Oozing Matters: Infracycles of “Waste Management” and Emergent Naturecultures in Phnom Penh

Abstract

The Cambodian city of Phnom Penh displays a unique recyclable waste collection system. This article follows the daily practices of waste pickers and the movements of recyclable waste through the city. The hereby examined recurrent daily interactions define the overall infrastructure of recyclable waste handling that can be described as infracycles: sociomaterial constellations through which the quotidian flows of persons, goods, tools, narratives and ideas are organized in a recurrent and circular manner, thereby functioning as an actual lived infrastructure. This infrastructure is lived out bottom-up, as waste pickers, depot owners, and others interrelate. As waste circulates through cycles, different sociomaterialities emerge, which shape the city. Keeping the city somewhat clean, waste pickers form material itineraries and direct flows that shape urban ecologies. In the same process, oozy materials leaking from infracycles also create new versions of the city in the form of urban naturecultures, which compete with other imaginaries and designs for Phnom Penh’s urban transformation.

Keywords:

• Recyclable waste
• circularity
• infrastructure
• leakages
• natureculture

The city as a garbage dump, “the city of garbage” (Meyn and Dara 2017): This is how cities in Cambodia are described both by local and international media. In particular, Phnom Penh, its capital and home to some 2.5 million inhabitants has fallen under media focus, since the absence of waste disposal strategies combined with exponentially growing waste generation has rendered garbage omnipresent in everyday experiences and images of the city. As garbage spreads and dissolves over time and space, loses its color, and ultimately becomes an indefinable mass gathering at lantern posts of the neighborhood street, the boundaries between nature and the city, and nature and culture blur. Shampoo bottles, plastic bags, beer cans, and food packaging are integrated into urban space, materializing and merging with it. Microbes, bacteria, and viruses such as Covid-19 travel with and on plastic and aluminum surfaces throughout the city. But how, more specifically, does waste (in principle recyclable or reusable) circulate, and with what effects? How does this circulation enact bottom-up infrastructures by which waste is handled? How do visible and invisible garbage flows and entanglements create an urban sociomateriality transforming the city? How, indeed, does (or does not) waste design Phnom Penh?

The handling of recyclable waste in Phnom Penh is patchy. It involves differing practices, multiple actors, and the material of “waste” as intertwined with its environment – and it is accomplished foremost by the protagonists of a so-called “informal” sector. In post-conflict Cambodia with its rapid and rampant marketized economy since the 1990s, the recycling economy is rather “formal” as it makes up high percentages of the nation’s “official” economy. In this situation, the notion of waste “management” is insufficient as it suggests a rather controlled and systematic method of handling waste directed by an administrative authority (through a top-down approach, as the Cambodian government intends to implement in the near future as a fully-fledged waste management system). Nor is there any “management” by local authorities in this sector yet, contrary to the solid waste sector, which, for instance, is responsible for organic and household waste. Another term is needed. Therefore, I substitute “management” for the more dynamic and progressive term of waste “handling,” able thereby to highlight that there might be more than just one single version of “proper” management, meaning other viable ways to handle waste than a rigid implementation of Western standards.

Compared to recyclable waste handling systems in other countries, which are partly or fully “managed” by either big enterprises or are state-owned, Phnom Penh elicits a genuine, grassroots economy that follows its own paths and laws without any state support. In the last twenty years, “informal” (recyclable) waste systems have been often successively formalized and privatized. In some cases, waste collectors have been partly (re-)integrated, as in the case of the Zabaleen community in Cairo in 2014, but, more often, eliminated and displaced from their profession entirely. The waste collection system in Cairo, for instance, was determined to have been the “most uniquely ecological in the world” prior to the (partial) privatization of the sector (Kuppinger, Hourani, and Kanna 2014: 621). In adjacent countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, waste pickers are also still able to maintain their collection activities of recyclables, but the state supports the sector financially and technically, as well as through capacity building initiatives and incentives. In India, the sector is divided in terms of recyclables, as waste pickers are responsible for plastics and electronics, while other recyclables fall under the formal sector’s purview.

Waste must always to be seen within its context, its environment into which it is embedded and from which it emerges. This means that there literally cannot be such a thing as waste without an environment, or ecological system, in which it does not belong. Dirt or waste is not waste per se, but its definition differs according to the social and cultural context or practice wherein it is treated as such. What waste is, in other words, depends on both perceiver and context. Such definitions also depend on power relations, as waste scholars have demonstrated (see e.g. Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018). Waste is a kind of underground being, a dirty, silted Cthulhu of modern times, attracting piqued glances from city denizens passing on the street. As the STS scholar Brian Wynne (1987: 1) once wrote: “waste exist[s] in the twilight zone where no clear, ‘natural’ definition of [it] can be given, within wide margins of uncertainty and variation” (c.f. Hird 2016). There is thus an intricate relation, and, in turn, a set of pathways, between waste and its urban ecology in two senses: First, they are recursively implied, as one generates the other. Second, since waste is always an agent among others, its attributes and characteristics, its very existence, is an effect of relationality (cf. Dumouchel 2019).

