Accessing Value in Lahore’s Waste Infrastructures

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• value
• infrastructures
• Pakistan
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

I want to express my gratitude to Catherine Alexander and Patrick O’Hare as editors of this special issue, others who have commented on various drafts of this paper, and the two anonymous reviewers who were generous and careful in their comments and feedback.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 This is an administrative designation referring to the various Town Municipal Administrations that comprise the municipality of Lahore. Other important administrative entities are the Lahore Cantonment Board and Walton Cantonment Board, which fall under the Pakistani military and have their own waste disposal services. Similarly, many private housing societies that cut across the urban and suburban landscapes in contemporary Lahore rely on separate corporate or informal entities for waste disposal services.

2 These groups were considered outside the fourfold varna system of caste Hinduism, and many of them have converted to Islamic, Christianity, and other religious traditions.

3 These workers collect valuable materials that are part of multiple, distinct waste streams, but this article focuses on plastics because, as will become clear later, they foreground the kind of embodied, experiential knowledge that is of direct relevant for my purposes.

4 This point about indeterminacy has been explored recently by Alexander and Sanchez (2019) to highlight that waste materials are not inherently lacking in value, but that waste, as lacking or having value, is discursively organised through political and economic regimes.

5 Recent work has reformulated the relationship between waste and value beyond an environmental or health paradigm. For instance, in the case of Egypt, Jamie Furniss has argued that waste be seen as ‘a problem of cleanliness’, rather than one of the environment, that is ‘connected to a complex series of notions relating to civilization […] and piety’ (2017:304). Similarly, in Darkar Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks has demonstrated how Islamic notions of piety and cleanliness are materialised through waste work and infrastructures, which thus shapes the self-understandings of workers who view cleaning the city as an act of piety and undergird political actions on their parts such as trash strikes (2018:126). Any accounting for how value is materialised out of waste must contend with the intricate and complex interplay of particular histories, social forces, and political dynamics that make both – waste and value – possible.

6 Catherine Alexander’s comments were instrumental in developing these key insights about waste as property.

7 See Arnold (1993); Prakash (1999).

8 Conservancy refers to a system of waste disposal in which waste is collected in dustbins and conveyed by carts and lorries to places of disposal.

9 I utilise fungible here in the sense that different instances of something are treated as identical. This is distinct from another use of fungible, in which one element is interchangeable for another (e.g. specific kinds of materials being exchanged for specific amounts of money). Thus, both the Company and the informal sector treat waste materials as fungible, though in distinct ways.

10 As mentioned in the introduction to this issue, James C. Scott discusses the distinction between techne and metis, each of which instantiate different epistemological ground, techniques, and applicability. Scott characterises techne as resulting from analytical and logical steps leading to theoretical knowledge about the world that is universal and abstract but ‘that may or may not have practical applications’ (Scott 1998:320). One important caveat is that abstract, universal knowledge around waste and its management is grounded on a practical applicability, which management experts deploy to delegitimise waste workers from the informal sector.

11 These clusters of jhuggīān are comprised of low or non-caste groups mentioned earlier. While waste work is a common form of employment, residents work in a variety of fields, such as domestic and custodial work, restaurant staff, and construction and repair work.

12 As far as I have been able to glean, this number was first used in a study from the 1990s that was explicitly commissioned to examine prospects for privatizing solid waste management in Pakistan (Engineering Planning and Management Consultants 1996). However, I have been unable to procure a copy of the study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Institute of Pakistan Studies and Wenner-Gren Foundation.