ‘Historical Primitive Accumulation’). In the
second case, primitive accumulation is an ongoing process whereby the
extra- economic prerequisite to capitalist production is an inherent and
continuous element of modern societies (‘Inherent- continuous Primitive
Accumulation’). De Angelis (2001) has made a synthesis of this debate,
that we subscribe to, and put the emphasis on the fact that accumulation
is the separation between workers and means of production. So, primitive
accumulation involves both the ex- novo creation of this separation and
its continuous reproduction in response to challenges (Hall, 2012: 1192).
In order to dierentiate the primitive or original (and therefore histor-
ical) character of primitive accumulation, the Marxist geographer David
Harvey (2003) has famously proposed the term of ‘Accumulation by
Dispossession’ (hereaer AbD).
e understanding of primitive accumulation is rst determined by
which approach to capitalism one embraces (Hall, 2012). Having clari-
ed our position in this sense, we report here some further clarications
on the concept of PA by Levien (2012), which are directly relevant to our
main argument because they will allow us to highlight the shortcomings
we intend to overcome.
First, scholars debate whether primitive accumulation is dened above
all by its function for capitalism or the means specic to it. In the rst case,
PA is dened by its result, notably the ‘freeing up’ of (natural) resources
and labourers. erefore, the preconditions of capital are created by ‘the
two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and pro-
duction are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned
into wage- labourers’ (Marx, 1957: 875). In the second case, PA is dened
by its means, meaning the extra- economic force in contrast to ‘the silent
compulsion of economic relations’ that characterized accumulation in
fully developed capitalism (Marx 1957: 899). Capital originates in violent
dispossession, a history ‘written in letters of blood and re’. Marx further
sustains that ‘It is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery,
murder, in short, force, played the greatest part’ (1957: 874; emphasis
added). is claries that force is necessary to generate the two major
transformations mentioned above which are the prerequisites of capit-
alist social relations (i.e. separation and proletarianization). However,
Levien (2012) argues that ‘for many, primitive accumulation came to be
dened by its results— rst and foremost proletarianization— rather than
its extra- economic means’. If we accept his position, then the second ex-
planation regards the issue of how much emphasis is placed on each of the
two transformations: (1) the forces seeking to turn assets (such as land
and natural resources) into capital, and (2) the creation of a class of wage
labourers separated from the means of production. e focus depends on
whether one is looking into historical or contemporary processes.
Leaving aside the debate upon the historical account of how the pre-
conditions of capitalism came into being, we want to focus on the con-
temporary processes. Since the 2000s, there has been a renewed interest
on primitive accumulation within Marxist debates. Without doubt, the
formulation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (hereaer AbD) by David
61
Harvey (Harvey 2003), in line with De Angelis (2001), has been the most
popular in reviving the research agenda on these issues. Although similar
to PA, AbD broke with the historicism of production’s modes. AbD places
emphasis on the rst of the two transformations: the dispossession of
assets. Levien (2012: 938) recognizes that ‘e signicance of Harvey’s
reconstruction of primitive accumulation as AbD lies, above all, in its at-
tempt to explain the contemporary upsurge in political struggles centred
on the dispossession of land and various other resources rather than the
exploitation of labour’.
e use of dialectics by Harvey makes it dicult to identify in his work
a clear- cut denition (see Levien, 2012). e main argument relies upon
the fact that AbD has increased in importance to expanded reproduc-
tion under neoliberalism. e examples given include land grabs, priva-
tizations of collective social assets, biopiracy and the various predatory
machinations of nancial capital, including the partial recapture of wage-
labourers’ income (e.g. lottery). Harvey oers also four general forms: pri-
vatization and commodication of previously non- commodied assets,
nancialization, the management and manipulation of crises, and state
redistributions of wealth from the poor to the rich (2005: 160– 165).
e concept of AbD can be mobilized to explain a number of ecological
distribution conicts, for example the development of shrimp farming
understood as a modern case of enclosure movement (Veuthey and
Gerber, 2012).
Glassman (2006) provides a means- specic denition for AbD (and
PA) as the ‘deployment of extra- economic coercion in the process of ac-
cumulation’ (Levien, 2012: 939), which is rejected by Harvey as it would
not cover all examples, because— for instance— the credit system and -
nancial power are economic. Harvey himself argues that ‘What accumu-
lation by dispossession does is release a set of assets (including labour
power) at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Over- accumulated
capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to prof-
itable use’ (Harvey, 2003: 149). Instead, Levien (2012: 940) proposes an
alternative one: ‘AbD is the use of extra- economic means of coercion to
expropriate means of production, subsistence or common social wealth
for capital accumulation. It is not simply an economic process of over-
accumulated capital seizing hold of under- commodied assets, but
fundamentally a political process in which states— or other coercion
wielding entities— use extra- economic force to help capitalists overcome
barriers to accumulation.’
In our opinion, AbD could be dened as the inherent necessity of
the capital system to separate, through extra- economic means, the la-
bourers from the means of production in order to relaunch the capitalist
social relations of production and to nd new protable opportunities
for the over- accumulated capital. AbD implies ‘means to expand the
scale and scope of capital accumulation via so- called “extra- economic”
means’ (Prudham, 2007: 411). ese means include dynamics that— in
principle— have nothing to do with the market itself (‘the economic’ in
its strict sense), such as conquest, enslavement, robbery, violence, legal
changes, and ideological- discursive changes.
