Economies of Recycling – The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations
Edited By: Catherine Alexander, Joshua Reno
ISBN: 9781780321943
That textile waste – in the shape of garments as well as in other incarnation – has increasingly a commercial value in an area of globalised markets was a topic here in Shirahime on more than one occasion.
The first time we talked about this was when we reviewed ‘The travels of a T-shirt in the global economy‘. We then reviewed ‘Salaula’, which described the trading of 2nd hand clothing in Zambia, followed by ‘Recycling Indian Clothing‘ detailing clothing recycling habits and processes within India.
All this was complemented by a portrait of Panipat – Indias ‘shoddy capital’.
This review is the last in this series, at least for now, on recycling. Although it has to be said that through the review of this book I’ll be taking on a slightly larger perspective: Each chapter of the this book offers insights into the recycling economy of a distincly different industry.
‘Economies of recycling’ is devided into 3 sections, the first two of which contain 4 chapters, while the last one entails 3.
- Section 1 is entitled ‘Global Waste Flows’. It is dedicated to the actual materiality of waste:
- textile recycling in India,
- ship breaking in Bangladesh,
- the global nuclear uranium fuel cycle, and
- e-waste streams that ultimately take the goods to where they originally came from (China).
- Second 2 is called ‘The Ethics of Waste Labour’. The four chapters covers topics such as
- the role of gender in work related to ‘waste work’ in Dakar
- the links of social and material waste stream at the example of the cooperative ‘BAUEN’ in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which took on a hotel dumped by investors during the 2000 economic crisis as their own remodelling and ultimately operating it
- the relations of urban politics with waste at the example of Rio de Janeiros landfil sites, and finally
- the social and political implications of ‘waste labour’ in relation to the economy of death examplified on India’s Hooghly river.
- Section 3 then is called ‘Traces of Former Lives’ where rather than social and political links like in Section 2, the different geographical links and waste/recycling streams are exemplified. To do that, the following examples have been chosen:
- Re-use of discarded medical equipment and technology from the US in Madagascar
- how Mexican drug traffickers use US landfill sites to deposit the drugs before they get picked up and sold by local dealers, and – as last chapter of the entire book –
- the Canadian summer cleaning tradition of ‘Remont’ (deep cleaning) that brings private and public-institutional life to an intermittent hold.
‘Economies of Recycling’ is very clearly a book by academic for academics – although they don’t necessarily share the exact same discipline. As a consequence, the rigour with which the chapters are written – keyword: reference to sources – is clearly in accordance to academic best practise.
The drawback of such rigour though is that the chapters are at times quite difficult to read, and it does cost some effort to extract the actual essence of the information, and to build a somewhat vivid picture of the real situation.
This said, the book offers a highly interested, and very versatil glimpse into aspects of our material world that we are very little familiarised with. It is a journey across all the geographies of the planet, and into multiple layers of society and ways of how people earn a living from waste in one way or another.
The book also makes it clear that the definition of what ‘waste’ really is very much depends on the eyes of the beholder, for one, but then also to a not unsubstantial degree on the ingenuity of individuals that discover value at the most improbable place.
Equally, it is made clear that working with some form or shape of waste normally is work that is ‘difficult, dirty and (often) dangerous (3Ds), and in that sense those that do it – either because of their expertise or for their need of survival – do very genuinly merit our gratitude. And very often also our admiration for what seems sometimes like a miracle product made from discarded matter.
While the book is held, evidently, in the crisp descirptives of academics, at least my mind allowed me to travel to places I have hardly encountered in my life. And – strangely enough – I’m enticed to go and see with my own eyes.
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This book is available from your nearest book store as well as online from Amazon.
