Garbage Dreams

Journal of Urban Affairs, 2014

1999

My objective in this thesis is to examine how outsiders (mainly development organizations and the Egyptian state) have interpreted and acted upon Cairo's garbage collectors from 1971 to the present day. It plots the evolution of development thinking and practice over the forty-year period covered (including weighing developmentalism relative to other paradigms of intervention, viz. neoliberalism and biopolitics), and demonstrates how interpretations of waste have been central to shaping interventions and imaginaries of 'development' throughout that period.

Trashed Scott A. Lukas In Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage, Carl A. Zimring and William L. Rathje, eds., Los Angeles: Sage, 2012, Pp. 937-938.

Researchjournali's Journal of Economics, 2017

This study assesses the influence of technological factor to the sustainability of informal solid waste collection livelihood. It is motivated by the spread of informal solid waste collection service as a survival livelihood strategy in urban areas. This has been prompted by the inability of the local authorities to efficiently collect the generated solid waste. However, despite being widely practiced not much has been documented about the influence of technological factor to the sustainability of informal solid waste collection livelihood. This study was conducted in Kijitonyama and Tandale Wards. The study guided by four elements; equipments, information, methods and processes. The methodology involved a randomly sampled population of 20 informal waste collectors from the 2 Wards. Questionnaire interviews, observations, in-depth interviews and documentary review formed the research data collection techniques. The study used descriptive analysis to analyse variables. The findings show the income gained is below its potential due the limitation on the amount of waste collected and transported through the applied technology. Also, the applied technology threatened the well being of informal solid waste collectors by exposing them to diseases. On the other hand, the technology guarantees easy transferability, accessibility and effective use.

The overall aim of the thesis is to examine the institutional conditions for the implementation and emergence of landfill mining. The result shows that current policy makes it difficult for landfill mining operators to find a market outlet for the exhumed material, which means that landfill mining may result in a waste disposal problem. Regulations also restrict accessibility to the material in landfills. Therefore, it has generally been municipal landfill owners that perform landfill mining operations, which directs learning processes towards solving landfill problems rather than resource recovery. Landfill mining is not, however, necessarily to be perceived as a recycling activity. It could also be understood as a remediation or mining activity. This would result in more favorable institutional conditions for landfill mining in terms of better access to the market and the material in the landfill. The regulatory framework surrounding landfills is based on a perception of landfills as a source of pollution, a problem that should be avoided, capped and closed. Extracting resources from landfills, challenges this perception and therefore results in a mismatch with the regulatory framework. On the other hand, the material in mines is typically regarded in the formal institutions as a positive occurrence. Mining activities are regarded as the backbone of the Swedish economy and therefore receive various forms of political support. This favorable regulatory framework is not available for secondary resource production. Based on the identified institutional conditions, institutional challenges are identified. The core of these challenges is a conflict between the policy goal of increased recycling and a non-toxic environment. Secondary resources are typically punished through strict requirements for marketability, while primary resources are supported through subsidies such as tax exemptions. The authorities lack capacity to manage the emergence of unconventional and complex activities such as landfill mining. The institutional arrangements that are responsible for landfills primarily perceive them as pollution, while the institutions responsible for resources, on the other hand, assume them to be found in the bedrock. The major contribution of the thesis is to go beyond the potential-oriented studies of landfill mining to instead focus on how institutions relate to landfill mining. In order to move towards a resource transition with dominant use of secondary resources a new institutional order is proposed.

2012

This article discusses the transformation of landfills from dumps toan alchemist’s dream – gold mines – by highlighting five Swedishcase studies where the landfill has been extracted. It is shown thatlandfills are embedded in broader socio-technical systems, includingtechnology, policies, culture, norms, markets, and networks.These artifacts have aligned into mutual dependencies under thenotion that landfills are garbage dumps, which has entrapped thelandfill in the prevailing “dump regime”. At the present time there isa window of opportunity to escape the “dump regime.” Dumps arebeing challenged by the circular economy, which has establishedinstability in the regime. However, for landfills to transform into“gold mines” creative entrepreneurs with the capacity to understandthe emergent properties of deposition – i.e. giving rise to aresource base – will be key. For further transformation, specializedmining actors, collaboration and further exogenous changes suchas higher metal prices are necessary.