Despite these clarications, what concerns us here is the argument
made by Brenner (2006: 101) that Harvey gives an overly expansive den-
ition of AbD, notably that ‘the huge redistributions of income and wealth
away from workers that are indeed sometimes entailed by the operations
of nancial markets are, for the most part, no less straightforward results
of the capitalist game than is exploitation through the purchase of labour-
power’. For what concerns us here, the conceptualizations of AbD, as well
as the ones of PA, miss to account for important dynamics of capital ac-
cumulation dierent from expanded reproduction and dispossession. In
general, we refer to cost- shiing, but with a special focus on contamin-
ation. Let us rst put in evidence how contamination has not been su-
ciently accounted for, and second how this gap could be lled.
e debate on PA and AbD focus exclusively on the means of produc-
tion (and subsistence) but leave aside what could be called the ‘means of
existence’, meaning those means that are necessary for the physiological
reproduction of both human and non- human life, although not directly
(but of course oen indirectly) necessary for production. Examples could
be the air we breathe, the food we eat or the water we drink, but also eco-
system services (i.e. a certain climate) or, following the feminists, care
work (Beneria et al., 2015). e means of existence have to do, rst and
foremost, with the physiological needs where a set of metabolic require-
ments have to be met in order to ensure the survival of beings. We will
focus upon them because they are the condicio sine qua non for life, as
acknowledged from the hierarchy of Maslow (1943) to the fundamental
human needs of Max- Neef (1991). Max- Neef (1991) calls ‘subsistence’,
63
what here we propose to call ‘means of existence’, but these dier from
what Marxists tend to call ‘means of subsistence’. ey in fact refer mainly
to ‘subsistence production’, and more specically to ‘subsistence agricul-
ture’, a non- capitalist mode of production dened as ‘A form of organ-
izing food production such that a group (household, village, society)
secures food sucient for its own reproduction over time’ (Gregory et al.,
2009: 731). Orthodox Marxists therefore maintain the focus upon ‘pro-
duction’, while here we want to put emphasis upon ‘reproduction’, along
the lines of what feminist scholars have done since the 1970s (for example,
see Federici, 2004). Marxists have certainly discussed issues around the
‘reproduction of labour power’, and more in general the ‘social reproduc-
tion’, a term that encompasses ‘the daily and long- term reproduction of
the means of production, the labour power to make them work and the
social relations that hold them in place. [ . . . ] At its most rudimentary,
social reproduction is contingent upon the biological reproduction of
the labour force— both day to day and generationally— through the pro-
duction, acquisition, distribution and/ or preparation of the means of ex-
istence, including food, shelter, clothing and health care’ (Gregory et al.,
2009: 696– 697; emphasis added). However, we consider that (1) insu-
cient emphasis has been given to the importance of the means of exist-
ence and (2) that it has not been related to debates about PA and ABD.
In particular, we intend to explore how contamination, via cost-
shiing, negatively aects the means of existence and contributes to cap-
ital accumulation.
Perreault (2012: 1051) argues that, in reference to water, there are dif-
ferent forms of dispossession, apart from privatization and marketiza-
tion, ‘including contamination, which remove it from the public sphere
and eectively enclose it’ (emphasis added). is is in line with the calls
to account for (1) ‘contingent role of nature in shaping pathways of accu-
mulation and dispossession’ (Sneddon, 2007) and (2) for ‘the ways dis-
possession shapes patterns of, and opportunities for, social reproduction’
(Roberts, 2008). However, the analysis is limited to the dispossession of
livelihood and fails to consider the eects of contamination for humans,
as well as non- human being, which is not directly related to the means
of subsistence and production. Perreault (2012) rightly concludes that
‘mining is subsidized by the lands, livelihoods, and bodies of the indi-
genous campesino peoples who bear its environmental costs’. But what
about the subsidies to miners with compromised health or loss of bio-
diversity in the locality?
In this book, we not only propose to examine ‘how the materiality of
specic forms of nature shapes processes of dispossession’ (Perreault,
2012: 1052), but also how it shapes processes of contamination. Beyond
dispossession, and its consequent separation of labourers from their
means of production, we argue contamination endangers existence
means of both human and non- human beings.
2.4.2 Our Contribution: Capital Accumulation
by Contamination, or Else Cost- Shiing Successes
We argue that, apart from dispossession, there is an additional strategy
of capital accumulation that needs more attention, which could be called
‘lower costs of output’ via cost- shiing, namely contamination.18 Kapp
(1950), a proto ecological economist, had already discussed cost- shiing
as extra- economics means. Social costs aect means of existence, as well
as means of subsistence and production. As previously argued, the phe-
nomenon of cost- shiing, meant as the socialization of costs, is described
as a systematic ability to displace the costs to others, one that is pervasive
and external to the economic process (in this sense extra- economic), the
reason for which cannot be simply considered an ‘externality’ (as if it was
accidental or a particular case, and therefore possible to internalize). e
idea that contamination makes the others pay for the costs is very much
part of the ecological economics epistemology (Berger, 2008). erefore,
for Kapp, economic change generally occurs for the benet of some
groups and at the expense of other existing or future groups (Hornborg,
2009). Once cost- shiing is interpreted as a successful practice of busi-
ness entities, it is easy to understand the logic that underpins it. We argue
it is the logic of capital accumulation by cost- shiing. ere are dierent
18 We are aware that the words pollution and contamination have slightly dierent meanings,
although they are oen use as synonyms and etymologically they are equivalent (meaning ‘to
dele’). Following the Oxford dictionary, we prefer ‘contamination’ as it expresses ‘the action or
state of making or being made impure by polluting or poisoning’, while pollution is dened as
‘the presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance which has harmful or poi-
sonous eects’. In brief, we interpret contamination as the act, while pollution is the state.
65
types of cost- shiing including, for example, the bail out of banks where
private debt is socialized or the fact that reproductive work unequally
falls upon women, but we intend to focus on contamination. In fact, we
want to demonstrate that contamination is an important strategy in the
modern processes of accumulation. Cost- shiing encounters social re-
sistance that resists the socialization of costs by enterprises, in the form of
ecological distribution conicts.
We examine a complementary strategy of capital forces with the aim
to relaunch the capitalistic relation and nd new protable opportunities
for the over- accumulated capital. We propose to call it accumulation by
contamination (here aer AbC). We dene it as the process by which the
capital system socializes costs, through successful costs- shiing, which
degrades the means of existence and bodies of human beings (as well as
of other species) in order to nd new possibilities for capital valorization.
Examples of AbC are waste dumping, air pollution, alteration of biogeo-
chemical cycles, and epidemic health problems.