As contemporary infrastructure studies have begun to focus not only on the relationality of infrastructure and on infrastructures as a concept, but also on its materiality, this article builds on such studies while focusing on the “lived” and material character of infrastructures. Highlighting dynamic materials that are the infrastructure at that moment allows me to bridge human and non-human dichotomies while answering (in) how (far) an infrastructure is. Here, I tie in with existing studies of “lived” infrastructures, such as those developed for example by Simone (2004). I presuppose that the infrastructure of recyclable waste handling in Phnom Penh is as much an infrastructure as it is a network (Larkin 2013) and a collaboration (Simone 2004, 2015) of diverse goods, people, and ideas, which is maintained through quotidian practices. Here I suggest that the lived character of an infrastructure is not arbitrary, chaotic, and diverse, but rather follows itineraries and pathways, unraveling a principle according to which the lived infrastructure eventually works, thus forming and shaping the collaborative network. As I show in the following, materials, primarily recyclable waste, as well as people, do not only “move” from one point to another in a casual sequence, but rather circle and move among different positions of what I term infracycles. Phnom Penh’s recycling infrastructure simultaneously both is enacted by human and non-human practices and emerges as a dynamic and active material in places, following its own itineraries. It is, thus, lived and dynamic. Instead of occurring within a linear, coherent, and technical infrastructure, waste handling takes place in partially overlapping “infracycles” that are not a single part of a system, but actually are the infrastructure. Combining the concept of circularity with the concept of infrastructure helps to develop an understanding of how the latter is lived in the sense of stable and dynamic at the same time.

These different cycles of waste and waste-handling enact a bottom-up, lived infrastructure that sustains and shapes the overall infrastructure as the (re-)circulation of materials, people, and corresponding ideas, constituting and strengthening a structured pattern. To understand this underlying principle, I consider my empirical example through the lens of cybernetics, which, once unraveled the circularity of systems, which function under the grid of self-regulations. Difference constantly hereby created as part of exacerbating feedback processes eventually form the “difference which makes a difference” (Bateson 1972: 453) resulting in information, that (in-)form the infrastructure of recyclable waste handling in the city and makes them stable. I examine in what will follow the recurrent practices of waste pickers in Phnom Penh and waste as a moving material along the trajectories of the whole infrastructure of recyclable waste handling.

1 A Lived Infrastructure

Phnom Penh is a rapidly expanding city, not only in terms of population, but also geographically and economically. The amount of waste is therefore quickly increasing. Waste patterns the streets and clogs the sewage systems (Jensen 2017). It is omnipresent and pervasive. Circling around dirty and smelly quarters, waste pickers collect what they deem valuable, sellable, or reproducible from the streets and alleys. What remains accumulates, sediments into undefinable pieces, and becomes a part of the urban environment, part of the streets, part of the sewage systems, and even part of children’s bodies as they fish for the useable in sludge-packed sewers.

Synthetic packaging material entered Cambodia in the 1990s, and there have been practically no policy regulations on waste for four decades. After the withdrawal of the US-American troops, the market for consumer goods opened up rampantly. In the following years, Cambodia was not only “flooded” with products wrapped in plastic packaging and aluminum items, leading to an increase of nonorganic waste, but also with good advice from the Global North in regard not only to how “good” government works, but also how the nation’s reconstruction should accordingly best occur.

Phnom Penh has until now only one official solid waste collection company, CINTRI Cambodia Co. Ltd., which collects household waste (over 50% of overall waste generation) and transports it to the almost full Dangkoa landfill in the south of the city. This waste collection, however, covers only parts of the city, and know-how as to how to improve collection and treatment alike is manifestly insufficient. For one thing, CINTRI only picks up organic household waste. Due to narrow and inaccessible streets, labor problems, and the rapid expansion of the city, the waste collection company can hardly be said to fulfill its duties. Outlying areas and poorer districts, in particular, have their household waste collected rarely, if at all. Since the company, somewhat bizarrely, collects fees for its services via the electricity bill from the Electric Authority of Cambodia (EDC), people unable or unwilling to pay can lose both garbage collection and electricity (IGES and Nexus 2016; IGES and UN 2018; STT 2015).

In April 2018, the government began to tax the sale of plastic bags. From now on, the larger supermarkets had to charge 400 Riel (10 cent) per bag. This, however, has had little impact on the overall generation of the city’s plastic bags, since most people do their daily grocery shopping at markets or small family shops, which still hand out plastic bags free of charge (PPCA et al. 2018). Nonetheless, it was a step in the right direction. However, plastic bags are neither collected by CINTRI nor by waste pickers, because they are too thin and light, and regardless cannot be sold on. Thus, they usually end up in rivers or on streets, side by side with other kinds of waste.

Until recently, the government had no significant waste disposal policy aside from the aforementioned long-term contract with CINTRI in the solid waste management sector. This changed in October 2019, when prime minister Hun Sen declared that “We will buy CINTRI. Then we will start collecting the waste in the city” (Chan 2019). Even though the prime minister’s sudden declaration may have been provoked by internal relations between the municipality and CINTRI, the surprising announcement can also be located in the context of longstanding and ongoing consultations with (non-)development organizations, mainly from the Global North and lodged within the realms of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), about “proper” waste management practices (IGES and UN 2018; PPCA et al. 2018; UN 2018). However, it seems clear that this “new” waste management plan presently lacks specific provisions for recyclable waste, albeit it hints at a situation in which the government aims to take control, subsequently, of the overall waste management situation in the city.

Since CINTRI, until now, only collects solid household waste, and only insufficiently, people have found opportunities to earn money and sustain a livelihood by gathering and selling recyclables. Thus, the infrastructure of recyclable waste handling nowadays is mainly enacted by private people living in Phnom Penh. Following Simone’s (2004: 408) description of infrastructure as “(…) a specific economy of perception and collaborative practice [which] is constituted through the capacity of individual actors to circulate across and become familiar with a broad range of spatial, residential, economic, and transactional positions,” the waste pickers’ bottom-up process of waste handling can be described as a lived infrastructure. Waste pickers enact and, indeed, are an essential part of the infrastructure through their interactions and negotiations with others in the bustling city. Their infrastructural work “(…) facilitates the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space.” (Larkin 2013: 328). The infrastructure for handling waste in Phnom Penh can thus be visualized as a system, circulating and constantly negotiating of the materials of recyclable waste, entangled with technical equipment, roads, pushcarts, and waste in many different forms and shapes.

