It is said that all garbage in Mexico City goes through seven stages of sifting. From the moment it is left on the street until its final destination at the garbage dump on the outskirts of the city. On the night of 4 February 1994, I placed seven small bronze sculptures, painted in seven distinct colours, in seven different garbage bags. I then dropped the bags in garbage piles in seven different districts of the city. In the following days, months, years, I have wandered the flea markets in the city looking for the sculptures to resurface. To date I have found two of the seven.
—Francis Alÿs about his art project “The Seven Lives of Garbage” (Ferguson, Alÿs, and Philbin 2008, 68)
Waste has a social life. Objects often go through many hands before they are thrown away. They may be passed on in families and between individuals, modified and repaired in the process. When they are discarded, they may be recovered from landfills and dumpsites by waste pickers, sorted, sold, and resold. All of these processes of use and reuse take place outside of the formal waste system.
Municipal solid waste systems of developed countries were established with the intention of replacing the informal economies of scavengers and scrap dealers, who were often seen by urban elites as nuisances and competitors for generating revenue from saleable refuse (Strasser 1999, 114). Despite these efforts, informal waste management continues to play a significant role in many parts of the world. Scavenging and the valorization of collected materials constitute a substantial part of waste management in the cities of both emerging and industrialized countries (Medina 2007b; Simpson-Herbert 2005).
While recycling in rich countries is a technology-intensive industry, the majority of recycling activities in cities of the Global South are carried out by informal networks of waste pickers and scrap dealers. Their value chains involve many stages of selection, sorting, aggregation, and processing that increase the value of the reclaimed materials at every step.
Until recently, informal activities such as waste picking and street vending were seen as temporary phenomena bound to disappear in the course of modernization and industrialization. Yet the formal waste management and recycling industry did not succeed as expected in developing countries. Today it has become clear that the informal economy is here to stay. Although still illegal in many places, informal waste management has persisted, leading many policy makers to reassess their opinions and move from a strategy of criminalization to one that recognizes waste picking as a legitimate occupation that delivers a public service and contributes substantially to resource conservation and sustainability.
An inclusive approach to recycling integrates the informal sector with the formal waste system. This begins by recognizing informal recycling practices and by supporting organizations that allow waste pickers to work under better conditions. Inclusive recycling can involve the public sector hiring waste pickers, offering healthcare and education, providing access to loans and technical support, and encouraging waste picker unionization and the establishment of cooperatives and associations (Scheinberg 2012).
In several countries, waste pickers have formed larger groups that allow them to pool material and sell it in larger quantities, commanding better prices than they could receive individually. In 2010, Brazil enacted its National Policy on Solid Waste (NPSW), the world’s first national legislation that recognizes the work of waste pickers as a profession (Brazil 2010). Written with the participation of waste picker organizations, the law grants pickers a central role in waste management and resource recovery. It encourages the formation of waste picker cooperatives and associations, requiring companies and public institutions to form partnerships with them.
There is little disagreement about the goals of waste picker integration—giving workers access to a safe environment that enables economic survival under dignified conditions. The details of this integration between formal and informal actors are unsettled, however, especially since many cities know very little about their formal waste system, if we are to judge by the available data, which can be used as a proxy for estimating the quality of a city’s waste system and governance (Wilson et al. 2012, 253).
Informal waste management has been studied through different macro and micro lenses by estimating the economic impact of the sector and publishing ethnographies of waste picker communities. Between those two perspectives, a substantial gap remains. The spatial organization of informal activities on the urban scale as well as the geographies of collection and valorization networks and their links to the global economy remain poorly understood. At the same time, this is the scale where most development projects and initiatives operate.
Informal systems are illegible by definition. Individual waste pickers might benefit to some extent when this illegibility protects their sources, clients, and strategies from competing actors and repressive administrations. The situation is different for waste picker cooperatives when illegibility hinders their development and complicates their integration into formal waste systems. Waste picker unions and recycling cooperatives suffer from a lack of information that can allow them to plan their operations more effectively, negotiate better contracts, and increase the public visibility of their work.
