Producing abjection: E-waste improvement schemes and informal recyclers of Bangalore

Abstract This article focuses upon informal e-waste recyclers who subsidise the environmental costs of Bangalore’s information technology boom. It illustrates how improvement schemes devised by development agencies, to make Bangalore’s e-waste disposal practices more sustainable, reproduced the effects of bourgeois environmentalism and effectively cast off informal recyclers from having a substantial role in the city’s emerging regime of e-waste management. Being cast out and rendered superfluous has been a deeply degrading experience for Bangalore’s informal recyclers. In order to foreground this experience I draw upon the notion of abjection and show how informal recyclers are constituted as abject residents who must be confined to collecting and processing waste from the most marginal frontiers of the city’s e-waste circuits.

[1]  Josh Lepawsky,et al.  From beginnings and endings to boundaries and edges: rethinking circulation and exchange through electronic waste , 2011 .

[2]  Graham Pickren,et al.  Geographies of E-waste: Towards a Political Ecology Approach to E-waste and Digital Technologies , 2014 .

[3]  Zygmunt Bauman,et al.  Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts , 2003 .

[4]  Laura J. Shepherd,et al.  Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism , 2007 .

[5]  N. Anand.  Municipal disconnect: On abject water and its urban infrastructures , 2012 .

[6]  Rolf Widmer,et al.  Global perspectives on e-waste , 2005 .

[7]  S. A. Moore.  Garbage matters , 2012 .

[8]  Emma Mawdsley,et al.  India's Middle Classes and the Environment , 2004 .

[9]  A. Baviskar.  Between violence and desire: space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi , 2003 .

[10]  Feng Wang,et al.  The Best-of-2-Worlds philosophy: developing local dismantling and global infrastructure network for sustainable e-waste treatment in emerging economies. , 2012, Waste management.

[11]  S. A. Moore.  The Politics of Garbage in Oaxaca, Mexico , 2008 .

[12]  Gautam Bhan.  “This is no longer the city I once knew”. Evictions, the urban poor and the right to the city in millennial Delhi , 2009 .

[13]  S. A. Moore.  The Excess of Modernity: Garbage Politics in Oaxaca, Mexico , 2009 .

[14]  Julia Elyachar,et al.  Best practices: Research, finance, and NGOs in Cairo , 2006 .

[15]  R. Grant,et al.  Mapping the Invisible and Real "African" Economy: Urban E-Waste Circuitry , 2012 .

[16]  Martin V. Melosi,et al.  The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present , 2008 .

[17]  D. A. Ghertner.  Analysis of New Legal Discourse behind Delhi's Slum Demolitions , 2008 .

[18]  I. Young.  Justice and the Politics of Difference , 1990, The New Social Theory Reader.

[19]  Colin Mcfarlane.  Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay , 2008 .

[20]  A. Roy,et al.  Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning , 2005 .

[21]  P. Tschakert.  Digging Deep for Justice: A Radical Re‐imagination of the Artisanal Gold Mining Sector in Ghana , 2009 .

[22]  D Rochat,et al.  INDIA: INCLUDING THE EXISTING INFORMAL SECTOR IN A CLEAN E-WASTE CHANNEL , 2008 .

[23]  Rajyashree N. Reddy.  Revitalising Economies of Disassembly Informal Recyclers, Development Experts and E-Waste Reforms in Bangalore , 2013 .

[24]  Trevor J. Barnes,et al.  The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography , 2012 .

[25]  M. Gandy.  Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai , 2008 .

[26]  Lisa Eklund.  Marriage squeeze and mate selection – Analysing the ecology of choice and implications for social policy in China , 2013 .

[27]  Partha Chatterjee,et al.  The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World , 2004 .

[28]  R. Bush.  'Soon there will be no-one left to take the corpses to the morgue': Accumulation and abjection in Ghana's mining communities , 2009 .

[29]  Josh Lepawsky,et al.  Making chains that (un)make things: waste–value relations and the bangladeshi rubbish electronics industry , 2011 .

[30]  D. Sibley.  Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West , 1995 .