Most important are people who collect recyclable waste, ed jai¹ (waste pickers) in Khmer, depot owners, and so-called “middlemen” who direct materials further along supply chains. In total, probably around two thousand ed jais wander through the city of Phnom Penh every day (Sang-Arun et al. 2011; Seng, Fujiwara, and Seng 2018). With their colorful trousers and checkered hats, without which the sun would be unbearable, they flow through the heavy traffic, crisscrossing the city with the changing rhythms of the day. Furthermore, approximately 300 landfill scavengers collect and extract recyclables from the dumping fill, in which they often also live. Others collect irregularly from relatives or tenants and sell it directly to the depots. The faction of people collecting recyclables in streets consists not only of ed jais but also includes – surprisingly – CINTRI workers. While these employees theoretically only collect solid waste from households, the men working at the back of the collection cars are also always in search for recyclables. The common knowledge that one can gain some tidy wage additions by collecting recyclables during regular work-time attracts these workers. Slowly, the lived infrastructure which emerged with the profession and practices of waste pickers decades ago is being further tapped into and adopted by CINTRI workers, in turn.

As it is still common to throw non-organic waste on the streets or into rivers or sewers (if it has not been burned), there is no shortage of resalable waste. Sometimes, waste pickers also buy recyclables directly from households. They sell their gathered things to intermediaries or depot owners, who assemble different kinds of recyclables from different factions among the pickers. These then resell to larger depots that eventually resell abroad, mainly to Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, and China,² where the most prominent of the recyclables (aluminum cans, plastic bottles, papers) are finally recycled. Copper and metal mainly travel to Singapore (PPCA et al. 2018: 21). Yet, not everything can be collected. Some kinds of waste lose value by disintegrating due to heat or humidity, or simply because they are of no value, as is the case with thin plastic bags.³

As waste moves around, circulating along and across material itineraries, it enacts Phnom Penh’s sociomateriality, which patterns and shapes the urban – in a constant rhythm of waste handling and leaky itineraries of waste.

As I demonstrate in the following, the circulation of waste materializes the infra in an only loosely coherent “structure.” To capture this situation of simultaneous circularity and emergence, I draw on the systems theorists Maturana and Varela (1987), and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1991; 1972) to specify what I term “infracycles.” This helps me in qualifying the concept of infrastructures, because, first, the terminus of infrastructure is misleading in many settings as it conjures an image of linearity, and a sequence of “services” which have little resemblance to Phnom Penh’s waste handling. Embedded in the buzz and chaos of the city, waste handling is the result of diverse human and nonhuman practices and relational conjunctions and collaborations. By focusing on infracycles, I thus aim to characterize the dynamic and lived character of a not-quite-coherent infrastructure as materialized in daily practices, as various actors become entangled in waste circulation. Composed by circulations of people and waste, the “service” is an effect of patchy infracycles which partly overlap.

Moreover, and this is the second point, while tracing waste and practices along its circuitous pathways, it becomes possible to traverse the boundaries between human and non-human, and thus to grasp waste handling as a deeply sociomaterial practice. These pathways entail a move from fixed, stable identities toward the fluidity of moments and events emerging out of entanglements that Jensen (2017: 629) has described as a “decentring of the anthropology of infrastructure.” The following descriptions make abundantly clear that “the” infrastructure, paradoxically (Howe et al. 2015), is not “one” homogenous thing. Instead, as I show, “it” emerges descriptively and analytically as a set of overlapping, moving and permuting infracycles of waste, while also producing urban sociomaterialities as naturecultures which transform the city.

2 The Practices of a System

Conceived too rigidly and linearly in engineering, political and economic contexts, the notion of infrastructure restricts the capacity for grappling with different or more flexible ways in which agents act as infrastructure. As they do not act within a line of sequential services, I suggest instead to focus on the aspect of circularity, which can be contrasted with that studied by cyberneticians, who have emphasized the importance of circularity and feedback loops as part of self-regulative systems. Assuming that systems adaptively strengthen their function through the principle of (information) circulation, cybernetics pushed back causal linear understandings of how our world works. The constant production of diverse information between “inside” and “outside” eventually led to a feedback loop ensuring the systems’ adaption to its environment. The information, thus, is a difference that makes a difference. To draw these themes together, and deal with the still current anthropological critique that “(…) social reality could never be simulated in all its complexity” (Rodin et al. 1978: 747), I make a brief excursion into the realm of systems theory and cybernetics, inspired by the anthropologist Stefan Beck (2019),⁴ the biological systems theorists Maturana and Varela (1987), and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1991; 1972).

Phnom Penh’s infrastructure characteristic lies in the quotidian practices that seem to hold up the whole infrastructure as one thing. As Howe et al. (2015: 559) state, the paradox of infrastructure pertains to “(…) its double quality as both solid and durable and evaporative and itinerant; it is built and grown, rigid and fluid, meant to last but doomed to be outmoded, ruined, and exceeded. Therefore, it is in these nodes of paradoxical intermingling and entanglement that we can rethink the complexity of infrastructure; its realization is only the limit of our collective imaginary.” The lens of practice makes it possible to focus on the events and moments in which infrastructure is used, adapted, formed, or adjusted. In order to differentiate between various “realizations” of infrastructures, it is important to follow the daily practices and intertwinements of human and non-human agents, but also to heed Beck’s (2019: 21) advice to search for organizational principles underlying constellations of practices that emerge as infrastructures, examining their specific conditions for self-organization and maintenance while focusing on what compels them to hold together.