Formalization is not only a question of policy and professionalization, however. Observing and describing the informal sector is an act of formalization in itself. Depending on the approach, formalization can have positive or negative consequences for waste pickers. It can benefit them by giving them access to services and protection, but it can also make them more vulnerable by exposing them to competition and regulatory scrutiny or, in the worst case, by displacing them or removing their sources of income. The questions about how to make an informal systems legible, which I discuss in more detail in the following chapter using examples from waste picker cooperatives in Brazil, cannot be separated from the larger issue of what form of integration is desirable. What should be formalized and what should be left unmeasured?
Current efforts to formalize waste picking in developing countries were preceded by similar processes that took place in the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. After municipal water and sanitation systems helped get epidemics and other public health issues largely under control at the end of the nineteenth century, the focus of waste management shifted to the technical problem of organizing waste collection and disposal at a large scale (Melosi 2004, 50). In 1901 sanitary engineer M. N. Baker noted that “it is seldom recognized that the problems incident to final disposal are largely engineering in character and therefore should be entrusted to engineers” (Baker 1901).
The comprehensive approach to waste management and recycling taken by municipalities was driven by resource value. U.S. households widely practiced the separation of discarded materials during the late nineteenth century (Strasser 1999). In 1898, New York’s Street Commissioner George Waring introduced a comprehensive collection and recycling system that used three bins for organic waste, ashes, and residual garbage. The garbage was separated in a new sorting plant that allowed detailed monitoring of all material streams and successfully captured 37 percent of the collected refuse (Hering and Greeley 1921, 300). The motivation for this new form of industrialized recycling was purely economic. It was meant to cover the costs of municipal public services. In the words of Hering and Greenley, waste recovery is only justified “when, after previous disinfection, it shows a sufficient margin of profit” (ibid., 310). Today, this economic calculation has to consider the increasing costs of disposal in the form of transportation, tipping fees at landfills and waste-to-energy plants, and treatment costs for incinerator ash.
Although resource value is an important driver for recycling in low-income countries, industrial-scale resource recovery has not lived up to its expectations in the cities of the Global South. This has happened for several reasons. Rapid urbanization and a weak tax base have caused many municipalities to struggle with the provision of essential services such as water, electricity, waste collection, and sanitation. The available public services are often limited to affluent areas, excluding or underserving many poorer areas. In addition, informal or low-income neighborhoods with narrow, unpaved streets do not support efficient truck collection, further exacerbating the unequal service distribution.
Waste pickers can compensate to some extent for the deficiencies of public services, but municipalities often forgo this opportunity by excluding them from service provision. In 2002, the city of Cairo attempted to modernize its waste system radically by entering into service contracts with three multinational waste companies. This tactic was meant to replace the traditional door-to-door collection system operated by local Coptic-Christian Zabaleen waste picker communities, who collected mixed household waste and fed organic components to their livestock, which city officials had deemed unsanitary and backward (Gauch 2003).
However, after a single year of operation it became clear that the new system has not led to expected improvements, but instead to numerous resident complaints about service fees, poor service quality, and waste accumulating on the streets. While the informal Zabaleen system achieved recycling rates of 80 percent, this number dropped to 20 percent after privatization, partially due to toothless service contracts that do not require higher rates and have limited enforcement options (Fahmi and Sutton 2013, 168). Following failed attempts to achieve a symbiotic relationship between the waste pickers and the collection companies, the government is currently prepared to give the Zabaleen official status and direct service contracts once the contracts with the multinationals expire (Guénard 2013).
Besides the value of reclaimed resources, several other factors drive the development of local waste management systems in low-income countries (Wilson 2007). Public health and environmental protection are important drivers in environments that have uncontrolled, illegal dumps and litter on the streets that can clog sewers and cause flooding. If no employment alternatives are offered, the closing of open dumpsites creates a dilemma for waste picker formalization by removing access to the material and income the pickers rely on. Such conflicts have become increasingly common as emerging countries have reorganized their waste systems by delegating responsibility for regulating and implementing comprehensive resource management to municipalities, regions, and national governments. In the political processes of shaping these waste policies, waste picker organizations have become effective advocates in several countries.
