Presentation long abstract

Barcelona's waste management system is increasingly witnessing the presence of informal waste pickers. We estimate the presence of around 2000 workers, mainly undocumented migrants, who collect, sort and sell scrap metals and objects from the streets and the unsorted trash. They sell them to the recycling industry and second-hand shops, contributing to the circularity of the city. However, the informal character of their work renders them highly vulnerable to social marginalisation and economic exploitation. Through the lenses of urban political ecology, we investigated the social and economic conditions under which they live and work. Particularly, we observed the stigma, socio-economic marginalisation and injustices they face in their interactions with the city. Theoretically, we developed our analysis around the concepts of capital accumulation and urban metabolism, understood as the interaction between material and energy flows and the socio-political dynamics underlying the circulation of these flows. Methodologically, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork based on participant observation and the collection of 100 surveys and 10 semi-structured interviews with informal recyclers. The analysis was backed by secondary data (e.g. waste statistics). Our findings show that informal recyclers contribute substantially to the recycling rates of the city. However, their work is invisibilised and undervalued through a process of labour informalisation based on racialisation. Drawing on Fraser’s conceptualisation of capitalism as an Institutionalised Social Order, we suggest the existence of a legal-institutional system of race-based structural informality that displaces their activity outside of the formal economy, allowing for higher levels of exploitation of the value they produce.