In the context of Phnom Penh’s waste handling, organizational patterns become visible through recurring daily practices and circulating needs, values, narratives, and ideas through which recyclable waste circulates and moves. In the sense of Maturana and Varela (1987), circularity is bound to the concept of autopoiesis: Living systems always function in this self-regulatory fashion, which means that they (re-)build their own elements and positions while interacting with their environment. Circularity, I suggest along with these authors, can be seen as the underlying precondition under which the organization of the infrastructure works. It points, hereby, to the practices, which “draw” the circuits of routes, timeframes, or recurring practices. Through the recurring circulation of materials among positions information are created, that (in-)form the infrastructure in a self-regulatory manner. Understanding flows of information elicits decisions and itinerary practices; ideas and materials take and unravel a conjunctive understanding of forming and stabilization processes and complex social reality, these being mutually dependent.

This relative order is abruptly disturbed when waste is traced empirically, as it evokes that this material cannot be only endure within an infrastructure, because its status can change dynamically and may ooze out from the structured system, and thus away from the model we have made of it, for example, when it fragments and follows other paths, as is the case with wastewater. Infrastructures function thereby as “activity trails.” Such trails are also characteristic of emergent environments that materialize as urban Phnom Penh, which can be traced with circuits better than linear structures. The system is not closed, however, and some materials leak and ooze with consequences for emergent urban naturecultures, as they do not fit into the seemingly “calculable” model of the infrastructure as a system (only).

My emphasis, accordingly, is on infracycles of waste handling. Underlying (infra) modes of circular distribution of elements within a sociomaterial arrangement of persons, goods, tools, ideologies, and ideas, circulating through time and space (cycles), translated and manifested in and through practices, embedded in political, social, and historical, and other hybrid surroundings. Rather than a coherent infrastructure of recyclable waste management, waste handling operates through multiple underlying smaller and sometimes overlapping cycles, which, in various ways, interact, interchange elements, overlap, and render the entire infrastructure somehow functional. Waste circulates among single infracycles, before it is passed on to other cycles. It moves along a trajectory of the overall infrastructure of recycling waste handling. By tracing some of their circuits, I am able to put myself in a “more pragmatic position” (White, Rudy, and Gareau 2016: 11), shifting the focus to engagements and arrangements in order to bridge dichotomies between humans and non-humans and highlight realities lying beyond a realistic or purely constructivist differentiation. Whereas the circularity of waste materializes the infra in the structure, the organizational principle, which is the circularity, marks the differences and the materiality of each cycle as a system.

3 The Infracycles of Recycling Practices

In the following, I offer an ethnographic description of one infracycle prominent to practices of waste handling in Phnom Penh. In this case, this is the infracycle of waste pickers circulating around the district of Toul Tom Pong. While waste pickers directing collected recyclables to the depot at which they are based, for example, create in their specific sociomaterial constellation with waste, pushcarts, basic needs among others one infracycle, different intermediaries and depots or other waste picker groups perform others. Meanwhile, CINTRI workers, who also collect recyclables while collecting household waste, also enact another infracycle. These infracycles consist and are constituted by daily practices, for instance by waste pickers in streets, or on landfills, which also involve not only with humans, but may, in turn, merge with land, weather, and sewage canals. Even though the practices of waste pickers are similar in a general sense (handling and distribution of recyclable waste), they are also different, because the infracycles differ from one another in terms of the matter of their self-organization and maintenance (Beck 2019). Thus, organizational practices of distributing recyclables according to each material, which is weighed and exchanged for money at Minh’s depot, can be distinguished from Tam’s depot’s way of sorting and ordering hers. Differences in the direction of infracycles are, therefore, only graspable at the empirical level where those differences become visible.

As I went on my daily stroll to trace recyclable waste with waste pickers from the Toul Tom Pong district, one of the districts where I conducted PhD research between 2016 and 2018, I realized that waste pickers usually walk very similar routes within a certain area of the city. Disregarding official district boundaries, waste pickers have their own maps of collection in mind. At the same time, they are limited in their mobility, both due to the weight of the full pushcart and because of their affiliation with “their” local depot. Waste pickers are affiliated with a particular depot, because they need a pushcart for the job, which is usually provided or “borrowed” from intermediaries. The exception is formed by waste scavengers who use a motorcycle to push the cart, since they usually live at the outskirts of the city and drive to the inner quarters to collect waste, or those who still gather using merely their backpack. Depot owners and middlemen with their own small shops are organizational units in their own right. Smaller depots, in particular, depend on their customers; these are often households who sell directly to them due to convenience and proximity.

The most experienced waste picker I met was Socheat, a woman in her mid-forties. She started collecting when she first came to the city in search of a job some thirty years ago. She quickly realized the value of various kinds of waste thrown out by people in front of their house or into the river, and started to collect it. After extracting the valuable bits from the rest, she sells them on to the depots. During this period, there were relatively few waste pickers in the streets, but also fewer recyclables for exploitation. This, however, has changed dramatically. Over years of collecting, Socheat has become an expert in finding the best locations for picking recyclable waste, and thus she has been able to support herself and her family without taking a job with regular worktimes in one of the garment factories. She starts walking in the district of Phnom Penh Thmeu early in the morning around six when it is not yet unbearably hot, with a break during the midday heat, starting again at around two, continuing thereafter until the evening. She is flexible. During heavy rain spells, she decides whether to finish work or continue picking after sheltering under the leaves of the huge tree next to the yellow house. During scorching hot days, the same tree provides shade and relief. This flexibility is called “freedom” by most of the waste pickers I accompanied. To many, freedom, as understood in terms of self-employment and autonomy, is more important than having a stable and perhaps more economically secure job.

