Contextualizing Waste and Recycling

In a refreshing departure from existing studies and understandings of urban informal economy in general, and, scavenging, waste and recycling economy in particular, the above book provides a contextualized picture of a waste and recycling chain, which study necessitated that the author supplement field economics with anthropology and sociology, quantitative with qualitative methodology, and traverse different levels—micro, meso and macro. The result of this multidisciplinary, multi-methodology and multi-level effort is a brilliant scholarly piece of work that is academically enriching, even as it calls into question received notions, and, very often unsubstantiated assertions, of and about, informal work, urban poor, waste pickers, and environmental concerns.

While literature relating to value-chain framework does not explicitly figure in the book, its implicit deployment enables the author to so structure the book that each chapter situates and captures, simultaneously, the complexity and relatedness of different ‘nodes’ of a value-chain. Thus, for example, while the book as a whole is concerned with poverty and the urban informal sector with specific focus on Delhi’s garbage collectors or scavengers and the plastic recycling or scrap dealers, it begins with those involved at the lowest levels of the waste recovery and recycling chain living in slums, and ends with those operating at the highest reaches of the plastic recycling value chain, namely, the wholesale scrap market situated a couple of kilometers away.