Green Capitalism or Extended Extraction: Rethinking the Circular Economy of Informal Waste Recycling

Keywords: Informal Economy, Agbogbloshie, E-Waste, Circular Economy, Racial Capitalism, Global South, Green Growth/Economy
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

A green agenda that prioritizes circular economy strategies, such as intensified material recovery and recycling in commodified waste streams - like electronics and textiles - can reproduce predatory practices that aggressively exploit racialized labor while simultaneously cannibalizing their environments. These sustainability strategies disguise new exploitative circuits of accumulation through extended extraction within the socio-spatial urban waste frontier - global South cities and their expanding dispossessed, unhoused, and racialized army of informal labor. Circular economy campaigns that re-imagine waste as a resource, informal waste recycling as an environmental 'good', and waste workers as environmental stewards, neglect an accounting of race, and the historical, political, and economic factors that make possible, waste recycling as a viable economic strategy for sustainable development in the global South. Using the lens of racial capitalism, the paper makes explicit the connection between circular economy strategies, and the greenwashing of capitalism - through tech-savvy, market-based solutions designed to address its grey residues - and the racialized forms of accumulation that it relies upon. The paper concludes that green capitalism, and the green economic paradigm at its center, do nothing to interrupt or eradicate racialized forms of accumulation. It does, however, create avenues for renewed circuits of capitalist accumulation through forms of extended extraction.