Waste: The first and final frontier

Waste: The first and final frontier Jacob Doherty In: A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 3rd Edition. James Carrier, Ed. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/a-handbook-of-economic-anthropology-9781839108914.html Waste is what economy is meant to guard against. Before it came to refer to the total structure of relations of production, circulation and consumption, economy was the virtue of achieving ends with the minimum means necessary, of prudently disposing one’s resources to create value without waste (Mitchell 1998: 84-85). Waste is surplus gone bad, the opposite of wealth, the abject pole of value, the limit of Lockean property, the material index of inefficiency and irrationality, that which needs development, the place where enclosure happens. It is a shadow stalking the core concepts of political economy. Thrift, budgeting, saving, austerity, rational investment, the meeting of supply and demand in the market with its disciplinary effects and informative price signals, all work harmoniously together to maximize utility and prevent waste. So the Panglossian story goes. Insofar as it becomes property and sanctions private appropriation, waste is temporally and logically before liberal property regimes, the formation of capital and the production of commodities. Physically, waste is where property first com es from. The Statute of Merton of 1235 initiated the transformation of waste to real estate, giving manorial lords in England the right to enclose portions of the wastes, the common land from which peasants sustained themselves, so long as they left sufficient land for peasant sustenance (Goldstein 2012). For John Locke, waste was both the moral limit of accumulation and the justification of private property. By the seventeenth century, when Locke (2003 [1689]: 121) wrote that “in the beginning all the world was America”, that is, waste, waste had come to be associated with irrationality, unproductivity and sterility. A narrow image of human nature – “Man,” in Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) terms - on the other hand, was expressed through the labor of rationalizing, developing and improving waste (Gidwani and Reddy 2011: 1627-28). By making a property of the land, Man it would not go to waste. Man could rightly enclose as much as he could use without it falling into waste, Locke argued. Collect all the apples you want in the state of nature, so long as none rot. Only the introduction of money to his theory of property enabled accumulation beyond the moral limit imposed by waste’s decaying materiality. But waste is a relative category and, contrary to the Panglossian story, economy proceeds by both eliminating and making waste. Karl Marx (1959 [1867]: 50-56) observes the economy with which capitalists seek to deploy the means of production (no wasted time) and their conversion of industrial by-products into new raw materials (no wasted stuff), savings driven by competition and the falling rate of profit. But after noting the “capitalist's fanatical insistence on economy in means of product ion”, Marx (1959 [1867]: 53) argues that “more than any other mode of production, [capitalism] squanders human lives, or living-labour, and not only blood and flesh, but also nerve and brain. Indeed,” he writes, “it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that the development of the human race is at all safeguarded and maintained”. Capitalist economy militates against waste to extend and enrich some human lives by squandering others in the maw of industry (Yates 2011). Yet while valuable means of production are closely guarded from going to waste, the processes of extraction, production, circulation and consumption generate vast new wastes in the form of industrial pollution, construction debris and consumer discards (Mohai et al. 2009; Reno 2015). In this sense, waste is not only temporally and logically before liberal property regimes and the formation of capital, but also after them, a result of the capitalist production of commodities. Waste, then, is contradictory, both prior to and after property, at once a pre-condition and a result of enclosure, production and accumulation. This chapter examines that contradiction by developing an understanding of waste frontiers: liminal zones in which people, places and things are cast out of and reincorporated into processes of capitalist accumulation. It draws on the growing body of work in environmental and economic anthropology on wastelands and waste economies to explore how the expansion of capitalism constantly produces and captures an outside. Ethnographic interest in waste has blossomed in the last decade in response to the ecological crises of the anthropocene, dubbed an “apotheosis of waste” (Hecht 2018: 111), giving rise to exchanges between economic anthropologists, urban geographers and environmental historians. While canonical understandings of pollution in anthropology cast it as matter falling between the cracks of classificatory systems, the abject constitutive Other of the symbolic order (Douglas 1966; Kristeva 1982), recent work in economic anthropology has shifted attention from symbolism to the material movement of objects and substances across domains, the forms of labor this movement requires and the productive porosity of the categories of waste and value. 