Contested Waste: Environmental Conflicts and Waste Picker Resistance in the Global South

Contested Waste’ examines socio-environmental conflicts involving waste pickers in the Global South, uncovering the systemic injustices that underpin contemporary waste policies. Driven by the privatisation of waste management, these conflicts expose the “recycling paradox”: while waste pickers make critical, uncompensated contributions to sustainability, they are further excluded.

This book analyses how modern waste policies marginalise waste pickers, triggering conflicts in cities across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Drawing on over 70 conflicts documented in the Global Environmental Justice Atlas, the book explores how privatisation, incineration, and waste enclosures displace informal recyclers and worsen the sustainability crisis. These processes exemplify “Capital Accumulation by Dispossession,” as waste streams are enclosed and privatised, excluding waste pickers, and “Capital Accumulation by Contamination,” as environmental burdens are shifted onto marginalised communities. The book also showcases waste pickers’ resilience as they organise to fight for justice and equitable waste systems.

Essential for scholars, policymakers, and activists in environmental justice, development, and urban studies, this book reveals the structural drivers of waste conflicts and the transformative power of grassroots resistance in shaping sustainable and inclusive urban futures.

Federico Demaria is a Serra Hunter Associate Professor in ecological economics and political ecology at the University of Barcelona (UB). His main research interest is to understand the interactions between society, the environment, and the economy. His research aims to inform theory on how these interactions are shaped, politicized, and contested. He is the co-editor of Degrowth (Routledge, 2014) and Pluriverse (Columbia University Press, 2019); the co-author of The Case for Degrowth (Polity Press, 2020), and author of The Political Ecology of Informal Waste Recyclers in India (Oxford University Press, 2023). In 2023, the International Society for Ecological Economics awarded him the Bina Agarwal Prize for Young Scholars in Ecological Economics.

Daniele Vico is a researcher in political ecology and ecological economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona, Spain. His research focuses on informal recycling in European and Global South cities. Before joining academia, he worked as a project manager for the International Labour Organisation (ILO), focusing on trade unions, labour protection, the just transition, and the social and solidarity economy.

Lucía Fernández Gabard has spent 20 years organizing the waste picker movement: locally with the UCRUS Union in her native country Uruguay, regionally with the Latin American Network RedLACRe, and internationally by leading and founding the International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP) in 2024. She is now the director of the Organisation and Representation Programme at WIEGO (Women Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing). Member of the Lefebvrian Studies “International Network of the Production of Space.” she co-organized events and co-edited
publications around Lefebvre’s theory. She is a co-founder of the Observatory of Territorial Conflicts in the Metropolitan Area of Uruguay, as well as an assistant professor at the Institute of Urban Studies and Theory of the Architectural, Design, and Urbanism School in Uruguay.