Abstract

In Recycling Class, Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relationships around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru, India, itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions, to push our understanding of what types of coalitions deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives. Recycling Class links middle-class, sustainable consumption with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. Through ethnographic, community-based research, Anantharaman shows how diverse social groups adopt, contest, and modify neoliberal sustainability’s emphasis on market-based solutions, behavior change, and the aesthetic conflation of “clean” with “green”.

Anantharaman argues that middle class “communal sustainability” efforts create new avenues for waste picker organizations to make claims for infrastructural inclusion. Co-produced “DIY infrastructures” serve as sites of citizenship and political negotiation, challenging the technocratic and growth-based logics of dominant sustainability policies. Yet, these configurations reproduce class, caste, and gender-based divisions of labor. Tracing garbage politics in Bengaluru for over a decade, Anantharaman demonstrates that inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility and reveals the “win-win fallacy” of sustainability. Drawing on feminist geography and urban political ecology, Recycling Class argues that achieving just and ecologically safe cities ultimately requires resisting the seduction of neoliberal logics of growth, efficiency, and entrepreneurism, and rejecting casteism, to reconstruct an urban commons from the detritus of a commoditized society.