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Contribution short abstract:

Delhi is currently faced by a burgeoning waste crisis. By focussing on human and non-human relations around a landfill site, I examine multiple forms of dependences and recycling practices that sustain and reproduce liveable city spaces and processes of value creation.

Contribution long abstract:

Delhi is currently reeling under the burden of excessive increase in discarded materials—city’s trash, increasing the burden on landfill sites. The growing urbanisation and consumption pattern has disrupted city’s waste management processes. Decades of waste dumping, lack of formal recycling facilities and ecologically sustainable infrastructure (both human and technological) has had a deleterious effect on the everyday life of neighbouring residents and has led to visible socio-ecological (anthropocentric) crises around the landfills—in our case Bhalswa landfill, located on the north-west periphery of Delhi. The increase in fires and respiratory diseases, declining water quality, and oozing leachate in the surrounding water body is a result of above-mentioned processes. The effect of which is borne by marginalised human and non-human entities. The human entities such as waste pickers mostly from lower-caste communities and non-human entities (mostly animals) such as cows and pigs around the landfill site bear the burden of city’s detritus, while clearing city’s waste. Through a study of human and non-human relations around the landfill site, this paper will examine multiple forms of dependences and recycling/repair-work that sustain and reproduce liveable city spaces, and processes of value creation—both social and economic. In doing so, I examine the relations that humans and non-human forge with discarded materials and how the nature of these relations vary depending on the caste, gender, class and human-animal relations. For example, waste pickers are dependent on the landfill because of their everyday livelihood by converting waste in value; whereas milch-cattle dairy owners (mostly from dominant OBC communities) in the surrounding areas of the landfill leave their cows on the landfill for them to feed off the garbage and later sell milk produce of these cows in middle-class colonies. In both the cases there is a unique dependence on the landfill sustaining city’s metabolism.