If AbD is dened as freeing up assets like a resource (therefore by its
function), as we proposed, then AbC is a dierent category. Instead, if
AbD is dened by extra- economic means (Harvey, 2003; Glassman,
2006) and is dierent from expanded reproduction, then AbC is a sub-
category of AbD. In our understanding, following the focus of De Angelis
(2001) on separation, AbC is a dierent category since it has to do with
lowering the costs of output, else with shiing- costs with extra- economic
means. As Kapp (1963) argued, social costs are a form of non- market
interdependencies; they do not appear on accounting books, although
they are a normal part of the business practice.
Cost- shiing (or socialization of costs), and consequent capital accu-
mulation happens in two ways:
1. Direct prots due to subsidies. For example, subsidies to the incin-
erator (a subsidized and concentrated right to contaminate, i.e.
carbon credits).
2. Indirect prots due to saved costs (indirect subsidies). For example,
toxic waste dumping leading to health problems or productivity
loss of other economic activities such as farming or shing; remedi-
ation costs. ese social costs are oen so high, that if they were
accounted for, they would in fact inhibit the activity in itself (e.g. see
the calls to leave the oil in the ground).
In conclusion, we have identied two main circuits of capital accumu-
lation (see Figure 2.4): (1) expanded reproduction, through economic
means, which means the production and capitalization of surplus value
(i.e. the appropriation of what is produced by the workers, but not paid
back as wages); and (2) capital accumulation by extra- economic means,
via both dispossession (i.e. the liberation of assets, or separation) and
contamination (i.e. cost- shiing, or socialization of costs).
As we will explore in the next chapters, AbC plays a central role in both
case studies presented. In the case of shipbreaking, the conict emerges
out of cost- shiing alone, and therefore AbC; while in the case of Delhi,
there is a shiing of costs to middle- class residents but also dispossession
of the recyclers’ means of production. Capitalism has a lot to do with two
simultaneous, but distinct, processes: the privatization of assets and the
socialization of costs.
Capital
accumulation
Expanded reproduction:
Production and capitalization of
surplus value
By:
- Dispossession: Liberation of asset
s
- Contamination: Cost-shiing
Economic
means
Extra-economic
means
Figure 2.4 e circuits of capital accumulation.
The Political Ecology of Informal Waste Recyclers in India. Federico Demaria, Oxford University Press.
© Federico Demaria 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780192869050.003.0003
3
Shipbreaking in Alang
A Conict Against Capital Accumulation
by Contamination
3.1 Introduction: e Metabolism of a Global
Infrastructure, Namely Shipping
In August 2009, a re broke out aboard the European containership MSC
Jessica1 killing six workers on the Indian shipbreaking beaches of Alang.2
is kind of tragedy is rather common. e re erupted as they were
dismantling the cargoship’s engine room. It took place as the ship had
neither been decontaminated by the original owner nor made safe by the
local enterprise. e Geneva- based Mediterranean Shipping Company
(MSC), the world’s second- largest shipping line in terms of container
vessel capacity, had protably used the ship since its construction in 1980.
MSC denied all responsibilities as, ocially, the owner of the vessel was
a Panamanian company and the vessel was registered in Panama while
under bare- boat charter to MSC; aer the vessel le MSC’s service it was
sold to a Saint Vincent company.3 In other words, MSC, along with most
shipping companies, normally uses ags of convenience, cash buyers,
and shell companies to bypass the international regulations. is chapter
1 An earlier version of this chapter has been rst published as an article in the journal
Ecological Economics in 2010, as part of a Special Section on ‘Ecological Distribution Conicts’
edited by Joan Martinez Alier, Giorgos Kallis, Sandra Veuthey, Mariana Walter, and Leah
Temper. Demaria, F. (2010). Shipbreaking at Alang- Sosiya (India): An ecological distribution
conict. Ecological Economics 70(2): 250– 260. http:// www.indian expr ess.com/ news/ six- die- in-
re- at- alang- ship- break ing- yard/ 498 063/ (Accessed in January 2012).
2 An earlier version of this chapter has been rst published as an article in the journal
Ecological Economics in 2010, as part of a Special Section on ‘Ecological Distribution Conicts’
edited by Joan Martinez Alier, Giorgos Kallis, Sandra Veuthey, Mariana Walter, and Leah
Temper. Demaria, F. (2010). Shipbreaking at Alang- Sosiya (India): An ecological distribution
distribution conict. Ecological Economics 70(2): 250– 260.
3 Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) response regarding allegations of a re causing
six deaths on MSC Jessica shipbreaking operation. 17 October 2012. Available at http:// www.
busin ess- huma nrig hts.org
investigates, through the lens of an ecological distribution conict related
to shipbreaking in Alang- Sosiya (India), how to understand the linkages
among nature, economy, and society.
Rich societies use large amounts of resources. Conicts of resource ex-
traction and waste disposal, such as the conict over the excessive pro-
duction of carbon dioxide, arise as a consequence of this. Rich societies
generate large quantities of other kinds of waste, encountering oppos-
ition to local waste treatment and disposal sites, such as incinerators and
landlls (Pellow, 2007) and rising management costs (Pearson, 1987).
is is the background of a rapidly changing and lucrative trade, global
in nature, in which waste ows towards developing countries or poorer
areas of developed countries (McKee, 1996). Under a world- system per-
spective, the core, through unequal power relations, manages to export
entropy to distant sinks in the periphery (Scott Frey, 1998; Hornborg
et al., 2007). ese ows, legal or not (with organized criminal groups as
important players), consist of urban and industrial waste, hazardous and
non- hazardous waste, and waste intended for reuse, recycling, and nal
disposal (Clapp, 1994; D’Alisa et al., 2012).