2 The first part of the chapter describes the cultural and ecological co-constitution of resource frontiers and waste frontiers, situating them in capitalism’s expansionary imperative. The second part maps the ways these two frontiers are materially connected, suggesting that waste frontiers are becoming important sites of appropriation as devalued materials pushed out of circulation constitute a necessary outside from which to initiate new cycles of accumulation. The Two Frontiers For Locke, the expanse of the American frontier justified enclosures insofar as the continent’s endless wastes ensured that one could take some as property and leave enough and as good for others. Intellectuals at the time disagreed about the nature of America’s waste lands: Europeans viewed it as degenerative, weak and barren, while Jeffersonians saw a boundless and fertile expanse waiting idly to be subject to Christian labor and national expansion. Whatever the view, however, the frontier was a spatial fix for the social contradictions of early American empire, diffusing the tensions of unequal capital accumulation as the poor and landless spread West to enclose for themselves (Grandin 2019). As a site of racialized displacement and appropriation, the frontier materialized the ideology of limitless growth and generated a national mythos of conquest, settlement and muscular frontier masculinity. Infrontier spaces, settlement outstripped the law, which meant that land commonly was occupied by settlers whose appropriation was only retroactively legitimized as property (Nichols 2020: 39). The settler frontier project was the context in which the Lockean definition of waste was legally enshrined. Previous notions of waste in English common law, exemplified in Blackstone’s commentaries on feudal land rights, understood waste in relation to transformations in land use. Affirming the interests of lan downers in maintaining the value of lands over those of tenants seeking to increase their benefit from it, waste referred to changes initiated by a tenant without the landowner’s permission that had lasting effects on a property, for instance opening a mine or gardening in a meadow, cutting a forest or letting one grow on farmland (Purdy 2006: 663). If English waste law reproduced feudal social hierarchies and defaulted to the conservation of land use, the American frontier required a reformulation of waste to suit both the ideological needs of republican egalitarianism (read: formal equality among white male landowners) and the material need to transform the Western wilderness. In a 3 series of decisions in the nineteenth century, American courts reworked waste law in the image of yeoman smallholders and in the name of the development of Mankind to refer to idle, wild land waiting to be cleared and put to use. Waste, in this view, was not unauthorized change in land use but, following Locke, idle land awaiting valorization by labor, enclosure and production. For American jurists, “progress and improvement were the ... aims, and forward movement across the continent was synonymous with betterment. The anxiety-producing image was of arrested movement, stasis, land locked into forest and the development of the continent brought to a halt” (Purdy 2006: 692). Manifest Destiny, the expanding frontier and America’s liberal contractual social order, relied on bringing the meaning of waste into line with Locke’s justifications of original acquisition and conquest. Waste and the production of resource frontiers While the model of the American frontier is not universally applicable, it is more paradigmatic than exceptional. Insofar as it relies on growth, capitalism “is a frontier civilization” (Moore 2014) dependent on the appropriation of land, labor and resources from outside itself. In primitive accumulation the process of appropriation from both the environment and labor outstrips that of commodification, meaning that the full costs of ecological and social reproduction are borne not solely by capital, but also by the humans and environments inhabiting capitalist frontiers (Mies 1986; Moore 2015). Resource frontiers thus sustain capitalism through the constant provision of artificially cheap land, energy, labor and resources, “gifts of nature” from the edges of capitalism (Patel and Moore 2018). Frontiers are zones where nature is transformed into resources, a process that economic anthropologists have shown to be contingent on the cultural work of translation and of rhetorically constituting landscapes as extractive zones (Di Giminiani and Haines 2019; Hoag 2019; Tsing 2003). Waste is crucial in the symbolic repertoire for constructing resource frontiers (see Franquesa chap. ___, this vol.). Writing about the consolidation