Rubbish Belongs to the Poor

Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons

Patrick O'Hare

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780745341408
• eBook ISBN: 9781786807496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Rubbish. Waste. Trash. Whatever term you choose to describe the things we throw away, the connotations are the same; of something dirty, useless and incontrovertibly 'bad'. But does such a dismissive rendering mask a more nuanced reality?

In Rubbish Belongs to the Poor, Patrick O'Hare journeys to the heart of Uruguay's waste disposal system in order to reconceptualize rubbish as a 21st century commons, at risk of enclosure. On a giant landfill site outside the capital Montevideo we meet the book's central protagonists, the 'classifiers': waste-pickers who recover and recycle materials in and around its fenced but porous perimeter. Here the struggle of classifiers against the enclosure of the landfill, justified on the grounds of hygiene, is brought into dialogue with other historical and contemporary enclosures - from urban privatizations to rural evictions - to shed light on the nature of contemporary forms of capitalist dispossession.

Supplementing this rich ethnography with the author's own insights from dumpster diving in the UK, the book analyses capitalism's relations with its material surpluses and what these tell us about its expansionary logics, limits and liminal spaces. Rubbish Belongs to the Poor ultimately proposes a fundamental rethinking of the links between waste, capitalism and dignified work.

1

‘All because We Bought Those Damn Trucks’

Hygienic Enclosure and Infrastructural Modernity

The office where I conducted fieldwork during the Uruguayan summer of 2014 is no doubt much like other public sector workplaces in Montevideo. The public servants there complain about broken air conditioning, haggle over the taking of holidays, joke and flirt with one another, and enjoy endless sips of mate tea in order to deal with endless amounts of paperwork. Its principal distinguishing feature was the responsibility it held for authorising and classifying the thousands of tonnes of waste deposited daily at Felipe Cardoso, Montevideo and Uruguay’s largest landfill. In travelling to the Laboratorio de Higiene from my house opposite the landfill, I undertook the reverse journey of Montevideo’s waste, which before reaching Felipe Cardoso had to pass through the office, in one form or another.

I had heard of the municipal Laboratorio from waste-pickers who had formalised their activity and needed municipal approval for the collection and disposal of waste. Given the institutional title, I expected to encounter a scientific environment when I arrived to interview the director. Indeed, most of the Laboratorio’s small team were trained chemists who wore white lab coats. For the most part, however, they encountered waste not under the microscope, but in paper applications to be processed, approved, or declined. Under the direction of the middle-aged director Joana, a light and humorous atmosphere prevailed. After our interview, she agreed to let me return to conduct participant observation once a week. On my first day, ever keen to make myself useful, I was asked to order the office cupboard, disposing of records that had already been digitised. It was with a meandering journey through such paperwork that my archival research into the history of Montevidean waste management began, while I simultaneously noted down the queries that passed through the office. A shipload of shark meat had mistakenly arrived at the port – could it be dumped in Felipe Cardoso? A ladies’ retirement home founded in the nineteenth century was updating its TV sets – would the Intendencia collect the old televisions? A private high school was replacing its scientific equipment – could they dispose of anatomical skeletons along with test tubes and Bunsen burners? I had already encountered plenty of discards as they tumbled out of trucks in and around the landfill: now I met them classified according to industry, calculated in kilograms and tonnes, and filed away under diverse rubrics.

The Intendencia is the most important actor involved in shaping Montevideo’s ‘wastescape’, a fact equally relevant for clasificadores as it is for waste scholars. It is the Intendencia that defines and subdivides the city’s waste; that stipulates what should happen to materials once they are thus classified; that collects refuse from most of Montevideo’s citizens and grants concessions for the collection of the rest; and that owns and operates the city landfill. Specifically, the Intendencia has a fleet of around thirty public waste collection trucks, while the Consorcio Ambiental del Plata (CAP), a subsidiary of the Spanish multinational Abengoa, which holds the concession to collect waste and recyclables in the centre of Montevideo (Municipio B), operates seven trucks and four smaller vehicles (Abengoa 2014). Together, these collect waste from over 13,000 waste containers throughout the city. In their labour, clasificadores are governed by municipal decrees; they brush up against the materiality of municipal waste infrastructure at the landfill or on the streets, and they act against normative processes of linear disposal when diverting materials from the waste-stream. Rather than mere background, municipal regulations and infrastructures have important affective and political implications for the everyday labour of waste-picking.