The experiments with industrial recycling schemes in Cairo and other cities of the Global South have demonstrated that neither a comprehensive modernization approach nor a system carried by waste pickers offers realistic solutions to resource management in developing countries. Waste picker integration seems to be a necessary element of waste systems that are both equitable and effective.
Due to the illegibility of informal waste management, public attitudes toward waste picking are subject to several myths that continue to shape waste policies. Contrary to widespread perceptions, scavengers are not always the poorest of the poor, informal recycling is not inherently disorganized, and waste picking does not play an insignificant economic role (Medina 2007a).
Various models and spatial organizations of informal waste management exist; they vary by region and depend on local culture and economy. Waste pickers collect material from open dumpsites, from the street, or by collecting door to door from residents. They typically sell to local scrap dealers who are frequently informal actors themselves. Itinerant buyers who purchase material from residents combine aspects of waste pickers and scrap dealers. Waste pickers specialize in different materials. Solitary waste pickers without access to spaces where they can sort and aggregate material often focus on aluminum cans and metals, which combine light weight with high value, or they collect paper and cardboard with the help of a handcart. They usually sell their material on the same day they collect it. Other materials of interest include recyclables such as glass, PET and other plastics, commercial and industrial waste materials such as rubber, mixed household waste including food waste, and, in the case of manual scavengers in India, even human and animal excrement sold as fertilizer (Rāmasvāmi 2005).
The term “recycling” describes the separation of valuable materials from residual waste but typically does not account for how value is generated. In comparison, the concept of “valorization” is more useful in the context of informal waste management since it focuses on the commercial value that is generated at each stage of extracting, collecting, storing, and processing (Scheinberg, Wilson, and Rodic 2010). In industrial-scale recycling, the sale of reclaimed materials is a substantial source of income for the recycler but still secondary to the income from municipal contracts. For waste pickers, though, this revenue is essential.
Valorization involves many actors who are connected in a network of interdependencies often described as the value chain, a hierarchy of value creation with waste pickers at its base. Pickers collect material and sell it to intermediaries. These middlemen, sometimes formal companies, at other times informal junk shops, aggregate and sell materials to industrial buyers. Manufacturers need PET and cardboard as secondary raw materials, but they usually buy only in quantities that no individual waste picker or informal scrap dealer can supply. Informal junk shops often do not have enough space and financial resources to pool large amounts of material and wait for the best price. Therefore, they have to sell it to other intermediaries who further aggregate and process it by, for example, cleaning and shredding plastics into granular pellets. Access to a shared space for sorting, processing, and storage is essential for waste picker organizations, since it allows them to bypass middlemen and gain access to customers in the higher ranks of the value chain. Such spaces are often located under highways or in other residual urban spaces.
The waste value chain is dynamic. Prices for secondary raw materials are constantly in flux and multiple process chains exist for different materials. Value chains are influenced by the availability of material, potential buyers, and the capacity to process recovered materials. A material that offers a good source of income at one point can quickly drop in price and lose significance for waste pickers. The prices of PET and plastics are especially sensitive to regional and temporal fluctuations.
Formalization is a broad concept that can include measures such as registration and taxation, social security, and legal representation. It can be inclusive or repressive in its intention—integrating or banning informal practices. Early studies were often characterized by a pessimistic tone, depicting waste pickers as victims without agency, while more recent work describes informal recycling as a legitimate profession with many potentials for positive development (Gerxhani 2004). Development economist Martha Chen groups the literature on informality into four main schools: dualist, structuralist, legalist, and voluntarist (Chen 2012).
Based on work by anthropologist Keith Hart, the dualist model describes the informal sector as a result of the different speeds at which population and the formal economic sector grow. The informal economy is described as an economically significant sector, largely autonomous and with limited interconnections to the formal economy (International Labour Office 1972). The structuralist view introduced by Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes challenges this notion of autonomy, arguing that the informal economy is closely intertwined with the formal sector, which produces informality through deregulation, globalization, and outsourcing (Castells and Portes 1989). Introduced in Hernando de Soto’s work on Peru’s informal economy, the legalist view hypothesizes that bureaucratic obstacles and their associated costs for the individual drive workers into informality or prevent informal operations from acquiring a formal status (de Soto 1989). Finally, the voluntarist view argues that workers may sometimes voluntarily choose informality over formal employment due to better economic opportunities and more autonomy (Maloney 2004).