In the 1970s and 1980s scandals of toxic waste dumping in the South
led to attempts to stem these ows, such as the Basel Convention on the
Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their
Disposal of 1989. Yet, India, among others, has been increasingly used as
a dumping ground for toxic industrial waste (like asbestos and mercury)
from developed countries (Singh, 2001).
e issue of shipbreaking is examined here as an example of toxic waste
trade (Alter, 1997). Shipbreaking is the process of dismantling an obso-
lete vessel’s structure for scrapping or disposal. Conducted at pier or dry
dock, or directly on the beach as in Alang- Sosiya, it includes a wide range
of activities, from removing all machineries and equipment to cutting
down the ship infrastructure. It is the destiny of ocean- going ships like
oil tankers, bulk carriers, general cargo, containerships, and passenger
ships, among others. Depending on their interests, stakeholders will call
it breaking, recycling, dismantling, or scrapping (Stuer- Lauridsen et al.,
2004). It is a challenging process, owing to the many problems of safety,
health, and environmental protection (OSHA, 2001).
e industry provides steel at cheap prices and employment, which
contribute to economic growth. On the other hand there are concerns
69
about the health and safety of workers, and the impact on the environ-
ment. ese are the premises of the debate on whether shipbreaking
in India falls under a WIMBY (Welcome Into My Backyard) logic or
is a case of (environmental) injustice (Singh, 2001) and application of
Lawrence Summers’ Principle (Martínez- Alier, 2002). is chapter dis-
cusses the controversy under a framework of ecological economics and
political ecology.
Changing social metabolism (meaning the ow of energy and ma-
terial in the economy) (Fischer- Kowalski, 1998; Foster, 1999), driven
by economic and population growth, generates growing quantities of
waste. Georgescu- Roegen proposed a paradox highlighting that ‘tech-
nical evolution leads to an increase in the rate at which society “wastes re-
sources” . . . the economic process actually is more ecient than automatic
shuing in producing higher entropy, i.e. waste’ (Georgescu- Roegen,
1971: 34). In other words, the more developed a society, the higher its rate
of generation of wastes per capita (Giampietro and Mayumi, 2009). It is
generally accepted that under a fair allocation of responsibility, developed
countries should deal with their own waste. Principles such as ‘the pol-
luter pays’ and ‘producer liability’ appear to be legally settled. However,
cases in which countries from the North ‘externalize the costs’ of toxic
waste disposal outside their own national borders (notably to the South)
are not rare. e pollution haven hypothesis (Antweiler, 2001) refers to
the idea that lower trade barriers will shi pollution to those countries
with less stringent environmental regulations, which are normally also
poorer. According to the Lawrence Summers Principle, Southern coun-
tries have an environmental ‘comparative advantage’ regarding waste
treatment (Pearson, 1987). In an internal memo leaked to the press,4
Lawrence Summers, then chief economist at the World Bank in 1991,
wrote: ‘I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste
in the lowest- wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’
Pollution should be sent to places where there are no people, or where the
people are poor, since ‘the measurements of the costs of health impairing
pollution depend on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and
mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing
pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will
4 ‘Let them eat pollution.’ e Economist, 8 February 1992.
be the country with the lowest wages.’ e cost of internalizing the exter-
nalities would be the lowest.
e question is whether decisions on matters of life and death should
be taken only on economic grounds. Poor people that meet the ‘Lawrence
Summers’ criteria oen complain, as several studies from political
ecology document (Martínez- Alier, 2002). Such ecological distribution
conicts express underlying valuation conicts, actors deploying dif-
ferent languages to arm their right to use a safe environment (Martinez
Alier, 2009).
is chapter investigates shipbreaking in India from the vantage
point of political ecology, paying attention to the unequal distribution
of benets and burdens (already in the present generation) in a context
of growing global social metabolism that leads to greater generation of
waste, and with an analytical focus on the ways actors express alterna-
tive claims in the political arena and the valuation conicts that hence
emerge.
Section 3.2 describes the methods and the study region. en Section
3.3 introduces the shipbreaking industry, describing the process through
which a ship becomes waste for the ship owner, enters the scrapping
market through a cash buyer, and is nally dismantled by a shipbreaker.
Section 3.4 presents dierent options for the management of the ship’s
toxic waste and analyses the socio- environmental impacts resulting from
current practices. e conict in the Blue Lady case at the Supreme Court
of India is analysed in Section 3.5 with particular attention to the valu-
ation languages used by the dierent social groups. Finally, conclusions
are drawn in Section 3.6.
3.2 Methods and Study Region
Data from interviews, ocial documents, direct and participant obser-
vation have been combined using the case study research methodology
(Yin, 2003). Fieldwork was carried out from April to July 2009. e ac-
cess of researchers to the industry site is strictly regulated and workers’
freedom of expression is limited. Semi- structured or in- depth interviews
with 64 respondents were conducted with local villagers (10), farmers
(8), shers (9), shipbreaking entrepreneurs (4), workers (11), political
71
and administrative authorities (6), legal experts (4), academics (5), and
activists (7). Interviewees were selected to represent a broad spectrum
of interests and knowledge regarding shipbreaking, using both random
and snowball sampling methods. Moreover, focus groups have been led
with farmers, shers, and workers. Interviews were conducted in English
or with the help of local translators in Hindi and Gujarati. National
and international documentation was researched with special focus on
the Blue Lady case at the Indian Supreme Court during 2006 and 2007
(Civil Writ Petition No. 657 of 1995). Ocial documents were examined
under the guidance of the lawyer Sanjay Parikh and the petitioner Gopal
Krishna. Media coverage on shipbreaking has been extensively examined
on the Internet and at the Centre for Education and Documentation in
Mumbai.
e case study is located in the Gulf of Cambay, Bhavnagar District of
Gujarat State in the north- west of India (see Figure 3.1). Alang and Sosiya
are the two local villages that give the name to the Alang- Sosiya Ship
GUJARAT
ARABIAN SEA
Alang-Sosiya
Figure 3.1 Location map of Alang- Sosiya in the State of Gujarat (India).
Source: Author’s own.
Breaking Yard (ASSBY) (see Figure 3.2). e District, originally based
on farming and shing, is under rapid industrialization and urbanization
which resulted in the degradation of the environment and decline in bio-
diversity. Gujarat State, historically a main centre of trade and commerce,
has one of the fastest- growing economies in India.
