KATE O’NEILL: I talk about waste as a resource at a time when we think about all resources as being under great pressure. We’re running out of oil, we’re running out of timber, fisheries are under threat. And so you’ve got all of these limits that we see on resources, and waste seems to be one of the few resources, paradoxically, that is growing rather than shrinking. So I started to think of it as some resource that we’re starting to tap into, and that’s kind of where this notion of a frontier comes from. You see both need and technology leading to opening up this resource for general exploitation. And it’s all about conflict, too. This idea that a whole bunch of outside actors are kind of converging on this frontier and maybe displacing who was there.

I’m Kate O’Neill. I am a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at University of California at Berkeley. My book is Waste.

The personal beginnings of this book go way back to when I was tiny and got really interested in picking up litter from the playground, in figuring out where trash went. My parents would take us to the local tip, or landfill—tip is the Australian phrase for it. So it was always fascinating for me. And then as I went through school and college and graduate school, I shifted more to looking at politics, and the politics of the environment. Then I had the opportunity to take classes in environmental justice and those classes exposed me to the impacts of hazardous waste, particularly on minority and marginalized communities. So I blended that with a focus on global politics and wrote my dissertation and first book on the hazardous waste trade. And then I left the field of waste behind for a while and I worked on global environmental politics and governance. I worked on mad cow disease as a global issue, environmental science fiction—so, a bunch of things. And then I was asked by the editor of Polity Press to contribute a book to a series on resources. It took me a years to write it. I’m glad I waited that long because about two years ago this kind of seismic shift happened in global recycling markets when China stopped importing all kinds of scrap, including paper and plastic scrap from the rest of the world. And that really gave me a hook on which to hang the whole book.

The chapter where I talked about different kinds of waste was the hardest one to write. That really did take me more than a year of back-and-forth and edits and, like, begging friends to read the manuscript. Because it’s really hard to wrap your head around the different kinds of waste. A lot of people that talk to me are very focused on consumer household waste. What do they recycle? Where does that go? What is their responsibility for doing this and why are they kind of producing so much waste? And that lens is certainly one way. I do encourage people to step back and look at the broader structures: at issues of how products are designed and sold and advertised; at why we create the waste we do. So there’s that set of structural perspectives.

And then to look at waste as objects and to look at the travel of those objects. So I looked at electronics and food and plastics. Cars are another example. Tires, bicycles. They’re good for tracing how wastes move, what the afterlife of all of these objects are as they move through these global systems. And then also to think about wastes as streams. And then you’ve got these other categories that are really kind of mind blowing that either cut across the traditional lines or just their own thing. Nuclear waste is something that we’ve never dealt with as a society; it’s not got really much value at all. One of my growing interests is in disaster waste, and that’s waste that is left over from hurricanes, from fires, from war, from other kinds of cataclysms. And with climate change rapidly accelerating, we’re seeing it becoming a growing issue. These are wastes that have to be separated. Some you’ve got valuables, you’ve got hazards, you’ve got rubble, you’ve got carcasses, you’ve got human remains. And all of that requires a lot of sensitivity to think about and deal with.

A lot of people have these assumptions that the waste trade is all about wealthy countries dumping on poorer countries. And I found in research throughout the years that this is really a misleading perception and one that in many ways is not helpful. I mean, I think it does depict and get at some of the very worst examples of say, dumping the most toxic wastes onto poor communities at home and also overseas. But it overlooks some things. One is that it’s not all about north-south. Many of the wealthier countries that are producing waste are in the Global South, as we would broadly define it: China, India, Brazil, other countries like that. The networks along which wastes travel are very complicated and often run from poor country to rich country, from middle income to poor country, and so on and so forth.

Informal waste work is one of the world’s oldest professions. You can go back right through to the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and probably a lot earlier, and see people making a living from dealing in junk and scrap. And this is now a livelihood that supports tens of millions around the world. It’s huge. And really thinking and looking at how waste workers depict themselves in the Global South. How they organize gives you a view of a profession that is definitely more lucrative than other informal work. Some people describe it as more politically powerful, more open. I think part of that is that waste workers are not trapped in factories or sweatshops; they work outside, they have more connections with each other, community groups outside actors can make more connections with them. It seems to lend itself to more organizing.

And that’s not to say it’s a great thing. There are many risks associated with being a waste picker. And of course, everyone who is a waste picker who was interviewed will say that they do not want to see their kids growing up in the same field. But that also means there’s been greater levels of organization among these groups; to try and fight for institutionalizing their work, to incorporate their work into say, municipal waste services, without displacing them from their traditional work and labor that supported their livelihoods. So you’re now seeing in some big cities in the Global South—in India, Brazil, for instance, you’re seeing collectives of waste workers becoming the city municipal waste workers. And it’s been pretty successful.

And that contrasts with what’s happening with waste work in the north. And, you know, this is sort of a future research sort of question to figure this out exactly, but waste work has traditionally been a valued unionized profession in the U.S., at least it has been so for the last few decades. And there’s some evidence now that some of that formalization is unraveling. It goes hand in hand with just the general unraveling of union protections, the neoliberalization of the workforce, getting rid of those traditional protections. There’s some signs of an informal waste economy emerging that didn’t necessarily exist, or is certainly not as visible as it was previously. And that we saw during the recession, with people going around and pulling all the copper piping out of deserted houses. You see a thriving waste economy. If you’re downsizing your possessions, you know, you’re putting things up for free on Craigslist. People will come and take them, reuse them. There are people who will collect your junk outside of the municipal system.

When I started writing this book, I didn’t really expect it to relate as directly as it wound up doing to my work on global governance, global environmental governance in particular. It kind of found its way in. I started to see that as I finished the book off, but I think that waste itself in all its different forms—as waste, scrap, paper, plastic electronics, whatever—poses some fundamental challenges to how we think about global governance at a time when that is also being challenged by climate change and the challenges of governing that. But I found that thinking about global governance through this waste lens forces thinking about venues for governance, whether they be where the rules are made—who is making the rules, which actors are kind of being mobilized at any given point in time—happens in very different places. It could happen in the UN, it could happen in the World Trade Organization. It can happen kind of at regional levels where you’ve got these different actors involved in making treaties, even sort of figuring out how to police what crosses borders.

The other piece of it was that this topic just helped me think about, and helps people think about, how these global governance phenomena, these global markets and so on, are connected to what’s going on locally. You know, just to give a couple of examples: you have the case of the waste collectors in Cairo, the Zabbaleen, whose livelihoods were being threatened by multinational corporations that the Egyptian government wanted to bring in to take over waste services, and their resistance at that very local level in terms of just continuing to collect the trash. And the other example goes back to China’s ban on importation of plastic and paper scrap: that decision has fundamentally shaped what we put out on the curb every week. To study wastes is to really get a window on a broader society and how it operates.