The daily practice of waste pickers includes the collection, separation, and selling of recyclable items. Waste pickers collect what seems valuable, which usually means what can be sold to middlemen and depot owners. But they also sometimes find things that might be of use at home, or for their children. When Ponnleu, a forty-four-year-old mother of two children, starts collecting in Toul Tom Poung, she begins by walking a random route within an area which varies day by day, but is always within walking distance of her depot. She pushes the cart in front, either shouting her call of ed jai or making noises with a special horn to draw attention. Each time she finds plastic bottles or, better, aluminum cans, which bring much more money, she briefly stops the cart at the side of the road, bends her back, and grabs the valuable waste, or, she goes to one of the rubbish bags which households place outside to be picked up by the waste collection company and opens it in search for a forgotten can or some empty water bottles.

As people like Socheat or Ponnleu stay longer in the business, they begin to accumulate a network of households within “their” streets, which mostly, or sometimes even exclusively, sell to them. This depends on the personal relations they have managed to make, on the number of competing waste pickers, and also on how many households directly sell to depots. The last group, in particular, is constantly growing as citizens recognize that selling to the depot directly brings more money than what they receive from waste pickers. However, many are still compassionate toward the ed jai and continue selling their waste to them. In turn, many waste pickers are highly dependent on their depot owners because they bought pushcarts from them, which are repaid in small installments. Some depots also provide small daily loans with which waste pickers use to pay the households for recyclables. This dependent relationship is very strong and often lasts an entire working life. Even if ed jais should succeed in paying off their carts in full after many years, the cart will still be numbered among the owner’s fleet, and, thus, it will still belong to him in some manner.

After Ponnleu’s cart is full, when it starts raining, when she feels unwell, or when her self-induced shift is over, she returns to the depot. Stuck in a line with other ed jais waiting to have their collectibles weighed, she is already thinking ahead about daily tasks that remain to be done. In her mind, she is on the way to pick up the children from school, to cook, and to avoid the daily fights with her drunken husband in the evening. This is quite a typical situation among waste pickers, who are mainly women, and who often provide the only income source for their entire family, while their men indeed often spend time drinking alcohol and gambling. At the end of the day she goes home, conscious that she will start walking tomorrow again.

Here the infracycle “closes.” But that does not mean that the movement of waste ends. Rather, the waste materials collected are passed on to another infracycle, starting with the depot, which leads to further circulations and translations. The principle of self-organization thus lies in the aspect of recurrent practices that recur because waste pickers aim to sustain their livelihood in such a way and live out what they call flexibility and “freedom.” The overall infrastructure is moreover maintained through compassion by citizens and the interdependencies between single infracycles. By describing the daily routines of waste pickers as an infracycle, I have highlighted the lived and dynamic character that gives durability and relative stability to waste recycling in the city. Within the infracycle of ed jai, pushcart, horn, and plastic bags necessary to sort collectibles, recyclable waste, as it comes to be translated and modified. Found plastic bottles are emptied or squashed in the cart, which Ponnleu likes to pack as much as possible before returning to the depot. Materials circulate along waste picker’s itineraries through the district. As waste pickers search for value, waste is moved “out of sight” of other people living in the city, and the waste ceases to be material out of place. The waste itself is continuously modified in circulation, until it finally spills out of the infracycles altogether.

But this is only the case for some waste: the remainder, which is not deemed valuable and left uncollected, follows other paths. Oozing and merging with the urban environment, it enters other infracycles and undergoes different kinds of permutations.

4 Permutation and Appropriation

As waste materials are moved from one infracycle to another, they undergo processes of permutation. Recyclables are physically and materially altered. The aluminum beer can Ponnleu picks from the street, circulates into different positions. First it is on the ground, then it is moved about in a cart, then it sits for a while in the depot, and finally it is transferred elsewhere. In the process, the can rubs against the waste it is packed with. Particles detach and scatter. The plastic bottle still contains dirty water, which will be emptied before the bottle is weighed on the big green scale in the depot owner’s courtyard. Recyclables, in other words, are materially translated over time. What is often called the material afterlife of waste, is actually still its life, just in another relational form. But the permutations of waste are not only material. It also changes socially by becoming inscribed with different values, which are gradually “added” by the people that interact with it. Beyond material permutations, waste is culturally interlinked with narratives and images of urban life.

Processes of permutation are connected with processes of appropriation. Ed jais claim waste materials in their “realm” of waste picking. They take hold of materials for different purposes and attach them to individual and collective practices, wherein they become part of shared experience. Davuth, a depot owner, for example, affectionately tells me about the red children’s bicycle he once bought from a waste picker, which he has now fixed and refurbished for his grandson. Ed jais looping through the streets appropriate urban space as part of their daily routine of walking, or as they “make” room for themselves, chatting every evening after work. Here, they sit in one specific corner, where they often buy themselves something to eat from a woman, who passes by, knowing well that these consumers will be waiting. In these processes of appropriation, materials, narratives, and experiences thus become part of each infracycle. Waste turns into something like the boundary object seminally discussed by Star and Griesemer (1989). On the one hand, permutations and appropriations create parts of the infracycles of waste recycling in Phnom Penh. On the other hand, they also verify infracycles’ individuality and socio-material diversity as meaningful across differences. Waste as a boundary object is understood as having a common identity among all cycles as such. They are “(…) objects that are able both to travel across borders and maintain some sort of constant identity” (Bowker and Star 1999: 16). It is the thing through which cycles are connected with each other and which holds all infracycles as a collaborative network together. The boundary object is thus the structural hub, which compels them to hold together. Even if it has a completely different form (bottles, bundles or leakwater) for different cycles, it generates a commensurability in its meaning throughout the single cycles and ensures an overlapping space between them that stabilize the overall infrastructure.

