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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines debates over “Inclusive” EPR among members of the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, and argues that rejecting an inclusion narrative was simultaneously a demand to center waste picker knowledge of circular economy systems and to chart a just transition on their own terms.

Paper long abstract:

The circular economy is increasingly being constructed through new legal arrangements that require extended producer responsibility (EPR) over the lifecycle of consumer products. Such arrangements place producers at the center of circularity by requiring their financial investment and, in some cases, management of the recycling process. As EPR policies extend producer control over circularity, they have the potential to monopolize opportunities within emerging systems for multinationals and to exclude informal workers from performing work they have long performed as part of the circular economy. It is estimated that there is around 20 million waste pickers around the world reclaim, segregate, and sell materials from households and landfills for recycling or reuse. In 2021, the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers began implementing popular education to develop knowledge about EPR models that would ensure that waste pickers could be effectively included as stakeholders in policy debates. This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the implementation of “Inclusive EPR” popular education among waste pickers (canners) in New York City, and the collective formulation of a formal waste picker position on EPR, both of which evolved in the same time frame. The idea of ‘inclusion’ or ‘inclusive EPR’ as a frame was variously contested across the global network, particularly among long-established waste picker collectives in Latin America. These processes reveal efforts to push back against the decentering of waste pickers in the EPR arena by examining their demands to contribute knowledge and chart a just transition on their own terms.