3.3 e Shipbreaking Industry
3.3.1 e Shipping Industry
e shipping industry constitutes a key infrastructure for the world’s social
metabolism as more than 80% of international trade in goods (both raw
materials and manufactured goods) by volume is carried by sea.5 Material
ows resulting from international trade (direct import and export ows
in terms of their weight) are part of physical accounting methods, such
as material ow analysis (MFA) (EUROSTAT, 2001; Vallejo, 2010), used
to quantify ‘social metabolism’ processes (Fischer- Kowalski, 1998). In
GULF OF CAMBAY
Alang Sosiya
Figure 3.2 Map showing shipbreaking plots at Alang and Sosiya.
Source: Author’s own.
5 If not diversely specied, data for this section comes from Review of Maritime Transport
(UNCTAD, 2011). All presented data refers to vessels of 100 gross tonnes (GT) and above.
73
2010 developed countries accounted for 34% of goods loaded and 43%
of goods unloaded in tonnes, while developing countries accounted for
60% and 56% respectively (post- communist European transition econ-
omies account for the rest). Some regions are characterized by a phys-
ical import surplus while others face a physical trade decit (Giljum and
Eisenmenger, 2004).
Since the 1990s ‘international seaborne trade’ (goods loaded) in-
creased faster than world gross domestic product, highlighting the ef-
fects of changing production processes, consumption patterns, and the
deepening of economic integration (globalization). In 2010 this trade
reached 8.4 bn tonnes, from 2.5 bn tonnes in 1970. Figure 3.3 shows the
historical evolution per type of cargo for selected years. Data from 2009
reects the economic crisis.
As a direct consequence, the number and capacity of ships has signi-
cantly increased. In 1960, the world ocean- going eet comprised 15,000
ships (84 mn of deadweight tonnage; DWT a measure of how much
1970 1980 1990 2000 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
Selected year
Other dry cargo
Main bulksª
Oil
Millions of tonnes
Figure 3.3 Development of international seaborne trade, selected years
(millions of tonnes loaded).
Note: ª Iron ore, grain, coal, bauxite/ alumina, and phosphate.
Source: UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport, various issues.
weight a ship is carrying or can safely carry), while in 2011 it had reached
103,392 (1,396 mn of DWT). Figure 3.4 shows the composition of the
world eet by principal types of vessel, selected years.
In 2007, developed countries controlled about 65.9% of the world
DWT, developing countries 31.2%, and economies in transition the re-
maining 2.9%. In 2011 the four top ship owning economies (Greece,
Japan, Germany, and China) together controlled 50% of the world eet.
Fleet ownership, however, does not always reect ship registration.
Foreign- agged ships accounted in 2011 for 68.1% of the world total,
most of them registered in the so- called states of convenience (or open
registers). e top ve registries (Panama, Liberia, Marshall Islands,
China Hong Kong, and Greece) together accounted for 52.6% of the
world’s DWT. Figure 3.5 shows ship entries at Alang- Sosiya Shipbreaking
Yard (India) in 2004– 2005 by ship owner’s country: 82.5% of them used a
ag of convenience.
Flags of convenience, together with scal havens, shell companies, and
cash buyers, allow under- invoicing (resulting in evasion of import tax and
money laundering) and facilitate ship owner’s access to the shipbreaking
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2011
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
Selected years
Millions of dwt
Other
Container
General cargo
Dry bulk
Oil tankers
Figure 3.4 World eet by principal types of vessel, selected years.
Note: Vessels of 100 GT and above.
Source: UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), 2011.
75
market. is increase in the size of the world eet does not immediately
lead to a general increase in the supply of ships for scrap (see Figure 3.6).
Ship owners evaluate the expected future earning potential and the ex-
pected cost of keeping the ship in operation against the revenue obtained
when the vessel is sold for scrap. is mainly depends on the price of steel.
Potential earnings are more important in the decision than the scrapping
price. e 2008– 2009 economic crisis resulted in a boom of shipbreaking
because of excess shipping capacity (see Figure 3.7 and Figure 3.8), with
ship owners associations planning to eliminate 25% of the world eet.
In fact, according to the data elaborated by the French NGO Robin
de Bois, if in 2006 demolitions were equivalent to only 0.6% of the ex-
isting eet (293 vessels), the economic crisis reversed the situation (288
vessels in 2007; 456 in 2008; 1,006 in 20096; 956 in 20107; and 1,020 in
Canada 62
12
15
14
19
43
47
1
3
0
0
3
14
12
Norway
Italy
France
Poland
UK
Japan
Germany
010203040506
070
Flags of
convenience
used
Others
Figure 3.5 Ship entries at Alang- Sosiya Shipbreaking Yard (India),
2004– 2005.
Source: GMB (Gujarat Maritime Board; www.gmbpo rts.org).
6 In 2009 of 1,006 vessels (8.2 mn tonnes), 435 were demolished in India (43%), 214 in
Bangladesh (21%), 173 in China (17%), 87 in Pakistan (9%), 42 in Turkey (4%). Robin de Bois,
Information Bulletins on Ship Demolition: #17, September 2009; #18, January 2010. www.robin
desb ois.org.
7 In 2010 of 956 vessels (6.5 mn tonnes), 422 were demolished in India (44%), 135 in Turkey
(14%), 125 in China (13%), 90 in Pakistan (9%), 79 in Bangladesh (8%), 5 in Europe (1%), 100
in other countries (10%). Robin de Bois, Information Bulletins on Ship Demolition: #19 to 22,
January 2011. www.robin desb ois.org.
20118). e excess supply is reected since 2009 in the spectacular fall in
the Baltic Dry Index that measures the rates charged for chartering dry
bulk cargoes. In 2011 strong steel prices and the recovery of maritime
business increased costs for ship procurement but at the same time sig-
nicantly increased the margins in the ship scrapping business.9 In gen-
eral ship owning companies look to sell their ships for demolition at the
best price.
e 2011 UNCTAD report rightly argues that ‘the competitiveness of a
country’s scrapping industry is mostly inuenced by labour costs and the
regulatory environment. All major ship scrapping countries are devel-
oping countries’ (p. 151). In other words, ships go for scrapping wherever
35.00
30.00
25.00
20.00
15.00
10.00
Millions of dwt
5.00
0.00
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
2007
Sold for
breaking
Figure 3.6 Tonnage reported sold for breaking at the world level, 2000–
2007 (millions of DWT).