of American sovereignty and the production of resource frontiers in Navajo lands in the US Southwest, Traci Voyles (2015: 9) calls this process ‘wastelanding’: the discursive practices that make “an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable” and thus authorize the damage of these bodies and environments by industrial pollution. Racialized representations of native land and land uses as wasteful, infertile and ecologically in decline, Voyles shows, systematically 4 devalued Navajo territories in the decades leading to their reconstitution in the 1950s as America’s new energy storehouse, the resource frontier supplying uranium to fuel the nation’s growing energy demands. The state-orchestrated uranium boom during the Cold War was predicated on the prior colonial devaluation of Navajo lands as empty wastes awaiting extractive industries and the concomitant pollution that would turn them into sacrifice zones sustaining national development. The material and discursive process of wastelanding thus cheapens the land, labor and resources of colonized subjects as already wasted and, in so doing, translates them into a reservoir for further pollution. Far from being limited to the American frontier, the notion of waste as an obstacle to progress was also a recurrent feature of British colonialism. In nineteenth-century India, colonial government fixated on the transformation of Indians’ conduct and environments in order to overcome native wastefulness and achieve development: the maximization of utility through the economic use of resources and rationalization of land tenure. In colonial discourses, “the trope of waste came to dramatize the difference/distance that separated Europe from India” (Gidwani 2008: 29). Constructing Indian bodies and forms of agriculture as irrational and inefficient justified vast, harmful ecological transformations like drainage projects to turn flooded lands into stable colonial property. Here again, the supposed wastefulness of colonized populations justified both their dispossession and the elaboration of forms of rule intent on bringing them into line with a liberal notion of human nature defined by rational labor to improve nature, saving it from waste (Gidwani 2008: 23-24). Waste, then, both precedes and follows the resource frontier. It is central to the symbolic devaluation of land, life and labor that makes them available as cheap inputs into capitalist accumulation. But if resource frontiers are defined by moving nature from the outside to the inside of capitalism, waste frontiers embody the inverse movement of moving devalued matter from inside to outside capitalism. Waste frontiers and the basis of growth In addition to the free gift of natural resources, capitalist expansion relies on cheap waste. Processes of extraction, production, circulation and consumption create both valued goods and devalued bads: waste that must be moved away to sinks. Historically, burning and burying have taken waste away, dissolving it into air, soil and water. Transformations in the material composition and scale of waste in industrial capitalism, 5 however, have pushed beyond the capacity of these sinks, causing a crisis of waste: the end of the atmosphere as a cheap sink for greenhouse gases, of oceans as sin ks for agroindustrial run-off and microplastics, of soils as sinks for toxic waste (Moore 2015: 101). Just as the imperative of endless growth necessitates the construction of new resource frontiers to resolve capital’s recurring crises (Luxemburg 2003 [1913]), growth requires the expansion of waste frontiers. The anthropocene in this sense marks the closing of the waste frontier as the earth’s sinks overflow and waste can no longer be pushed outside (Hecht 2018). So it is that the end of cheap waste is also a crisis of capitalism, threatening the imperative of endless growth and necessitating the construction of new waste frontiers. Modern waste-management infrastructures of landfilling, incineration and recycling are designed to carry waste away, materially underpinning ideologies of endless accumulation by disappearing the residues of routine life. The regular cleaning and maintenance that ensures the continual, orderly reproduction of everyday spaces of work, dwelling and leisure are possible because of infrastructures that cheaply distance people from their waste (Reno 2016). Disposal makes consumption possible, making room for the accelerating rounds of acquisition required by planned obsolescence, fast fashion and material cultures of disposability (Giles 2014; Hetherington 2004). Even as waste management technologies evolve to handle the growing tonnage of waste by increasing hygiene and fuel efficiency, capturing leachate and gases and regulating particle emissions, these innovations cannot keep pace with the growing volume and material complexity of waste. Rather than alleviating them, waste-management infrastructures sustain ecologically damaging modes of production that necessitate the expanding waste frontier (MacBride 2011). Recycling in particular dominates