Burning Wet Waste: Environmental Particularity, Material Specificity, and the Universality of Infrastructure

Abstract

The problem of plastic waste accumulating in the environment has become ubiquitous in recent years. One way in which urban governments are looking to solve this issue is by investing one of several thermodynamic technologies that fall under the umbrella term ‘waste-to-energy’. The drawback of such technologies is that the waste stream must be consistent in quality and quantity. By drawing on ethnographic research with environmental activists in Kochi, South India, I demonstrate that particular environmental and material conditions—in this case Kochi’s immense wetness—confound the supposed universality of such infrastructures. Querying waste infrastructures in this way also leads to insights that suggest that investing in infrastructures to address issues of plastic waste often deepen attachments to plastic economies of capitalist accumulation. I ultimately argue that addressing environmental and social concerns about plastic waste means broadening what is relevant to infrastructural interventions in urban environmental governance.

Keywords:

• Environment
• Infrastructure
• Plastics
• Wetness
• Waste

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Australian Science and Technology Studies conference at Deakin University in 2019, and the EASST/4S 2020 conference in Prague, and I am grateful to participants for their feedback, particularly Timothy Neale and Aadita Chaudhury. I am grateful to my doctoral supervisors Georgina Drew and Susan Hemer for their feedback on countless drafts, and thank Maya Weeks and Pallavi Laxmikanth for their feedback as well. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments. Finally, special thanks to the many people in Kochi with whom I worked. All faults are mine alone.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Associate Professor Georgina Drew, my PhD supervisor, was conducting research into the cultural politics of rainwater harvesting in Kochi at the time.

2 For a detailed history of the social and environmental justice issues of the installation of Brahmapuram in 2008, see Ganesan (2017).

3 ‘Journey Towards a Waste-free Smart City’, 2018. The Hindu, 31 December, https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/journey-towards-a-waste-free-smart-city/article25867971.ece (accessed May 23, 2022).

4 The Convention on Wetlands is the intergovernmental treaty that provides the framework for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. It is named after the Iranian city of Ramsar, where the convention was fist signed in 1971. India signed the convention in 1982, and currently has 64 sites designated as Wetlands of International Importance, one of which being the Keralan backwaters that surround Kochi. See https://www.ramsar.org/wetland/india.

5 Sunil Kumar (2017).

6 Dr Manoj mentioned to me a few times about research being conducted into efficient use of fly ash as bricks and other valuable materials, but his opinion was that once it was in the environment, it was very difficult to avoid its toxicity.

7 There is a long and recently revived literature on the intersection of anthropology and refusal. Carole McGranahan, building on the seminal work of Marcel Mauss, takes the stance that a refusal is not necessarily a severing of social ties, but instead can be thought of as ‘a generative act, a rearrangement of relations rather than an ending of them’ (McGranahan 2016, 335). This is the spirit in which I took these refusals. I am also reminded here of Mary Douglas’ How Institutions Think, where she states, ‘Writing about cooperation and solidarity means writing at the same time about rejection and mistrust’ (Douglas 1987, 1).

8 A slightly alcoholic drink made from the fermented sap of coconut palms.

9 Our visit came six months after Kerala was subject to the worst floods in a century, where over a third of the state was underwater. For a more ethnographic description of this flood, see Barlow (2022).

10 Sunil Kumar (2022).