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Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on the entanglements of plastic pollution and climate change. I argue that plastics recycling start-ups in Uganda can be seen as experimental sites for imagining alternative futures and governing urban transition in a wider context of anthropocenic crisis.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on plastics recycling start-ups in Uganda as experimental sites for imagining alternative futures in a wider context of anthropocenic crisis. More specifically, I suggest that plastics recycling start-ups play an important role in shaping urban governance from below against policies that approach sustainable urban transition as a set of techno-logistical solutions. Plastic pollution relates to climate change in at least three ways. As an oil-derived material, it is part of the cause. As a central feature of what has been called the global waste crisis, it evokes similar anxieties about runaway change, and thirdly, in places with poor waste management, plastics end up in drainage systems and streams, thereby contributing to the severity of climate change-induced flooding. This paper focuses on Gulu city in northern Uganda where climate change mitigation is a key driver behind the current strategy for urban planning. Based on three months of fieldwork in the second half of 2025, I show how this strategy that has materialized through the construction of new infrastructures and establishment of environmental protection zones in the city tend to marginalize already vulnerable groups without addressing the lack of sustainable waste management. In response to these 'performative politics' (Fredricks 2018), self-proclaimed waste entrepreneurs and waste artists create alternative infrastructures of recycling that fuse the idea of a circular economy with social inclusion and emphasize localized innovation and knowledge production.

References:

Fredricks, Rosalind (2018). Garbage Citizenship. Vital infrastructures of Labour in Dakar, Senegal. Durham and London: Duke University Press