Presentation short abstract

Using a Foucauldian discard studies lens, we study why waste plays a central role in the dispossession of Karachi's indigenous fisherfolk, and how dumping of urban solid waste leads to loss of livelihoods and traditional fishing grounds at the coasts and in the mangrove ecosystems of Karachi.

Presentation long abstract

Indigenous Sindhi fisherfolk’s livelihoods and well-being in Karachi, Pakistan have been worsening substantially since the early 2000s due to urban solid waste and effluent dumping, land reclamation from the seas by the land mafia, and the resultant deterioration in socio-ecological conditions. By adopting a discard studies approach to analyze this case from a relatively understudied region in the Global South, this paper focuses on the wider context around waste entailing the specific power relations that uphold the dominant economic system leading to discard at Korangi (of urban and industrial solid waste) and of Korangi itself (its mangrove ecosystems, fisherfolk, fishing livelihoods, and culture). By analyzing the qualitative data we collected on the two fishing villages in Korangi—Ibrahim Hyderi and Rehri Goth—via in-depth interviews with key members of the fishing community, participant observation, and analysis of gray literature, the paper provides evidence for the changing relationships of the fisherfolk with the sea, their repression through consistently shifting definitions of legality, and their peaceful resistance. A Foucauldian lens adds to our analysis on power relations by identifying the state’s and economic elite’s top-down sanitation-based narratives, which “other” the fisherfolk as “unhygienic” and “aliens” to be discarded in favor of the “greater good” of maritime economic development and the Blue Revolution.

Presentation short abstract

Rivers and agricultural regions now act as hidden reservoirs of global plastic flows. Drawing on cases from Belgium and Turkey, this talk explores how waste infrastructures and government inaction generate socio-environmental injustice and transform hydro-social and agrarian worlds.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation gathers research on two distinct but interconnected sites where plastic waste has become physically embedded in the landscape: the waterways of central Belgium and the agricultural region of Adana in southern Turkey. In both locations, waste gradually accumulates over time, influencing local environments, labour dynamics, and government policies. Although different, these sites embody asymmetric economic relationships. Turkey remains one of Belgium’s main destinations for plastic waste exports.

In Belgium’s Dyle-Gette watershed, years of neglecting waste policies have transformed rivers into concealed storage sites for plastics and other toxic substances. When restoration groups and volunteers remove hundreds of tonnes of trash from riverbeds, they expose the extent of a problem that authorities have rarely acknowledged or addressed.

In Adana, global waste shipments arrive alongside agricultural activities. Plastic is burned, stored, and recycled within the same areas where food is cultivated and harvested. Farmers, residents, and waste and agricultural workers coexist with smoke, contaminated soil, and evolving health risks. While agriculture is often seen as productive and waste as destructive, in Adana, these systems overlap: plastic waste sustains economic interests while creating new vulnerabilities for people and land.

By examining these cases together, this presentation demonstrates how rivers and farmlands become silent repositories of global waste. It underscores how pollution becomes invisible, how responsibility is unevenly shared, and how daily labour sustains waste management systems.

Presentation short abstract

In 1984, the swedish mining company Boliden dumped 20,000 tons of toxic waste in Arica (Chile) with State approval. Homes were later built on the contaminated land, harming more than 12,000 people and inflicting slow violence. Despite resistance, the damage persists and the community stays neglected

Presentation long abstract

The Swedish mining company Boliden transported 20,000 tons of toxic waste to the city border of Arica, Chile. The waste arrived in 1984 during the Chilean dictatorship, and in 1990, under democracy, social housing was built in the contaminated area, exposing thousands to health risks. Authorities publicly acknowledged the danger only in 1997, after years of complaints that were dismissed. Medical professionals attributed illnesses to poverty and poor hygiene, using scientific discourse to deny the link to toxic exposure. This demonstrates how power and medical knowledge shaped what was recognized as harm, legitimizing practices that endangered marginalized communities. In 1999, part of the community sued the Chilean State. A 2005 ruling recognized the damage but compensated only some plaintiffs, fragmenting community unity. Later measures, such as a Health Center and Law 20.590, offered a palliative response without addressing the structural causes of the problem. In 2013, another group sought justice in Sweden by suing Boliden. However, in 2018 the company was acquitted, reinforcing how legal discourses reproduce colonial hierarchies by deciding whose suffering is acknowledged and whose is ignored. Despite more than four decades of slow violence, community resistance continues: Planeta Verde promotes environmental education; the Mamitas del Plomo Foundation advocates for strengthening Law 20.590; and the First Community Gathering for Environmental Justice brought together neighborhood associations to demand memory, reparation, and justice. This case reveals toxic waste colonialism as a prolonged regime of inequality that generates uneven geographies of harm while sustaining collective struggles for environmental justice in Latin-America.