Although the quotidian practices of ed jais hardly change rapidly, they do constantly change, if ever so slightly. They are adjusted according to personal experiences (as when Ponnleu optimizes her route over the years) or changes in political or economic circumstances (as when a depot closes due to gentrification pressure and waste pickers have to search for a new receiving point). Despite these modifications, however (or because of the maintenance that is hereby provided), the infracycle, and thus the whole “infrastructure” of waste handling, remains stable. The central infrastructural role of the waste pickers becomes particularly visible on the rare occasions when they actually do obstruct the system, for example by exceptionally selling recyclables to other depots, or deciding to stay at home from work, just because they can. The permanent and daily circulation of practices and activities around the topic of recyclable waste handling, which could also have a “rebellious” character when they obstruct the system, ultimately strengthens the entire infrastructure precisely because “unexceptional” and “rebellious” itineraries are perpetrated – in the sense that their outbursts occur within a social order that doesn’t aim to overthrow the entire system but to follow the ed jai’s wish to be free and flexible.

Infracycles, as I have depicted them, generate material semiotic permutations and appropriations. They function as an infrastructure because they are many, because they interact and partly overlap. They contribute to particular urban designs and naturecultures. Such designs, however, also have unintended effects. To examine how, I take leave of the relatively ordered space of infracycles, and focus on what oozes out from them.

5 Oozing Out: The Emergence of Naturecultures

Situated among heterogeneous environments and ecologies, infracycles participate bottom-up in the design and shaping of Phnom Penh’s urban spaces. What are the implications of infracycles and their “activity trails” for understanding urban (socio-)materiality and the transformation of the city?

When waste fragments into tiny pieces, blown up by the next gust of wind, or when it becomes liquid, washed away by rain and flushed into a drain, it oozes out from the infracycles of recyclable waste handling. At this point, waste ceases to be relevant to waste pickers and depot owners, either because it has no value, as in the case of plastic bags, or because it is materially out of reach for the pickers, or because the density of waste pickers is not high enough for them to be able to collect everything. Here, synthetic materials merge with the urban environment. At some point, plastic micro particles are no longer countable or, indeed, traceable. But they do not disappear. Even if we do not see them anymore, they are still there, somewhere, in some form. Originally a part of “culture,” synthetic waste is now fully embedded in urban “nature.” To ooze out aptly characterizes a form of leakage, which results in the emergence of naturecultures, a composite term that highlights the inseparability of the binary pair of nature and culture(s) foregrounding circulating practices and entanglements (cf. Gesing et al. 2018; Haraway 2003). What oozes is diffuse, fragmented, and in many cases toxic material – and it is not easy to trace these materials ethnographically. Waste material leaking from and oozing out of these cycles eventually participates in the enactment of urban naturecultures. Quiet, only partly visible, it contributes to the transformation of urban health and living. Focusing on leakages, thus, helps here to ask how the city is transforming, and offers a distinctive perspective on Phnom Penh’s urban transformation.

One of these leakages is methane gas at dumping fills, another is waste that fragments into micro particles, colonized by bacteria and inhuman species. Smoke and ash are emitted as waste is burned. Percolating through the air, along streets, or in canals, these leaky substances become part of urban landscapes and bodies. The composites they form with other agents usually remain unseen until they are made visible by studies of the impacts of burning waste or the ingestion of micro-plastics have on urban environmental health. But if ooze is usually unseen, it is not always unnoticed. The inhabitants of Phnom Penh recognize the unpleasant smell that spreads whenever the sewers pour forth their black broth over city streets during the rainy season or if they suffer skin rashes due to toxic materials. The circulation of global ooze is vividly illustrated by huge containers filled with plastic waste sent to Cambodia from countries in the Global North, only to end up stranded on beaches, as occurred in Sihanoukville in July 2019 (Vicheika 2019). The arrival of vast amounts of foreign waste highlights Cambodia’s low status in international politics, being one of many states in the Global South on the receiving “end” of trash and pollution from wealthy nations.

It is because Phnom Penh is therefore perceived as “a city of garbage,” a city where dirt is mainly viewed as out of place rather than out of sight, that new visions of a cleaner city are constructed and emerge. Unsurprisingly, therefore, politicians and businesspeople aim to change the image of the city. New versions of Phnom Penh are imagined and enacted that focus on green areas and parks as leisure areas, and foreground cleanliness (see also Namba, this issue). As brochures of new Phnom Penh housing projects make clear, the green clean city is defined by the absence of waste in these contexts. Since the 1980s, numerous construction projects, mainly financed by direct investments from Asian countries, have gradually been initiated. Recreating the urban imaginaries of wealthy Cambodians, these projects have also materially fragmented the city, as older, cheaper housing has been torn down and replaced with vertical high-rise buildings (Jensen, introduction to this issue; Nam 2017a: 659, 2017b).

One of the numerous satellite cities is the Grand Phnom Penh International City, a superlative and prestigious construction project built as a 250-hectare city within the city, some 7 km northwest of Phnom Penh. The image of green nature is part of the building project’s self-promotion, visible in one of its brochures, where it states: “The environment will be vastly greened with lush gardens, palms, friendly pedestrian walkways, children’s playgrounds and beautiful landscaping” (Grand Phnom Penh 2019). Here, an originally Western notion of nature as something pristine and exclusive, restricted and controlled, is combined with conceptions of clean and safe housing, evidently oriented toward international expats and entrepreneurs, who are the main addressees of these advertisements. The construction boom affects how Phnom Penh is imagined and visualized. However, it also contributes to a double transformation that directly relates to waste handling: First, to the extent that gentrification succeeds, it creates a city in which large areas will not need waste pickers, since there will be no accessible waste, and, in turn, an environment that is not amenable to them. Second, by modifying the societal and cultural understandings and expectations of what “clean areas” means (a picture of high-standard-living as envisioned in modern cities), upscale construction also mirrors the image of the actual existing city as dirty.

