Paper short abstract:

In the aftermath of two major disasters with (un)predictable impacts—the pandemic and earthquake—Istanbul’s informal recycling workers are compelled to navigate the changing valuation and accumulation of waste, adjusting their everyday lives amidst infrastructural collapse.

Paper long abstract:

On February 6, 2023, a magnitude of 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey, Kurdistan, and Syria, ranking among the world’s deadliest earthquakes in the past decade. This catastrophe claimed thousands of lives, leaving in its wake a trail of collective trauma, devastation, and disbelief. Turkey, long recognized as an “earthquake country”, with the lasting impacts of 1999 earthquakes, was expected to have better prepared for a predictable, if not an expected, disaster in the region.

Disasters often inhabit the liminal space between predictability and unpredictability. For instance, although the COVID-19 pandemic as a global disaster was not foreseeable, many anticipated the breakdown of healthcare infrastructures across the world. This paper turns to waste as a persistent and predictable by-product of infrastructural collapse following disasters. While not at the forefront, waste, in its various forms, is a foreseeable excess heavily impacted by disasters, rapidly accumulating with the absence of infrastructures to manage it. Based on a 15-month ethnography in Istanbul amongst informal recycling workers, I examine the unpredictable implications of disasters on the recycling industry and urban waste infrastructures, resulting in fluctuations in prices of recyclable waste, emergence of mountains of hazardous rubble, or disruptions in waste trade with months-long border closures. How do informal recycling workers, haunted by the pervasive fear of an imminent Istanbul earthquake maneuver their everyday lives collecting waste while expecting a potential catastrophic displacement? What forms of collaborative efforts emerge when workers are forced to survive off collecting materials suddenly devalued in the post-pandemic era?