Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

This article examines the historical processes by which low or non-caste groups have situated themselves in Pakistan's waste economy. Adopting caste as a category of governance, the colonial regime implemented policies and interventions that not only impacted these groups in the Punjab, but also cemented enduring connections between caste, waste work, and governance, which have subsequently shaped the trajectories of waste work in cities like Lahore. Moving beyond the framework of the “abject,” this article emphasizes caste as a historical category through which social stratification and exclusions have materialized across South Asia, and examines how low or non-caste groups have organized themselves in Pakistan's waste economy, which has resulted from rapid urbanization, bureaucratization and informalization, regional labor migration, consumptive economies, urban development, and sociopolitical relations. Rather than inhabiting the abjectness of capitalism, modernity, or caste hierarchy, this article argues that these groups have carved out a space for themselves and their wider social relations in cities like Lahore in Pakistan, where social inequalities and stratification are undeniable facets of urban life.

This article presents a nuanced social history of how reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa, organized against each other on the basis of nationality instead of uniting to combat the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis. Through this narrative of struggles at one particular dump, the article contributes to debates on informal worker organizing by theorizing the importance of the production of identities, power relations, space, and institutions in understanding how and why informal workers create and maintain power-laden divisions between themselves. The article argues that organizing efforts that seek to overcome divisions between informal workers cannot simply exhort them to unite based on abstract principles, but must actively transform the places and institutions forged by these workers through which they create and crystallize divisive identities and power relations.

Shivaji Nagar in the Deonar suburb of Mumbai is popularly known as “Bombay's Gas Chamber.” Located between one of Asia's largest garbage dumps and Mumbai's largest municipal slaughterhouse, this neighborhood is environmentally vulnerable, situated at the crossroads of clusters of heavy and petrochemical industries, and a network of the city's busiest highways. In popular, official, and scholarly narratives, this neighborhood has been constructed as a place of failure, waste, and death. The residents of Shivaji Nagar, well aware of these narratives, use the demonstration of “failure” to their advantage to stake claims of belonging to the neighborhood, and demand state assistance, albeit often with punitive consequences. They contend that in doing so, “failure” becomes not merely a judgment conferred upon the neighborhood, its residents, and their way of life, but rather a medium of exchange for and a condition of possibility of their futures, and thus elicits an additional amount of labor. The article will focus on these labors performed by the waste workers who live and work in the neighborhood.

Gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. This ethnographic article explores how trash's movements and labor reveal the spatialized and temporalized racial histories of neighborhood transformation in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), Brooklyn and the gentrified town of Norfolk, Virginia. Foregrounding the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I draw on two key interlocutors whose scavenging is conditioned by the “betterment”—community revitalization and “clean up”—programs that seek to displace them. As Sal “saves” Bed-Stuy by directing the flow of the dismembered ghetto, Superfly redirects coffee shop ephemera to black barbershops. By attending to how trash moves, Sal's and Superfly's labor make visible the material conditions of gentrification and point to how race and time are spatialized under racial capitalism.

Biomass briquettes have emerged as a development silver bullet, supposedly converting waste to wealth and tackling crises of unemployment, urban waste management, and rural deforestation. Briquettes have captured the imagination of international environmental NGOs operating in many African cities who promote briquette production, partnering with local Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) to improve urban livelihoods and sanitation. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Kampala, Uganda, this article examines the entanglement of material and immaterial labor in the production of briquettes. The outcome of these production processes is to capitalize Community, transforming everyday socio-spatial relations into an agential entrepreneurial subject fit to receive aid and carry out development. This has the additional effect of exacerbating differences of gender and education within the CBO, alienating the CBO from the rest of Bwaise, and reproducing the racial hierarchies of the development economy.

In recent years, growing emphasis on green economies and green capitalism have brought renewed attention to the waste practices of all places of work, including ones that are not directly linked to neither production nor waste management, such as schools, offices, and stores, as well as households, which European countries, in particular, are increasingly depicting as key sites of intervention for recycling economies. This trend represents a departure from historical waste management policies, which tend to view waste and waste work as separate from main economic and household activities, but is consistent with market economies’ trend of outsourcing dirty, demeaning, and dangerous labor to precarious and informal workforces, while at the same time granting them only limited legal access to waste materials and trash collection sites. The new forms of waste labor emerging from green capitalism's emphasis on private and small-scale recycling behaviors are largely invisible and unpaid; however, unlike more documented forms of global environmental racism denouncing the outsourcing of toxic materials to the Global South, they take place in industrialized countries where they are pushed upon disenfranchised minorities, such as informal workers, racialized ethnic minorities, and low-income women. In this article we examine women's participation in waste work through the lenses of waste, (in)visibility, and intersectionality. We draw on ethnographic and archival data collected in the city of Naples, Italy, an area with a prolonged history of toxic waste contamination and waste mismanagement which in recent years have drawn renewed scrutiny to public waste management as well as to everyday waste practices performed in households and workplaces, predominantly by women of different race and citizenship backgrounds. Through these experiences, we highlight how the increasing visibility of waste generated by green capitalism, coupled with the stigmatization and criminalization of informal waste collection and recycling, is generating new forms of social inequalities and exclusion.

Cheshire, Britain, and the towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world's first chemical factories and towns were created in the nineteenth century, is an especially important place to study historical responses to industrial pollution and its social costs. This paper, based on newly recovered archival sources about the Victorian alkali industry, explores the role of visual imagery, particularly drawings and lantern slides, in materializing the connection between labor in chemical trades, the disposal of waste, and poor health outcomes for diverse communities in the late nineteenth century. The paper will focus on the writer Robert Sherard's article “White Slaves of England” (1897), a work that, more than many of its time, drew national attention to the plight of nineteenth-century chemical workers by pictorializing the ways that work in heavy chemical industries, many of them involving waste and its disposal, affected individual workers and their lives. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the current state of scholarship on images, waste, and labor, areas for more needed work, and paths forward.