Source: UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), 2007.
8 In 2011 of 1,020 vessels (8.2 mn tonnes), 458 were demolished in India (45%), 154 in
Bangladesh (14%), 142 in China (14%), 108 in Pakistan (7%), 19 in Turkey (2%). Robin de Bois,
Information Bulletins on Ship Demolition: #23 to 26 February 2012. www.robin desb ois.org.
9 Article by Xu Hui, Executive Manager, China Ship Fund. Available at http:// www.chi nada ily.
com.cn/ bizchina/ 2010- 04/ 08/ content_ 9703387.htm (Accessed in January 2012).
77
Figure 3.7 e Alang- Sosiya Shipbreaking Yard during low tide
(April 2009).
Source: Federico Demaria.
450
400
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
No. of ships
01984–85 1988–89 1992–93 1996–97 2000–01 2004–05
2008–09
1982–83 1986–87 1990–91 1994–95
Year
1998–99 2002–03 2006–07
Figure 3.8 Number of ships broken per year at ASSBY.
Source: GMB (Gujarat Maritime Board; www.gmbpo rts.org).
it is easier to externalize social and environmental costs, which means
cost- shiing.
Companies look to sell their ships for demolition at the best price.
South Asian yards are the main destinations. For processing capacity
ASSBY in India (see Figure 3.7) and Chittagong in Bangladesh are the
world’s biggest yards (see Table 3.1); Chinese yards are catching up
to them.
Again, according to Robin de Bois (see Table 3.2), in 2011 India con-
tinues to be the undisputed leading country not only per number of
units, but also for tonnage (45% of the total 8.2 mn tonnes) followed by
Bangladesh (14%), China (14%), Pakistan (11%), and Turkey (7%).10
Data on ships sent for scrapping are not easily accessible.11 e 2011
report by UNCTAD presents statistics (see Table 3.2) based on data
from the information company IHS Fairplay (Maritime Intelligence
and Publications). Data dier signicantly in terms of tonnage but the
country ranking remains the same, where the four largest ship scrapping
Table 3.1 Numbers and tonnage of ships dismantled (2011)
2011 Nº of vessels %Tonnes of
metal
%
India 458 45 35,00,000 43
Bangladesh 145 14 16,00,000 19
China 142 14 10,00,000 17
Pakistan 108 11 10,00,000 13
Turkey 72 7 2,06,000 3
USA 19 2 1,31,000 1
Europe 5 1 – –
Others 55 6 – –
Source: Robin de Bois, Information Bulletins on Ship Demolition: 23 to 26 February 2012.
10 Robin de Bois, Information Bulletins on Ship Demolition: #23 to 26 February 2012. www.
robin desb ois.org.
11 Database from the French NGO Robin de bois is public and presents a lot of details for each
ship sent for scrapping. Instead IHS Fairplay data might be more exhaustive, but is less trans-
parent and detailed (therefore dicult to assess), and only accessible by paying an expensive fee.
For the purpose of this analysis the two are complementary and do not contradict each other.
Table 3.2 Top 10 ship- scrapping nations, 2010
Scrapped ships, percentage of total volume
Country Scrapped
amount, dwt
Number
of ships
scrapped
Rank Bulk
carries
Dry cargo/
passenger
Oshore Tan k e r s Others
India 9, 287,775.00 451 1 9.7 32.8 5.3 46.2 5.9
Bangladesh 6,839,207.00 110 2 15.1 5.5 5.7 71.1 2.5
China 5,769,227.00 189 3 46.6 36.3 2.5 12.2 2.4
Pakistan 5,100,606.00 111 4 8.1 2.9 6.2 80.6 2.2
Turkey 1,082,446.00 226 5 24.3 48.7 0.2 14.1 12.8
United States 217,980.00 15 6 0.0 19.9 0.0 80.1 0.0
Romania 16,064.00 4 7 0.0 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Denmark 15,802.00 25 8 0.0 53.4 22.7 0.0 23.9
Japan 13,684.00 1 9 0.0 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Belgium 8,807.00 12 10 0.0 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Source: Compiled by the UNCTAD secretariat on the basis of data from IHS Fairplay.
countries covered 98.1% of the activity in terms of recycled DWT in
2010. is data series allows us to see on which types of ships the dierent
countries specialize: India on tankers, dry cargo and passenger ships;
Bangladesh and Pakistan on tankers; China on bulk carriers.
In Bangladesh, since 2010 the industry has only been working peri-
odically due to an intensication of the controversy around safety and
environmental concerns. e Supreme Court had suspended the au-
thorization of beaching following an umpteenth fatal accident in 2009
and a new action by the NGO Bangladesh lawyers Association (BELA12)
which demanded compliance with environmental and social standards
(UNCTAD, 2011). Attempts by shipyards to circumvent the Court’s de-
cision had been successful, but the activity was then again suspended
due to new fatal accidents (at least 12 workers died in 2011). All site ac-
tivity was stopped pending an investigation report and dismantling au-
thorizations for new ships were suspended. Later, the industry restarted
operations. In any case this is probably not the end of shipbreaking in
Bangladesh.13
China has overtaken Pakistan and reached the levels of Bangladesh.
It keeps growing rapidly thanks to modernization of its industry, lower
taxes, and the complete lack of democratic control over accountability
for social and environmental impacts. New large facilities have been built
near Shanghai in association with major shipping and other companies
(including the Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company and
British Petroleum) which have guaranteed a steady supply of ships for
breaking. In exchange the Chinese rms have promised good environ-
mental controls and safe working conditions for the workers. In fact ship
owners are under public scrutiny in their countries for being the source of
alleged misery in shipbreaking countries (Wayne Hess et al., 2001). en,
one could wonder why ship owners are doing it in the least transparent
country (China) which keeps labour trade unions and environmental
NGOs under strict control, as well as denying access to researchers.