Presentation short abstract

Using a health anthropology approach, this study examines the embodied experiences of residents of Eitzaga, a rural Basque community, who coexist with an industrial landfill, highlighting local knowledge, social conflict, and coping strategies amid environmental harm and institutional abandonment.

Presentation long abstract

In Eitzaga, a small rural neighborhood in the Basque Country, the forced coexistence with industrial waste raises urgent questions about the toxic territories and bodies within a context of institutional abandonment. Since the collapse of the Verter Recycling industrial landfill in 2020, Eitzaga has lived under the effects of a contamination that exceeds the environmental realm and permeates bodies, social ties, and the territorial fabric. More than an isolated accident, that event was yet another episode within the structural dynamics of institutional neglect and corporate collusion that have long shaped the neighborhood’s reality, durably altering the community’s living conditions.

This research focuses on how contamination is experienced beyond technical indicators, attending to local knowledge, shared memories, and embodied narratives that emerge in contexts of prolonged exposure to industrial waste. It explores the ways in which residents interpret, experience, and confront toxicity, as well as its impact on social relations and the environment they inhabit. The aim is to understand the forms of life that arise amid institutional abandonment and environmental violence, as well as the margins of agency that communities develop to confront what is often presented as inevitable. Through this lens, the project seeks to contribute to contemporary debates on environmental justice, territorial vulnerability, and embodied toxicity.

Presentation short abstract

By tracing the mechanisms empirically, this research contributes to critical scholarship on political geographies of waste and advances theoretical understanding of how Global North circularity initiatives reshape lived realities in Global South contexts.

Presentation long abstract

Circular economy (CE) projects are predominantly examined inside the Global North, however their tangible impacts are increasingly evident in Global South contexts due to interrelated epistemic, financial, and material flows. Recognizing these flows is necessary since they pose important questions concerning environmental justice, especially in relation to the distribution of benefits and burdens along global value chains.

Using Dutch-Kenyan waste relations as a critical case study, this research demonstrates how this shift operates through three key mechanisms: (1) epistemic circulation that reframes waste and material circularity through market-oriented knowledge systems, (2) financial flows that are channeled toward formalized circular infrastructures, and (3) material flows that transform waste into tradeable commodities. Kenya's dual position as both a destination for Dutch waste exports and a recipient of Dutch CE development funding makes it an ideal site for examining how these mechanisms interact and materialize in practice.

Through an environmental justice lens, the paper argues that circular initiatives indeed extend market logics into previously non-market spheres - particularly waste systems that functioned as commons. This transformation creates new forms of territorialization that concentrate waste treatment activities in Global South contexts while undermining informally organized, community-based approaches. The result is the displacement and diminished agency of informal workers and communities who previously provided both environmental services and livelihood opportunities, effectively transforming Global South countries such as Kenya into subordinated links within global waste value chains.

Presentation short abstract

Prisons operate as toxic waste infrastructures, managing surplus lives under racial capital. Our participatory action research challenges this logic, centering lived experience to re-humanize incarcerated people and affirm recognition, accountability, and dignity.

Presentation long abstract

Carceral environments, like their inhabitants, remain spatially and politically 'out of sight' (Nixon, 2011), despite being hotspots of intersecting climate risks, contamination, and extreme human vulnerability. This paper examines carceral facilities as waste infrastructures – places where human beings rendered surplus to racial capital are warehoused alongside environmental hazards, treated as disposable, and exposed to harms they cannot escape. We use a participatory action approach, through semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people and advocacy partners, and campaign events aimed at creating a New Jersey Bill of Environmental Rights for Incarcerated People. Our research reveals how environmental harm is (re-)produced, (re-)lived, and normalized inside prison walls through three interlocking processes of (1) silenced risk communication; (2) embodied toxicity and health deterioration; and (3) institutional abandonment and expendability of life. Many incarcerated people come from neighborhoods already functioning as waste sinks – places marked by industrial pollution, unhealthy housing, heat islands, and respiratory illness – and return to them with worsened health. Rather than an aberration, carceral waste exposure is actually embedded in a continuum of place-based environmental injustice and ‘slow violence’ across space and time.