This chapter has three central arguments that are organised by a structure that attempts to model the linear ideal whereby materials are first defined as waste, second contained, and third eliminated. At the same time, just as mixing materials is integral to waste management, we find a muddling of sequence in this model and chapter, so that infrastructures of containment and elimination designed to act on waste can in fact create it. This then, is the first argument: the classification of everything that is discarded as waste calls forth an infrastructure that attempts to prevent access to and consumption of discards by way of their destruction. Second, I sketch out the contours of what in the introduction I described as Uruguay’s infrastructural modernity, arguing that its substantive feature is a process of ‘hygienic enclosure’, whereby discarded materials are enclosed at various scales, through the use of various technologies – containers, trucks, fenced landfills – and legal procedures, such as the establishment of municipal property rights over waste. The rationale for such manoeuvres has overwhelmingly been framed in terms of efforts to maintain the hygienic integrity of the body politic and that of the individual clasificador.

Understood within the framework of hygienic enclosure, the activity of Montevidean clasificadores is primarily seen as illicit. Beyond this optic, however, and this is the chapter’s third core insight, it can also be seen as an infrastructure in its own right, albeit one that exists in the shadow of the state and takes advantage of waste as a commons. As ‘matter that enables the movement of other matter’ (Larkin 2013: 329), waste services are not like other infrastructures, such as roads allowing transport, or pylons permitting the passage of an electrical current. Instead, the collection and disposal of waste enables our economies to continue with activities of mass production and consumption. Against the ideal of infrastructural and municipal modernity then, clasificadores, with their bags, carts, horses, and bicycles, can be seen contributing to this infrastructural provision. In the final section I expand on the idea of shadow infrastructure, and demonstrate how the concept might help us to analyse processes of dispossession and modernisation outside of Uruguay and outside the area of waste. For this I make a series of ‘partial connections’ (Strathern 1991) that link the threats faced by clasificadores in Uruguay to those encountered by traditional midwives, gypsy scrap dealers, and informal lenders.

Classification and the creation of municipal solid waste

What is waste in Montevideo and how has this changed over time? This seemingly simple question opens up onto a series of rather more complex ones. What commodities and materials are or have been produced and consumed in Uruguay? By which processes are materials classified as waste, and according to what criteria? Can a material’s classification as waste be definitive or is it always disputed? What I offer in this section is not a complete historical account, but rather a description of the major trends in the Uruguayan economy, the framework for the emergence of municipal solid waste (MSW) in Montevideo and the key distinction between waste-as-discard and waste-as-unusable-material. I begin with the changing composition of Montevideo’s waste-stream before turning to the ways that municipal decrees and infrastructures not only manage but also create waste, and the ethical implications for those who act in a moral, as well as a political, economy of discards.

Wastes, in the sense of materials surplus to human requirements (Gille 2010: 1051), have been present in Montevideo since the city’s founding in the early eighteenth century. To give but one example, European travellers were horrified to find cattle so abundant in the area that most of the animal was simply left to rot after having been killed. ‘They do not get [from the entire cow or bull] but the leather and the tongues, which they leave to dry in the sun’, commented the eighteenth-century French traveller Fesche, aghast (in Duviols 1985: 14). Briefly joined with Argentina as part of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, Uruguay gained its independence between 1811 and 1825 after a struggle for the territory between Argentina and Brazil was ultimately settled by British intervention (Faraone 1986 [1974]). This cemented a connection with Britain that would continue, as the rapidly industrialising superpower accounted for the lion’s share of Uruguay’s imports and exports into the twentieth century (1986 [1974]: 48).