12 http:// www.bel aban gla.org/
13 http:// www.rec ycli ngin tern atio nal.com/ recycl ing- news/ 5930/ ferr ous- met als/ ban glad esh/
recov ery- ban glad esh- shipb reak ing- tonna ges
81
Shipbreaking yards in Europe and the United States receive very few
ships, as the prices they can oer are close to zero, and tend to receive
state- owned ships, like the ones from the navy.
3.3.2 History of an Industry
Shipbreaking rst developed in the United States, UK, and Japan during
the Second World War because there were many ships damaged by war,
and an urgent demand for steel. In the 1960s it moved to less industri-
alized European countries such as Spain, Italy, and Turkey. In the 1970s
it le Europe and established itself in Asia, rst in Taiwan and South
Korea, and then during the 1980s, in China, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan,
Philippines, and Vietnam. South Asian countries have benetted from
favourable natural characteristics (high tidal ranges, gentle sloping, and
rocky bottom beaches) which allow the vessels to be beached, turning a
highly mechanized industry into a labour- intensive one.
3.3.3 From the Ship Owner to the Shipbreaker rough
Cash Buyers
Ship owners sell their ships through brokers operating in London,
Dubai, Singapore, and Hamburg. All ships are sold per tonne (LDT14)
at a price ranging from $100 to $400, depending on the ship type and on
the market. In the last 10 years ‘cash buyers’ have emerged as important
intermediaries ocially to assure fullment of the contract. ey dier
from traditional ship brokers because they acquire ship ownership, be-
coming themselves ship owners (although only for a limited period
pending its sale or during the handing over of the ship to a recycling fa-
cility). Original (last operational) ship owners get lower prices, but this
system allows them to bypass liabilities and regulations (Hillyer, 2012).
14 LDT (Light Displacement Tonnage) is the mass of the ship excluding cargo, fuel, ballast
water, stores, passengers, and crew.
3.3.4 ASSBY: Alang- Sosiya Ship Breaking Yard
e rst ship, called Kota Tenjong, was beached in Alang on 13 February
1983. ASSBY, which occupies 10 km of coastline, became in the 1990s the
world’s largest shipbreaking yard. In 2007 India accounted for 41% of the
world’s recycling capacity, 90% of it taking place in ASSBY (see Figure
3.8, and Table 3.3).
3.3.5 Shipbreaking Process
Once a ship arrives in the Gulf of Cambay it is inspected and checked
by the competent authorities which issue (occasionally with corrup-
tion) the relevant certicates. e ship is then beached by its own pro-
pulsion power at high tide and during low tide is laid down stable on its
at bottom. At this point cutters and their helpers, using simple LPG gas
and oxygen torches, can start taking apart the vessel structure. All oper-
ations take place directly on the beach in a relatively small and congested
area called a plot (see Figure 3.9). Machinery and heavy equipment (en-
gines, compressors, generators, boilers), together with other dismantled
components (navigation equipment, life- saving equipment, furniture,
electrical cables, utensils, etc.) are sold to traders for reuse. ese oper-
ations do not require investment in infrastructure or technology, as they
are labour intensive and moving cranes and motorized winches are re-
used from the same ships. Depending on their size and type, scrapped
ships have an unloaded weight of between 5,000 and 40,000 tonnes,
with an average composition as shown in Table 3.4. It requires from 3
to 6 months for an average ship (15,000 tonnes) to be dismantled with a
variable number of workers involved at dierent stages (from 150 to 300).
e industry requires relatively low xed capital (plot lease, machinery,
and equipment) and high working capital. e cost of the vessel itself
corresponds to more than 50% of the total cost. Interests on investment,
duties (customs, excise, value added tax, etc.) and port charges represent
the second important item. Labour and energy (torch oxygen and fuel)
each constitute between 3% and 6% of the total expenditure (Upadhyay,
2002; Dubey, 2005). Environmental, safety, and health insurance costs do
not appear in the accounting.
83
Table 3.3 Number and LDT (Light Displacement
Tonnage) of ships broken at ASSBY
Ye a r No. of ships IDT
1982– 1983 5 24.716
1983– 1984 51 259.387
1984– 1985 42 228.237
1985– 1986 84 516.602
1986– 1987 61 359.139
1987– 1988 3 244.776
1988– 1989 48 253.991
1989– 1990 82 451.243
1990– 1991 86 577.124
1991– 1992 104 563.568
1992– 1993 137 942.601
1993– 1994 175 1.256.077
1994– 1995 301 2.173.249
1995– 1996 183 1.252.809
1996– 1997 348 2.635.830
1997– 1998 347 2.452.019
1998– 1999 361 3.037.882
1999– 2000 296 2.752.14
2000– 2001 295 1.943.825
2001– 2002 333 2.752.414
2002– 2003 300 2.424.522
2003– 2004 294 1.986.121
2004– 2005 196 938.975
2005– 2006 101 480.405
2006– 2007 136 760.800
2007– 2008 36 643.437
2008– 2009 193 –
2009– 2010
(estimated)
400 –
Total 5033 31.877.972
Note: (Light Displacement Tonnage) is the mass of the ship
excluding cargo, fuel, ballast water, stores, passengers and crew.
GMB (Gujarat Maritime Board; www.gmbpo rts.org).
Figure 3.9 A shipbreaking plot in Alang (April 2009).
Source: Federico Demaria.
Table 3.4 Average components (both in weight and value) obtained by a
demolished ship
Weight (%) Value (%)
Re- rollable ferrous scrap and iron plates 75– 85 65
Re- conditioned machinery 10– 15 25
Re- melting scrap 3 2
Non- ferrous scrap 1 7
Furnace oil and oils 2 0.50
Wooden and furniture 2 0.50
Burning, cutting losses, and waste 5– 10 0
100 100
Sources: Interviews with shipbreakers; Upadhyay, 2002.
85
3.4 Hazardous Waste and Socio- Environmental
Impacts
3.4.1 Hazardous Waste Generation and Management
Ships contain (in- built and on- board) hazardous and non- hazardous
substances, signicant both in quantity and toxicity, which cannot (or
should not) be totally reused or recycled. e waste output of the process
represents between 0.5% and 10% of the ship’s total weight (see Table 3.4).