While prisons may function as infrastructures for managing toxic waste and human excess, the participatory research informing an ongoing advocacy campaign seeks to break that logic. By re-humanizing incarcerated people through centering their lived experiences of environmental harm, this work aims to shift public narratives from waste to worth, and to position carceral environmental injustice as a site of necessary intervention, accountability, and collective resistance.

Presentation short abstract

This article explores the narratives of waste management executives in Belgium regarding their companies and the sector, and how these can reflect and perpetuate Wasteocene relationships.

Presentation long abstract

Waste significantly impacts the environments in which we live, work, and play. Simultaneously, it is also shaped by the social and spatial practices embedded in these environments.

In our transdisciplinary research, we adopt the Wasteocene perspective (Armiero, 2021), which emphasizes how certain people, materials, and places are made disposable through systemic power relations. The management of the material flows is deeply political, reflecting and reinforcing global and local inequalities in labor and environmental exposure. The waste sector is characterized by high occupational risks, complex transnational processing chains, and environmental challenges. Workers are exposed to hazardous substances and ergonomic strain, particularly in outsourced or informal labor contexts.

In Belgium, waste management is carried out by both for-profit and non-profit organizations. These groups not only tend to cover different waste streams (the former are mostly active in industrial, metal, construction, and plastic waste industries, whilst the latter is active in the waste treatment of electronics, textiles, and other household items), but also inherently have different missions. We explore the narratives of both sectors: how they translate their profit, planet, and people missions and the implications this has for employees' working conditions.

We conducted 60 interviews with waste management executives in Belgium. Through a thematic analysis of their narratives, we examine how managers present their companies and sectors, and discuss how this can reflect and perpetuate Wasteocene dynamics.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Mumbai's informal waste recycling through environmental justice, tracing toxic exposures falling on Dalit and minority workers. I foreground plural resistances: vernacular knowledge systems, place attachment, and collective refusals against technocratic displacement.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines Mumbai's informal waste recycling economy through an environmental justice lens, foregrounding both the precarious labour conditions that sustain the city's metabolism and the resistant knowledge practices through which workers navigate toxic systems. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research in Dharavi's recycling clusters, I trace how waste systems structure differential vulnerabilities along intersecting lines of caste, class, gender, and migration status, producing what Davies (2019) terms "slow violence" through cumulative bodily harm.

The majority of waste pickers and workers in Mumbai are from Dalit or minority Muslim communities, populations already subject to social discrimination who become further marked by the stigma of "filthy" work (Chaturvedi & Gidwani, 2010). Workers report respiratory problems, skin infections, reduced lifespans, and substance use to cope with toxic conditions. This is environmental injustice embodied, the metabolic burden of processing urban detritus falling disproportionately on those already marginalised.

Yet workers are not passive victims of toxic geographies. Plural resistances emerge through what Ottinger (2013) calls "community-led science": vernacular languages of valuation, intergenerationally transmitted sorting expertise, homegrown tools and techniques, and tacit knowledge constituting sophisticated "citizen sciences." Workers also resist through place attachment, returning to Dharavi despite relocation, through informal networks that subvert regulatory exclusion, and through collective refusals to participate in traceability regimes that would formalise their dispossession. As technocratic circular economy policies threaten displacement by reframing waste as service delivery rather than livelihood (Gidwani, 2015), these knowledge practices become sites of contestation over whose expertise counts.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the role of Romanian Roma women in informal waste picking in Barcelona, framing recycling as a family project. It highlights the ambivalence of their labour: it reproduces community resilience while remaining largely hidden within public narratives.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyses how intersectionality, i.e. the simultaneous operation of multiple and overlapping fields of domination, unfolds within contexts of environmental injustice, by exploring the contribution of Romanian Roma women to informal waste picking in Barcelona. In the city, sub-Saharan individuals and Romanian Roma family groups constitute the main informal recycling workforce. Within the Romanian Roma community, waste picking is organised through kinship networks and collective resource management. Labour is divided by gender, age, and space, with men collecting and transporting materials, and women and children sorting, repairing, and preparing them for resale within domestic spaces.

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, the study examines the everyday practices of Roma women engaged in waste-based activities, framing waste picking as a family project that depends substantially on their contributions. It argues that while women’s labour in waste picking remains largely invisible in public narratives and institutional frameworks, in this case partly due to its domestic dimension and the resulting lack of visibility, it plays a central role in both sustaining the success of recycling activities and so in reproducing community resilience. This ambivalence, namely women’s labour as both reproductive and hidden, situates the study within Stefania Barca’s concept of forces of reproduction. In this perspective, Roma women’s work embodies both the structural inequalities embedded in waste picking and the agency that takes shape within the very constraints of this work. In these terms, this study explores the intersections of gender, class, and race within the context of the urban margins.

