Accessing Value in Lahore’s Waste Infrastructures

Abstract

ABSTRACT Lahore’s ever-growing waste generation has taken on increasing political significance – but why and how has this happened? This article argues that ways of knowing waste as one thing, and not another, shape how actors in Lahore’s waste infrastructures materialise value out of waste materials. For several decades, waste workers have been receiving payment for carrying away waste materials and making a profit by selling recyclables, which required they mobilise sociopolitical relations to access these materials. However, a public-private partnership has recently supplanted the municipal department overseeing waste disposal, which brought the newly-formed public Company into conflict with these workers. This article thus foregrounds this struggle to examine how waste becomes an epistemological object around which various kinds of work, exchanges, and technologies are organised, which subsequently shapes how value is realised out of Lahore’s waste infrastructures. This is what invests both – waste and its infrastructures – with such political salience.