The concept of informality, its policy implications, and the ideological alignments of the four schools of thought diverge. While the dualist view places informality outside of the formal economy, the structuralist view locates informality inside formal systems. Structuralists identify capitalism and market liberalization as drivers of informality. Legalists see them as the solution. Structuralists emphasize the dependency of informal wage earners from corporations or other informal firms, while voluntarists describe a class of independent entrepreneurs who prefer informal work to formal status (Chen 2012).
These theoretical models of informality have implications for informal waste policies. Anne Scheinberg groups prevalent formalization models into four different categories that imply different dependencies and relationships of accountability for waste pickers, offer different advantages, and carry their own risks (2010, 2012). In the service model, municipalities maintain responsibility for planning and monitoring, paying waste pickers to perform the collection. The commodities model aims to turn waste picker organizations into micro-enterprises that accept contracts from municipalities and private companies, generating income by selling the collected material. Between those two options, there are different hybrid models in which the city and the waste pickers share responsibilities and revenue from selling recyclables, with the city going beyond recognition and offering active support. Finally, Community-based Enterprise (CBE) models involve multiple actors in urban service provision, including residents, NGOs, waste picker cooperatives, and private companies.
In international development, the current emphasis on coalitions and partnerships, official recognition, and tight integration into formal waste systems can make it easy to forget that waste pickers remain vulnerable compared to formal actors such as companies and municipalities. The early observations by Christopher Birkbeck about the informal paper scavengers of Cali, Colombia, are still relevant in this context:
We cannot argue that they should be incorporated into the industrial sector of the economy since they are already part of it. Neither can we argue for increasing their share of the income generated by recuperation in anything but a limited way because of the structural constraints that operate in determining income. The garbage picker may work hard, may have a shrewd eye for saleable materials, may search long for the right buyer; in short, he may be the near perfect example of the enterprising individual. It will not get him far. (Birkbeck 1979, 182)
As Birkbeck, as well as Castells and Portes’s conceptualizations of the informal economy suggest, informality is not something that takes place outside of formal systems and is limited to waste pickers and street vendors. Informality can also be found in the actions of planners and public servants. The language of waste regulation is a different subject from its implementation and enforcement. There is much space for informal decision making in the latter. Every formal system involves a certain degree of informality and requires some extent of improvisation and bottom-up tinkering to make it work in the first place (Graham and Thrift 2007).
More than a question of organizational arrangements, formalization manifests on a more subtle level of terminologies and legal definitions. The boundary between formal and informal is drawn by language that explicates certain things and keeps other things vague or unnamed. It starts with the legal definitions of “waste” and its ownership, and its consequences for scavenging are not limited to developing countries.
Depending on jurisdiction and situation, waste may be considered to belong to its previous holder, be part of the public domain, or be owned by the city or its service provider. According to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1988, trash left out on a public street can be interpreted as abandoned by its previous owner and part of the public domain. Municipal ordinances can be more specific. Some transfer the ownership of waste to the service provider at the moment when it is collected, others at the time when an object is placed in the waste bin. In the first case, scavenging from containers is legal, in the second instance it is not. Here, it is worth focusing on the second point in the previously mentioned European definition of “waste” as “any substance or object (1) which the holder discards or (2) intends or (3) is required to discard” (European Commission 2008). In some European municipalities, the intention to discard suffices to transfer ownership to the city or service provider. In Vienna, leaving an object on the sidewalk for the city to pick up, for example, is considered an expression of this intent. Taking it from the street becomes theft, therefore rendering illegal the activities of Eastern European scavengers specializing in bulky waste.
Beyond waste ownership, many other factors influence the legality of waste picking, including the legal right to operate a business entity along with an organization’s form and compliance with health and safety regulation as well as taxation. Legalizing waste picking therefore requires legislative action that recognizes and defines waste picking as a professional activity.