These tendencies are plainly visible in transnational consultancy and development strategies for “waste management” and international “green deals” (UN 2018). Waste in its substantive, material diversity, and the people who deal with it, are basically absent. Green deals, often implemented through international political agreements in Phnom Penh, go often hand in hand with a particular notion of “cleanliness.” Simply put, green connotes nature, and nature is only properly natural if it is clean of “un-natural” materials like waste. In contrast with the enactment of messy, oozy naturecultures in the infracycles of recyclable waste handling, this urban vision is premised on a clean separation of nature and culture in the city, which at the same time imposes a social segregation of inhabitants according to their societal status. This idea of cleanliness is visible, for example, in educational programs that aim to install a clean-green notion of nature within local situations (GGGI 2018; Khmer Times 2018).

However, other naturecultures are also emerging in parallel with this purified vision. An illustration is provided by the abandoned Stung Meanchey landfill, in operation until 2009. Here, rickety wooden shelters and houses surrounded by high, gold-decorated steel fences run along the old landfill, which once lay at the outskirts of the city. Satellite images from Open Street Map and Google Maps visually attest that a form of “nature” has reclaimed the site: They show a greenish area sharply delineated from the rest of the matted gray urban space. “It’s green, but only in the rainy season,” a nodding employee of a local NGO confirmed to me. Aging waste pickers with wrinkled faces and bent backs sometimes still climb up the garbage mountain at Stung Meanchey in the hope of finding a piece of metal washed up by the soaked earth during the rainy season that they can still sell. Having worked for decades at the city’s edge, they still occasionally collect garbage from the area, which has turned into a green hill that offers a clear view of the city skyline. Green grasses and rewilded areas at the old dumping site emerge in a new natureculture constellation, wherein waste and its pickers are also still part of the picture. While the Google Map contrast between greenish areas and gray areas suggest a stark dichotomy between nature and culture, cleanliness and waste, Stung Meanchey vividly exemplifies that neither visions of eco-gentrification nor satellite images is able to encompass or fully replace the in-place hybridity of urban naturecultures.

While the landfill has become greener, many urban areas have in fact become dirtier. A young Cambodian woman who grew up in Phnom Penh tells me that: “Nature to me is everything around me (…), I think Phnom Penh is a bit too crowded for nature. I mean like in the city if it isn’t like a park or riverside; I don’t see anything really natural or green very much.” Formerly identified “natural” places, wherein citizens used to picnic or hang around years ago, are no longer available due to increasing pollution or hazardousness or, paradoxically, to the massive building boom (STT 2014).

The versions described also stand in a reciprocal relationship to each other. While new versions of the clean city are constructed due to its current dirtiness, the novel perception of the city as dirty leads to demands to have it cleaned. In turn, this creates a new position for waste pickers, who are now also part of the solution. Moreover, their role in “tidying up” the city is also recognized by the ed jais themselves. As Chenda, a woman in her 50s, tells me: “When I pick up waste, I also play a part in protecting the environment. The public spaces are much cleaner without those cans or bottles around.” Her point is echoed by international and local organizations: “These groups [waste pickers] work hard to protect the environment, and those waste picker groups are the backbone of recycling.” An interlocutor from an international organization even went so far as to describe the waste pickers analogously to garbage cans: “They are our bins!,” thus degradingly highlighting also their societal status as a marginalized group. However, (as bins) they stand in hegemonial opposition to the NGOs, multilateral organizations, and consultancy agencies, that have huge influence on the “development strategies” and infrastructural projects in Cambodia. This elicits another part of patchiness visible in the city. Yet, if Phnom Penh is comprised of naturecultures, waste pickers are evidently agents in their making. For more than twenty years, they (the “bins”) have been materialized as the living infrastructure of urban Phnom Penh, and they are by now a self-evident part of the sociomaterial urbanity and its naturecultural enactments.

Matters ooze out, and therefore matter. They matter as it has been shown that to trace and follow leakages and oozy materials is important: First, they elicit indications of the limits of infracycles and thus of the limits of what is provided by an infrastructure. Secondly, this can provide practical hints about the limits and problems of different infrastructures or their implementation, to be read, for instance, from a comparison of different forms of oozing out between different infrastructures. Lastly, oozed matter unravels its hybrid and political character as it is able to actively change the sociomateriality of the city.

While high-profile visions for the design of a green city proliferate, and locals mourn the increasing dirtiness of urban space, rewilding proceeds on top of hills of toxic waste materials. Meanwhile, infracycles ooze waste materials, which merge with other agents to become a different form of natureculture. Appearing side by side, these naturecultures compete with each other about what the city should become, and what it is becoming. As they do so, they slowly transform Phnom Penh.

6 Conclusion

This article has provided a thick ethnographic description of the practices of waste pickers and others who together make up the infracycles of recyclable waste handling in contemporary Phnom Penh. Rather than operating as a formal, organizational and technical infrastructure, infracycles are lived infrastructures characterized by heterogeneous flows of people and materials. As dynamical and moving constellations of different agents, infracycles hold together as daily, recurring, circular practices that transport and modify the materials of recyclable waste. By focusing on infracycles, I have thus been able to capture the dynamic and lived character of not-quite-coherent infrastructure as materialized by the recurrence of daily practices, by the entanglements of different agents, and by the circulation of waste. The overall infrastructure of recyclable waste handling in Phnom Penh is lived and dynamic in a circular way as its practices recur daily and the recyclables circulate and stay on the move, thereby stabilizing the infrastructure. One condition for self-organization lies in the ed jais’ aim to earn money and live out motives they call “flexibility” and “freedom.” Further the dynamic is reinforced and maintained by the compassion of citizens and the interdependencies between single infracycles and structural interlinkage through waste as a boundary object.