Uruguay had inauspicious beginnings. Faraone characterises the post-independence country as ‘a depopulated territory, [with] primitive means of production, absolute dependence on Europe for the provision of finished items, [and] abundance of products generated by the cattle industry’ (1986 [1974]: 20). From cattle, the primarily rural economy diversified into sheep, whose wool supplied the European market. From 700,000 animals in 1852, the country had 13 million by 1871. Between 1870 and 1913, leather, wool, and meat accounted for 66 per cent of the country’s exports (Roman 2016: 32). This provided not only a period of export-led economic growth but also, inevitably, an accumulation of wastes associated with these trades. With a relatively sparse population that mostly lived in rural areas, and without much of its own industry, the weight of the wool and cattle trade as part of an overall waste-stream would not have been marginal. The 1875–1900 period bore witness to the expansion of capitalism. By 1897, Montevideo’s population had reached 280,000 and the city boasted almost 2,500 industrial establishments, of which 70 per cent were dedicated to food production (beer, sugar, flour, pasta), clothing, furniture, and construction, with glass, matches, and textiles also present (Faraone 1986 [1974]: 44). The city’s landfill boomed with the products of nascent industry and a growing population, as well as those imported ‘luxury goods’ funded partly by economic growth and partly by debt (1986 [1974]: 53).

Municipal solid waste is an object that can hardly precede the emergence of the municipality as a political form. The work of cleaning and hygiene can be understood as activities that consolidated the authority of the state in Montevideo as the city entered a period of post-bellum stability in the late nineteenth century (see Fredericks 2014: 536). The Public Sanitation Act of 1888 was one of the first decrees issued by the fledgling city government, the Junta Económica Administrativa, making it responsible for ‘extracting rubbish’ from citizens, as well as a tax that would pay for the service (Fernández y Medina 1904). The decree formed part of wider municipal attempts to control the boundaries and material flows of a growing city increasingly perceived as disorderly (Baracchini and Altezor 2010). As an everyday presence, the local state became embodied in the men who picked up the rubbish as well as those who guarded the streets after dark.

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Montevideo’s municipal government¹ took responsibility for materials surplus to the households located within the boundaries of the city walls. There is scarce quantitative data on the composition of household discards at that time, but this is compensated for somewhat by the rich description of late nineteenth-century waste (collection) given by flâneur, and future mayor of Montevideo, Daniel Muñoz. In the Montevidean household kitchen of 1883, he recounts, writing under the pseudonym of Sansón Carrasco:

there is usually a rubbish box (cajon de basura), similar to a hospital coffin…. Affluent houses tend to have a reinforced box, presentable, decent even, if this word can be used to describe a rubbish receptacle, but the most fashionable junk used for this purpose is dilapidated kerosene tin cans that can be seen on the pavements every morning, ready for the visit of the rubbish man and brimming with all kinds of waste: rags, papers, vegetables, bones, and every type of filth that the broom gathers up during the day, from the living room to the furthest corner of the house. In the rubbish box, one can study the intimate life of each family: what they eat, what they spend, what they waste, what they save, what they work as, and what they wear. It is the index of private life, the sum of what was done yesterday, the household accounts book. If the rubbish men were observant, they would end up getting to know all the city’s inhabitants intimately, finding out about their customs, their vices and their virtues, just by paying a little attention to what comes out of each box as he empties them into his carts. (Carrasco 2006 [1883]: 36)

Carrasco goes on to describe the ragged appearance of the rubbish man, or basurero, who carries a bag into which he separates ‘cabbage, lettuce and cauliflower leaves, pieces of bread and bundles of straw’ that he will use to feed his donkey and follows one of the ‘seventy rubbish carts which leave Montevideo daily’ to its destination at Montevideo’s first recorded dump, overlooking the Río de la Plata in the Buceo district and adjacent to the cemetery (Carrasco 2006 [1883]: 36). ‘On arrival at the corner’, he writes, ‘what horror! I found myself in the kingdom of filth, vast, stinking, with mountains of waste and abysses of junk, over which an atmosphere of sour vapours floated, trembling in the light of the sun with dizzying reverberations’ (2006 [1883]: 37).

Carrasco continues detailing the materials he encounters: ‘here a pile of jars, particularly those of Oriental Tonic, the bombastic hair regenerator from Lanman and Kemp; there a pyramid of bottles; further a stock of broken glass’ (2006 [1883]: 38). He catalogues pieces of ‘bronze, copper and lead; latches and knockers, lamp tubes, broken gas contraptions, taps, bits of pipe and a thousand other knick-knacks’ (2006 [1883]: 38). Set apart is the iron, consisting of ‘keys, nails, screws, old bolts, and a hundred other trifles that evade classification’ (2006 [1883]: 39). Then there is the zinc and tinplate, which includes: ‘pieces of roofing, jars of conserve, tins of oil, pots of paint and varnish, and every other type of fabricated can, all dented, squashed and pierced’ (2006 [1883]: 39).