Presentation short abstract

Rapid urbanisation and inadequate infrastructure complicate sanitation in off-grid towns in Global South. In Alleppey, mechanised septic-tank emptiers work informally and their work is criminalised despite being essential. They navigate legal grey zones, public opposition, and environmental risks.

Presentation long abstract

Rapid urbanization places significant pressure on inadequately equipped towns, particularly in terms of sanitation. Despite its critical public health importance, urban sanitation remains largely neglected by governments in India. Faecal sludge management (FSM) has emerged as a pressing challenge, especially in off-grid sanitation towns. Urban local bodies struggle to manage rising waste volumes and face acute infrastructure deficits. Although manual scavenging has officially declined, caste-based hierarchies persist in FSM-related work. This study focuses on mechanised sanitation service providers who operate informally in and around Alleppey town, India, a region marked by high groundwater levels and frequent flooding that complicate sanitation infrastructure. These private providers play essential roles in waste management in this ecologically fragile area, yet they operate in a legal limbo. They are criminalised by the state and local communities, but their service is indispensable. Communities depend on their services but oppose treatment plants. Consequently, sanitation workers are forced to dump waste in open spaces or water bodies.

Using qualitative methods, this research examines how informal sanitation workers navigate complex legal landscapes that marginalise them while they fill critical sanitation gaps. It highlights the grey zones between legality and illegality and the environmental risks posed to peri-urban commons. Carried out mostly at night, their informal work faces police crackdowns, illustrating contradictions in sanitation governance. This study calls for reimagining sanitation governance by recognizing informality’s vital role and also to theorise fluid legal boundaries. The study contributes to debates on urban sanitation, Informal labour and legality in the Global South.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how changing waste metabolisms and political economies in Global South cities generate environmental conflicts involving waste pickers. A network analysis of 70 EJAtlas cases shows how privatization and incineration marginalise recyclers, who mobilise to defend livelihoods.

Presentation long abstract

Waste pickers play a critical role in urban waste management in the Global South, often serving as the primary agents of recycling. However, they face increasing threats from socio-economic exclusion and environmental injustice. This article examines the drivers of conflicts involving waste pickers in Global South metropolises, using 70 cases from the Environmental Justice Atlas. We analyze how changes in the materiality of waste (e.g., increased waste generation) and the political economy of waste management (e.g., privatization, and incineration) contribute to the marginalization of waste pickers. Our mixed-method approach, combining qualitative coding, network analysis, and system dynamics modeling, reveals that these socio-metabolic reconfigurations result in ecological distribution conflicts. Findings show that privatization and new waste-to-energy technologies intensify competition over waste, leading to its enclosure and the persecution of waste pickers. This shift reflects the increasing value of waste as an opportunity for capital accumulation through dispossession and contamination. Waste pickers, however, often mobilize to defend their livelihoods, forming alliances with residents and NGOs. This article contributes to understanding environmental conflicts by highlighting the co-constitutive relationship between materiality and political economy. It situates waste pickers' struggles within urban environmentalism of the poor.

By foregrounding labour, value and power struggles around urban waste, the article advances political ecology research on socio-metabolic conflicts in rapidly changing cities. It also offers insights for policy debates on inclusive recycling, showing how formalisation agendas often overlook structural inequalities. Our findings contribute to rethinking just, socially grounded waste governance in the Global South.

Presentation short abstract

The research is an investigation of the waste pickers’ informal economy in Palermo, South Italy, and their potential contribution to the co-production of a local just circular economy, through an action-research process, involving the association of the second-hand street market Sbaratto.

Presentation long abstract

For decades, waste-pickers in Palermo have collected materials and objects discarded by local consumption processes, giving them new value in various invisible chains. While a new incinerator project is planned, an actual circular economy strategy is missing, and the informal workers are far to be considered part of an ecological transition.

The theoretical background of the research work is at a crossroad between the emerging just circular economy framework, the post-growth social metabolism, and the urban informality studies. The former aims to incorporate the environmental justice, gender equality and ecological labour in the mainstream circular economy model.

An action-research process is modelled, involving the association of the second-hand market of Palermo in a mutual knowledge agreement. From the one side, a better understanding of the power relationships around the local waste system is provided, along with the interactions between informal activities and the formal waste collection system and workers. From the other side, a bottom-up investigation of the informal reusing, repairing and trading economies and their socio-ecological impacts is lead, in order to stimulate a reflexivity on a community waste prevention strategy.