Within the infracycles, recyclable waste undergoes numerous socio-material permutations and appropriations. Because infracycles do not form a closed system, however, they are also characterized by continuous leakages. Oozing out into urban twilight zones, waste becomes part of only partly perceptible aggregates in the ground, in the canals, and in the air. Oozing and leaking, waste becomes elements in emergent urban naturecultures to the detriment of urban health. At the same time, tracing oozy materials allows the eliciting of the borders and boundaries of the concept of infrastructure, the concept of modeling, and its suggested functioning and implementation.

Leakages become, moreover, a symbolic counterpoint for green images of Phnom Penh’s future. High-profile building projects contrast Western forms of cleanliness with the unappealing looks of garbage on streets or the toxic fumes of open canals. Waste, which was at the beginning defined as relational and as something which exists in a definitory twilight zone, has testified to its manifold status that doesn’t confine itself to fit into social constructivist perspectives. Waste materials that fragment over space and time, and therefore lose value and waste picker’s interest, ooze out of infracycles, emerging as new forms of naturecultures. As slippery and indeed oozy materials, they undergo diverse constellations and conjunctions with other agents, eventually becoming visible again in different places when they accumulate somewhere or dissipate somewhere else. This may have diverse social and political impacts, for instance when gentrification takes over cleaner quarters first, or when sewers with an elusively toxic smell drive away street vendors.

As we have seen, the Cambodian recyclable waste “management” system is an organically growing system which the state has not restricted, and which remains largely undetermined by any law. This is also distinctive to other waste pickers’ systems in adjacent Southeast Asian states, in India or in Egypt because waste pickers are able to become a visible presence as a political unit in the cities. They are indispensable, and because they are indispensable, they are highly visible in Phnom Penh’s urban picture.

Current popular descriptions of Phnom Penh as a city of garbage evoke aspirations for green cleanliness that escapes dirt altogether. In expanding pockets of the city, such visions materialize as wasteless backyards in gated communities, clean pedestrian streets, and as discourses and best-practice suggestions for the development of formal waste management systems. These compete over sovereignty in interpreting what the city is while transforming Phnom Penh. Waste pickers also find a role in these cleaned up images, as their inadvertent role as human “bins” that aid in tidying up the city. However, the different enactments of urban naturecultures do not add up. Rather they are added to one other. Polluted landfills become scenic, toxic hills, while the construction of luxury apartments exacerbates air pollution and leaves piles of garbage in its surroundings.

Ultimately, however, it is the everyday practice of waste pickers as part of the lived infrastructure that make cleanliness in the city possible. In principle, they do ecological reproduction work, or care work, in public urban spaces. Accordingly, they continuously “repair” the city, preventing it from getting swamped in waste. Due to their constant visibility, being part of the urban sociomateriality, this marginalized group is part of Phnom Penh’s urban sociomateriality. Their visibility and presence functions as a political counterweight, opposing hegemonic and waste-colonial structures, demonstrating that that city is made from below. This is a pertinent insight, not only with respect to the cleanliness of the city, but also in order to work against the elimination of these poor urban people through the greening and cleaning strategies of urban politics. They are part of urban naturecultures characterized not by purification and exclusion, but rather by mixing, cramming, and merging. Simply by making a living, they provide infrastructural services where neither state nor business has been able to step in. Multiply marginalized, yet present and visible on the streets every single day, the naturecultures they shape are consequential. But as they provide cleanliness in the city by caring practices, they also preserve a political non-structure. As oozy materials often “vanish” in a process of further fragmentations for the human eye, streets also become clean when waste gets picked up. This may give the misleading impression that no political action is necessary at all.

Acknowledgements

Foremost, I would like to thank all research participants for their openness towards my research project that I conducted in Phnom Penh. I am also grateful to Casper Bruun Jensen, the editor of this special issue “Material Itineraries: Urban Transformation and Activity Trails in Southeast Asian Cities” for his support and contributions to this article. Finally, I’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions that invited me to think further in different directions.

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Notes on contributors

Kathrin Eitel

Kathrin Eitel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Following studies in anthropology, history and politics from universities in Heidelberg and Istanbul, she conducted ethnographic research on recycling infrastructures in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as part of her dissertation project. Kathrin Eitel is particularly interested in enviromental matters, resulting from human/non-human practices and emerging sociomaterialities in relation to infrastructures and ontologies in the field of anthropology and science and technology studies. She has written articles on waste, infrastructure, and urban environments and politics, traversing thus disciplinary boundaries.

Notes

¹ Often also written as ad chais, or ad jais or etjais in Roman script.

² While China changed their waste buying policy at the beginning of 2018, and now refuses to continue to buy up all recyclable goods, especially from Western countries and Japan, and recover them, Cambodia’s flow of recyclables has presently remained untouched by the issue, insofar as only the minority of recyclables are reprocessed. It seems most likely that the world’s new garbage dump will be the Southeast Asian nations (Ellis-Petersen 2019; cf. Gerin 2018).

³ Clean waste materials in good condition and shape are favored by depots and ed jais risk the rejection of their collectives if they do not accord with the depot owner’s preconceptions.

⁴ This article was published posthumously and is unfortunately uncompleted. Beck differentiated in his keynote at the conference “Digitale Praxen” at Goethe-University Frankfurt between theories of praxis 1.0 to 3.0, where he highlighted the use of praxis as a verb, besides its usage as a substantive.