A second criterion for distinguishing formal from informal systems is the presence of monitoring. Formalization means establishing infrastructures that capture and represent processes under defined conditions, thereby giving structure to informal practices. Monitoring encompasses data collection, storage, and analysis, as well as protocols for responses to the measured results.
As an information-gathering practice, monitoring is different from surveillance or evaluation. Management theory defines monitoring as the organized and repetitive measurement of specified parameters over an extended period (Vos, Meelis, and Ter Keurs 2000). Unlike system evaluation, monitoring is constantly ongoing. And unlike surveillance, monitoring always serves a narrow goal and implies a standard against which an activity is measured (Hellawell 1991). Management theorist William Deming noted the need to explicate and observe goals in organizational systems: “What is a system? A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment” (1993, 50).
Waste monitoring infrastructures may serve to improve efficiency and sustainability, verify contractual obligations, measure service quality, prevent accidents, identify causes of pollution, or shed light on consumption behavior. Most of these goals are not directly observable in individual actions, they are constructs that have to be operationalized from a range of measurable variables. Monitoring requires establishing a domain-specific language to describe and classify all processes of interest while keeping aspects outside of its scope undefined. The language for describing waste management processes is politically fraught and has direct implications on the physical reality of waste systems.
Early U.S. environmental regulations reserved the first several years of their implementation for collecting data about regulated substances, processes, and facilities. Similarly, the first stages of Brazil’s NPSW were dedicated to collecting data for diagnosing the current system, registering hazardous waste operators, establishing technical standards and regional solid waste plans, and negotiating specific responsibilities in sectoral agreements. In the Brazilian model of shared responsibility, all actors are involved in monitoring and collecting data about the system. This includes civil society, as acknowledged in provisions for social control that mandate public access to information and participation in solid-waste policy making.
The NPSW also strives to make the value chain legible on the local scale. Cooperatives and associations are requested to submit documentation about materials collected and sold. The governments are expected to help cooperatives establish and formalize relationships with companies and institutions for technical assistance, education, or service contracts. Several projects that concern the professionalization of waste picker cooperatives focus on information management and accounting practices. The software CataFácil, developed by the Avina Foundation and the Federal University of Minas Gerais, supports mass balances, keeps track of work hours and finances, and can be used to generate various reports (Bazo Soluções 2015). In partnership with the Dutch government, CEMPRE, a Colombian NGO focused on recycling, develops benchmarking and monitoring tools for the value chain using interfaces that address the needs of both formal and informal actors.1
Although waste monitoring mandated by national laws implies centralized structures, it does not exclusively mandate a view from above. Somewhat paradoxically, practices of monitoring are not always perfectly formalized and stable, and they often involve informal aspects. Studying the monitoring infrastructures of international development projects, Casper Jensen and Britt Winthereik observe: “Monitoring moves around, and what monitoring means, what it entails, whom it involves, and how it is done all move in the same process. As this happens, initial (design) intentions and (political) ambitions for accountability and transparency are undone and redone” (Jensen and Winthereik 2013).
A circular economy where all waste materials are folded back into production must go beyond the scope of waste management and recycling to consider all aspects of a product’s life cycle, including production, consumption, and end of life. This requires extensive infrastructures of data collection.
Although extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a relatively recent concern in emerging economies such as Brazil, it is nevertheless a pressing one, considering the number of PET bottles and packaging supplies brought into circulation by international companies and the absence of a comprehensive system to recover and return these materials.
EPR policies are based on the polluter pays principle, which makes manufacturers responsible, partially or entirely, for bearing the cost of a product’s end-of-life treatment. The policy is intended to create an incentive to design products and packaging that are environmentally benign (OECD 2001, 9).
A widespread example of EPR known as “bottle bills” instituted mandatory deposits for beverage containers to help ensure that containers find their way back to stores. U.S. states with bottle bills have substantially higher recycling rates, not least because the deposits provide income for waste pickers. But the bottle bill model does not easily extend to all material categories. More complex EPR implementations include the European Union’s directive for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and the German dual system for recycling, which has been in effect since 1991. Popularly known as the “Grüner Punkt” (Green Dot) program, the dual system was established by manufacturers and retailers in response to a federal law that required retailers to take back packaging waste. Attempts to introduce similar policies in the United States date back to the 1970s, but they have failed due to industry resistance (Marques and Cruz 2015, 18; MacBride 2012, 58; Connett and Spiegelman 2013, 248).