In Carrasco’s account, we find organic food waste, a range of metals, paper, glass, bones, and rags. His trip from the household to the landfill is not a literary sleight of hand which elides the industrial and commercial wastes produced in Montevideo: the materials he encounters at Buceo have indeed mostly passed through the household. Industry produced wastes or by-products, but these were not policed or collected by the municipality at the factory gates. Until the 1970s, the Laboratorio’s director Joana told me, solid and liquid industrial wastes were often mixed and pumped into rivers and in later years the sewage system, from where they eventually ended up at sea.

If there was a lack of municipal concern for solid and liquid factory wastes at that time, the same did not hold for the gases or ‘miasmas’ emanating from industry. In mid-nineteenth-century Montevideo, ‘doctors, police, press, and citizens shared a deeply rooted belief that unhealthy air generated and transmitted illnesses’ (Alpini and Delfino 2016: 383). The central task of the Public Hygiene Council (Junta de Higiene Pública), when it was created in 1836 following a severe outbreak of scarlet fever, was to propose public health measures that would prevent air-borne diseases (2016: 383). The council advised citizens not to throw air-corrupting materials onto the streets, while businesses suspected of being ‘the origin of emanations degrading the constitution of the atmosphere’ were required to relocate beyond the old walls of the city (2016: 383). Slaughterhouses, brick kilns, soap and candle factories were targeted by decree in 1836, to which were added, in 1868, those producing starch, leather, fireworks, and animal fat (Fernández y Medina 1904).

During the First World War, Uruguay sided with the Allies, while during the Second World War it remained neutral; in both it supplied products such as meat, wool and leather to the warring parties, leading to a period of economic prosperity and a rising population that reached over 2 million in the 1950s. Already, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Uruguayan politicians, conscious of the structural disadvantages of importing most goods from Europe, had sought to impose measures to protect emerging national industries, such as textiles, sugar, and meat processing (Fernández y Medina 1904: 45). Meat in particular benefited from foreign investment and the advent of refrigerator technology that allowed it to cross the Atlantic in large ships – meat-packers in Uruguay are known as frigorificos or ‘fridges’ (see Edgerton 2008). Taxes were imposed on imported products that could be produced in Uruguay, and duty exemptions were put in place for machinery and parts needed by these industries. Such policies would eventually become known by the 1930s as import-substitution-industrialisation. In other Latin American countries these were specifically tied to centre-left governments – in Uruguay this was less the case, but it is true that protectionist measures would be loosened by the dictatorship (1973–85).

It is widely considered that Uruguay’s golden period ended in the early 1960s: some describe a continuous period of growth from the beginning of the twentieth century until then, while others prefer a more accurate stop-start chronology that accounts for dips such as that occasioned by the Great Depression. In 1910, Uruguay was positioned fifteenth in world GDP per capita, the second most prosperous economy in Latin America, behind only its neighbour Argentina (Roman 2016: 22). It was in the 1920s that Uruguay’s nickname of the ‘Switzerland of the Americas’ was coined by a North American journalist, a sobriquet endlessly promoted by subsequent Uruguayan governments. The name reflected not only the standard of living but also the predominantly white European nature of its population (in part due to an effective extermination of original inhabitants), its relative political stability, and, in some accounts, its strong banking sector. In the decade following the Second World War, not only did per capita income increase by more than 50 per cent, it did so as part of an economic model that reduced levels of inequality (Bértola 2005: 28) through policies such as the establishment of collective bargaining (consejos salariales).

In the first half of the 1950s, Uruguay’s growth was particularly exceptional, with pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘La Basura Es de los Pobres’ – ‘Rubbish Belongs to the Poor’
• 1 ‘All because We Bought Those Damn Trucks’: Hygienic Enclosure and Infrastructural Modernity
• 2 The Mother Dump: Montevideo’s Landfill Commons
• 3 Classifiers’ Kinship and Embedded Waste
• 4 Care, (Mis)Classification, and Containment at the Aries Recycling Plant
• 5 Precarious Labour Organising and ‘Urban Alambramiento’
• Conclusion: Circular Economies, New Enclosures, and the Commons Sense
• Notes
• References
• Index