Informal Waste Recycling Economies in the Global South and the Chimera of Green Capitalism

Abstract

AbstractThis paper contends that green growth/economy strategies directed at the global South through ideas such as the circular economy (CE) can maintain and reproduce predatory practices that aggressively exploit racialised groups, while simultaneously cannibalising their environments. These green strategies facilitate transfers of wealth from the global South to the North through new socio‐spatial frontiers for wealth creation, global South cities, and their expanding, dispossessed, unhoused, and racialised army of informal labour. Green growth/economy strategies—mechanisms that attempt to “green” capitalism—are portrayed as a chimera that can reproduce racial forms of exploitation and accumulation in discursive and material ways. Green campaigns that attempt to reconstruct notions of waste and value, and re‐imagine informal waste work as good and safe, neglect an accounting of race and the historical, political, and economic factors that make possible waste recycling as a viable economic strategy for sustainable development in the global South.