Like the landfill closures and sanitary disposal programs discussed earlier, EPR presents a dilemma for informal recycling. A rigorous implementation comparable to the Green Dot program collides with the interests and practices of the informal collectors who compete with the service companies for the same materials (Scheinberg et al. 2016). An EPR approach that does not displace waste pickers requires an adequate model in which both informal and formal actors can coexist, and such a collaboration requires information exchange between the actors.
Making informed decisions about eco-friendly package design requires life-cycle assessment (LCA) data models that cover the entire product life cycle, its origins and the energy footprints of its production and transportation. The same data are necessary for determining appropriate post-consumer treatment options. Acquiring such data is complicated not only by proprietary and opaque manufacturing processes, but also by the fact that many items are sold, resold, and modified by their owners several times. As a result, reliable and trustworthy LCA models for e-waste beyond the most general categories are still lacking (Offenhuber, Wolf, and Ratti 2013). An EPR approach that integrates informal recycling requires detailed information about the impacts of all processes in the value chain. As we will see in the following chapter, this is especially challenging in the case of Brazil, where the responsibilities for collecting such data are shared among multiple parties.
Compared to pure EPR implementations that hold manufacturers responsible for the recycling of their products and packaging materials, the Brazilian legislation could be more appropriately described as “extended product responsibility,” since it divides the responsibility among producers, consumers, and the waste management sector (Migliano, Demajorovic, and Xavier 2014). In this context, the law also makes special provisions for waste picker cooperatives, requiring companies and public institutions to collaborate and use their services. This arrangement implies a complex system of responsibilities that have to be negotiated separately through sectoral agreements.
The interpretation of shared responsibility is a political question that reveals itself in the minute details that regulate information collection and exchange. This includes issues such as how much proprietary information manufacturers must share with the waste management sector and the public. It also includes questions about what can be labeled as “recyclable” on packaging. Should this include items that are theoretically recyclable or only those that are reliably processed by recycling centers?
The New Solid Waste Policy of Brazil explicitly requires producers to “disseminate information concerning the ways of avoiding, recycling and eliminating the solid wastes associated with their respective products” (Ayoub e Silva, Leitão, and Lemos 2014, 195). This involves appropriate labeling and access to manufacturing information regardless of corporate secrecy. In the first sectoral agreement on the plastic waste stream, however, the binding labeling requirements for producers did not meet aspirations (ibid., 197). This example illustrates the limits of the shared responsibility model, which requires a complex set of agreements with powerful stakeholders who have an advantage in negotiations.
In all forms of EPR, monitoring infrastructures are necessary for evaluating environmental impacts of processes. Crossing the information gap between upstream production and downstream end-of-life treatment involves political, technical, and logistical questions.
Implementing a reverse logistics system such as the one envisioned by NPSW may appear to be a straightforward application of supply-chain management, but the flow of information is quite different despite many similarities. Supply chains have comprehensive information management with well-defined interfaces for data exchange as needed by producers and retailers. Reverse logistic systems, in contrast, start where product consumption ends. As environmental scientist Marcello Veiga explains:
Many particularities of reverse logistics have been continuously ignored. Forward logistics is an active process, where firms plan, produce, and supply distributors with products based upon forecasts. Reverse logistics is a reactive process with more unpredictable factors, which is usually initiated by end-user. The main trigger for reverse logistics process is the end-user, not the manufacturers themselves. (Veiga 2013, 653)
This has the consequence that little data are readily available upon collection. Products that have passed through various stages of use and reuse pose problems for identifying manufacturers and collecting information about material composition. Consequently, monitoring practices that focus on efficiency, transparency, and contractual compliance are not sufficient. Any successful reverse logistics system depends on the voluntary involvement of the individual, whether scavenger or resident, and needs to consider questions of motivation, social practice, and culture.
