Whose Frontier is it Anyway? Reclaimer “Integration” and the Battle Over Johannesburg’s Waste-based Commodity Frontier

ABSTRACT

The City of Johannesburg’s Pikitup waste management utility is regarded as South Africa’s leader in piloting initiatives to integrate reclaimers (also known as waste pickers) into municipal waste management systems. Yet paradoxically, these integration initiatives are creating new forms of exclusion of reclaimers. In seeking to understand how this could be the case, this article brings Moore’s concept of “commodity frontiers” into conversation with literature on the historical establishment of colonial power relations. The argument is developed in three steps. First, the paper argues that it was reclaimers who extended Johannesburg’s waste-based commodity frontier to establish the new zone of commodification. Second, it contends that Pikitup’s seizure of the reclaimers’ recycling commodification zone is implicitly rooted in assumptions underpinning colonialism. Third, the article argues that understanding Pikitup’s approach to “integration” as colonization reveals that integration is a mechanism of border control designed to eject and dispossess reclaimers rather than include them.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste picker integration
• recycling
• informal workers
• colonialism
• dispossession

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I reject the term waste picker for reasons outlined in this article and use the term “reclaimer,” which is the name used in Johannesburg. I use the term “waste picker integration,” as this is the name of the policy.

2 Gutberlet (2008) is an important exception. Although Reddy (2015) does not discuss integration, her theorization of the expulsion of waste pickers from Bangalore’s e-waste system as abjection is relevant to these debates.

3 Scheinberg (2012) and Reddy (2015) note similar programme outcomes.

4 This point is an extension of Rogers (2005) argument about the political work of landfills.

5 Most literature on waste picker integration focuses exclusively on integrating reclaimers rather than the informal recycling system and all actors who are a part of it.

6 Notably, Scheinberg (2012) takes great care to define integration and other related concepts.

7 The author is accompanying and supporting ARO members in their struggles and conducting participatory research on their political mobilization.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the South African Department of Science and Innovation as part of the “Waste Research, Development and Innovation Roadmap.” Additional funding was provided by the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries.