Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the ruins, rubble, and residues found around Uruguay's largest landfill. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research with waste pickers and managers, it analyses three discarded materials whose affordances have given rise to particular socio-material practices and futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the various ruins, rubble, and residues that are found around the perimeter of Montevideo's Felipe Cardoso landfill, the largest in Uruguay. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research with waste pickers and managers, it analyses three different discarded materials encountered around the landfill whose affordances have given rise to particular socio-material practices and futures.

The first material concerned is lead, a remainder of heavy metal dumping that was found in the earth of the 'pig town' shantytown and in the bodies of its children, leading, in the midst of a broader scandal of industrial lead poisoning in Montevideo, to the relocation of residents. The second material consist of potatoes, a remnant of agricultural dumping whose plants have become entangled with plastics, but which are still selectively harvested by local residents. The third set of material remains consists of the ruins of a composting plant, never fully operational, which has since housed various forms of waste and waste labour.

By focusing on different lively discards concentrated in a single site, the paper demonstrates how material remains and their infrastructures offer not only archaeological clues to the past, but also shape the future in indeterminate and unpredictable ways, generating instances of social change, conflict, and new forms of life. Anthropological research and oral histories are shown to be necessary to allow the unearthing of both 'past futures' and radical engagements with residues in the present.