Understanding a system such as the value chain, its actors, and their links to the larger waste system requires a different kind of legibility, one that recognizes material collection and valorization as local activities that depend on specific local conditions.
While some materials can be collected from the street, the recovery of others such as electronic devices requires the engagement of local residents to capture information that links these devices back to their manufacturers. Waste pickers respond to local conditions in the form of prices paid by junk shops, the supply of materials, and the available options for processing.
Waste picker cooperatives require information for managing their operations, but data collection has to take their practices and local context into consideration since they remain the most vulnerable party in the value chain. The value chain itself consists of local processes with intricate dependencies that are easily destabilized by changing markets and local actors. Monitoring through the local community, which is specified as “social control” in NPSW and delegated to municipal governments, again requires the consideration of local specifics.
The regulatory instruments of national programs like RCRA can be instrumental in evaluating the overall waste system and its impacts. They benefit from harmonized definitions of waste across localities, technical standards, and common data formats for data exchange. Their systemic scale is not sufficient at the local level of the value chain and its actors, which requires approaches that have their own modes of legibility within their specific contexts.
The importance of the local context can be demonstrated with the example of Brazilian recycling cooperatives and associations I describe in the next chapter. Currently, less than 10 percent of Brazil’s waste pickers are organized in such groups, although NPSW encourages more of it. Despite the advantages of collective action, each cooperative remains a precarious achievement that depends on specific conditions such as a suitable facility site, a sufficient source of waste material, the engagement of individual waste pickers, or the support of local politicians. No formula for success is easily transferred because they all have their own stories, local contingencies, and business strategies. From an information standpoint, each cooperative requires its own window into its operating environment to evaluate the costs of collection and the value of their service.
Media scholar Yanni Loukissas argues that all data are local because they require a local reading that takes the context of their generation into account. What may appear as a large archive of uniformly structured data reveals itself under scrutiny as a heterogeneous collection whose artifacts bear traces of the conditions of their generation. Classifications are always designed with a specific problem in mind, and typos, duplicates, and other artifacts reveal the methods of data collection and entry. Local data are therefore not a different kind of data source, but a different lens (Loukissas 2017).
Many recent experimental projects focusing on waste issues are local in their scope. Some of them might seem whimsical, such as the idea to locate open dumpsites by outfitting vultures with camera backpacks,2 or to identify litter by using image recognition algorithms on CCTV footage.3 Crowdsourcing initiatives that use technologies that appear to be generic, scalable, and location independent still depend on the engagement of a local community.4 The importance of the local context, however, does not imply that projects are necessarily limited to it. Projects that involve collecting recyclable materials with a fleet of digitally coordinated bicycles exist in Nigeria,5 India,6 and Massachusetts.7 Open source and civic technology initiatives are anchored in a local context while simultaneously engaged in a constant exchange with similar initiatives around the world.
The circular economy envisioned in EPR schemes creates and reinforces an economy of information. When provenance data is necessary to link a product to its responsible party, items of electronic waste with well-documented sources yield higher prices than undocumented scraps because they can be sold and processed in a more formal setting. This affects not only recycling cooperative profits but also the selection of potential customers. In the Brazilian shared responsibility model, waste pickers may not have the same rigid reporting duties compared to formal companies, but information remains critical for their partnerships with companies. Operational data are also necessary for cooperatives to demonstrate the value of their service in their political negotiations with cities, helping them to shift the theme of waste picker inclusion from charity (under the motto “anything helps”) to an adequate compensation for services, which can be in many ways superior to professional recycling.
The next chapter addresses the question of how waste picker cooperatives can design information infrastructures that are tailored to these specific needs. Cooperatives have to make informed decisions about where and what they collect. An experienced individual collector with a handcart may be able to make a living by picking the right material in the right place and selling it to the right buyer at the right time, but in a larger cooperative with machines, trucks, and a big collection area, the best strategies of valorization are no longer obvious. Most cooperatives have a good sense of their costs and opportunities, but they also know which information they lack. In the following chapter, I describe a participatory design approach used with different Brazilian recycling cooperatives to investigate information management and to explore opportunities for using ubiquitous communication technologies to implement data collection infrastructures that respond to the cooperatives’ needs.