Composition is diverse, mainly constituted by scrap wood, plastic, paper,
rubber, glass wool, thermocol, sponge, PVC pipes, oil, metals, heavy
metals, paints, cement, asbestos, and radioactive waste. Independent and
reliable statistics on quantity and composition are not available, while es-
timates are dicult because there are many dierent types of ships, which
vary considerably in their structure (Reddy et al., 2005a,b).
e controversy over shipbreaking mainly concerns the disposal of
hazardous waste. ere are three methods of disposal:
(1) Decontamination prior to export
Decontamination is the process of removing hazardous materials
contained in the ship structure (partially or totally), normally without
endangering seaworthiness. is must be done by ship owners. It is a
costly operation that requires expertise and technology. A totally de-
contaminated ship would not fall under the Basel Convention.
(2) Environmental sound management on site
Hazardous materials are safely removed and then properly dis-
posed once the ship has been beached. is is the option re-
commended by the International Convention for the Safe and
Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships adopted in May 2009
by the IMO (International Maritime Organization).
(3) Dumping
Hazardous materials are freely released into the environment.
ASSBY, since the beginning, has used the third method (High
Powered Committee, 2003; Reddy et al., 2003, 2005a,b). Waste, haz-
ardous or not, has generally been directly released into the sea from
the ship or the plot, burnt on the plot, or dumped during the night in
surrounding villages (see Figure 3.10). Some has been transported
and dumped in areas (like the surroundings of the city of Surat in the
Golden Corridor) where other industries undertake similar actions
so that it is impossible to identify the source and enforce any liability.
3.4.2 Pollutants Discharged
Scrapping activity discharges a number of liquid, gaseous, and solid
pollutants which are hazardous for the environment and human beings
(Islam and Hossain, 1986; Zhijie, 1988; Hossain and Islam, 2006, Neşer
et al., 2012). Most common are oil, bacteria, asbestos, heavy metals,15 and
persistent organic pollutants.16
Figure 3.10 A dumping site close to the shipbreaking yard of Alang- Sosiya
(April 2009).
Source: Federico Demaria.
15 Mercury (Hg), Lead (Pb), Arsenic (As), Chromium (Cr), Copper (Cu), Manganese (Mn),
Zinc (Zn), and Nickel (Ni).
16 Polychlorinated Biphenyl Compounds (PCBs), Dioxins, Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC),
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) and Organotins (Monobutyltin— MBT,
Dibutyltin— DBT, Tributyltin— TBT, etc.).
87
3.4.3 Socio- Environmental Impacts
3.4.3.1 Environmental impacts
In ASSBY waste materials accumulate over the soil and then ramify in-
crementally to seawaters in a stepwise manner through tidal and sub-
tidal zones, deep sea and their respective sediments. is has led to a
deterioration of physico- chemical properties of seawater and inter-
tidal sediments. COD (chemical oxygen demand) and BOD (biological
oxygen demand), used as indicators of water quality (organic degrad-
ation and tension in the system), are present at high levels. Shipbreaking
activity has substantially aected the ecosystem at Alang– Sosiya (Gujarat
Ecology Commission, 1997; Tewari et al., 2001; Reddy et al., 2003; Reddy
et al., 2004a,b, 2005a,b). System stress has led to a decline in biotic struc-
ture: a decrease in biomass, abundance, and species diversity has been
measured. Pollutants mix with suspended solid and migrate long dis-
tances, carried by high currents (Bhatt, 2004). ey have been found, to
a lesser extent, together with oating objects and oil, all along the 100
km of coastline on the East and West side of Alang (Pathak, 1997; Mehta,
1997). e exact spatial dispersion of contaminants remains unknown as
all selected control sites (10, 30, or 50 km away from Alang) have always
been aected by pollution (Dholakia, 1997). e intertidal zone around
ASSBY has practically no vegetation. Mangroves disappeared many years
ago, soon aer the industry began. e sea o ASSBY has very poor bio-
logical production potential with very low phytoplankton pigment con-
centration, low zooplankton standing stock, very poor macrobenthic
standing stock, and low numerical abundance of sh eggs and larvae
(Soni, 1997; Majumdar, 1997). Exotic species might have been carried in
with ballast water, which represents a serious biological risk. e popu-
lation and diversity of sh have decreased and species tolerant to pet-
roleum hydrocarbons seem to have adapted better to the environmental
stress (Mandal, 2004). e absence of sanitation facilities for the workers
has led to the presence of pathogenic and non- pathogenic bacteria (faecal
and nonfaecal coliforms, salmonella, clostridium, staphylococcus) in the
water of the ASSBY area (surface and underground), rendering it unsafe
for human consumption, while marine coastal water has become harmful
for sh population and unsuitable for recreation (Desai and Vyas, 1997;
Trivedi, 1997; MECON, 1997).
ere is a lack of studies into the potential impacts on local terres-
trial ecosystems. GPCB (Gujarat Pollution Control Board), a local gov-
ernment agency, claims to keep a complete monitoring, but it has not
made data available. For a comprehensive environmental impact as-
sessment one should go beyond local impacts and analyse the complete
material recycling chain (ancillary industries). e furnace emissions
of rerolling mills are rendered toxic by the presence of volatile organic
matter of marine paints and anti- fouling paints (such as lead, arsenic, and
pesticides) which has resulted in acid rain during the monsoon season
(Bhatt, 2004).
e 1997 Report by the Gujarat Ecology Commission, ‘Ecological
Restoration and Planning for Alang- Sosiya’ (GEC, 1997), remains the
most comprehensive study to date. None of its suggestions have been fol-
lowed, so that the assessment maintains its validity as conrmed by more
recent studies of the Central Salt & Marine Chemicals Research Institute
(Tewari et al., 2001; Reddy et al., 2003, 2004a,b, 2005a,b; Mandal, 2004).
3.4.3.2 Impacts on workers
Workers in ASSBY, mainly seasonal migrants from the poorer states of
India (Orissa, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand), live and work in piti-
able conditions (International Federation for Human Rights, 2002;
International Metalworkers' Federation, 2006). ey migrate as a sur-
vival strategy because with their previous jobs (at $1 per day) and small