the public understanding of waste in ways that individualize and moralize systemic ecological issues and divert attention from the large-scale causes of pollution and the uneven geographies of the waste frontier. Everyday household waste may be the most immediate encounter that most consumers in the Global North have with waste, but their effects pale in comparison to industrial pollution, extractive-sector waste, agro-industrial output and the emissions of contemporary global logistics systems that turn land, air, water and human bodies into sinks (Ahmann 2019; Chari 2013; Grater 2020; Kirsch 2014). The end of cheap waste in one sense represents a major goal and partial victory of environmental-justice movements demanding that polluters pay the cost of pollution. 6 Starting in the 1970s in the US, campaigns against the placement of landfills and incinerators in Black and working-class neighborhoods politicized the disproportionate burden borne by marginalized communities. Though planners argued that this was a natural case of markets directing harmful land uses to low-value land, key studies in the 1980s showed that race – more than property values, income or homeownership rates – was the most significant factor determining the location of the waste frontier, a pivotal movement-led contribution to academic understanding of environmental racism (Bullard 1993). Places become sinks when they are represented as empty or insignificant and when locals do not have the means or political influence to contest their reproduction as waste frontiers (Reno 2016: 136-39). While campaigns around the US led to changes in the planning and consultation process in siting harmful waste infrastructures, one effect of this has been increasing transnational flows of waste, going in the reverse direction of the established flows of colonial extractive economies. Taking advantage of international regulatory differences and the prior devaluation of racialized global peripheries, waste frontiers opened in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia as natural dumpsites (Pellow 2007, 102). While he claims it was never a serious proposal, the World Bank’s Larry Summers articulated the racialized logic of waste frontiers in a notorious 1991 memo stating that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that ... I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted” (quoted in Ferguson 2006: 70). New transnational campaigns like the Global AntiIncinerator Alliance emerged to combat this simple relocation of the waste frontier and toxic dumping, leading to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, effective in 1992. Predicated on a simple model of dumping from Global North to South, however, the Basel Convention missed the South–South movement of waste that has become a growing feature of global waste economies in the context of changing capitalist geographies of manufacturing and consumption (Lepawsky 2014). As Josh Reno (2015: 565) argues, however, focusing on waste’s border-crossing and the national origins of waste streams can obscure the common structural roots of waste and the general function of waste frontiers in the process of inequitable capitalist growth. Just as waste’s rhetorical function in the construction of resource frontiers is to naturalize land as empty and infertile and so sanction the displacement of previous inhabitants, waste frontiers also are mechanisms of dispossession. Analyzing the colonial 7 logics of dumping, the economic anthropology of waste builds on theories of primitive accumulation as an ongoing feature of capitalist economies, as opposed to the original sin of a bygone era. This process is located not solely in the phases of extraction and social reproduction, as has most commonly been described, but through the material processes of disposal. In southern Ecuador, for instance, the process of environmental-impact assessment led to a landscape in which the vast tailings of a large copper mine are disposed of in slagheaps, dams and reservoirs in the Amazon (Leifsen 2017). These capitaland technology-intensive systems of waste management via risk-anticipation and hydrogeo engineering externalize the costs of waste mitigation onto local rivers, forests and communities. By enclosing land, restructuring access to waters and making the environment toxic, legal waste regimes like these that underpin new projects of resource accumulation cause livelihood dispossession as they extend the waste fro ntier (Perreault 2012). In Palestine, the accumulation of waste includes disposable goods, Israeli industrial and municipal solid waste, sewage and the debris of buildings destroyed in military demolition campaigns, and it has become a central feature of occupation. These wastes take up space, shorten the lifespan of already strained infrastructure and pollute, exacerbating conditions of structural violence and displacement from occupied land in what Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (2020: 116) calls “dispossession by accumulation”. While Palestine is constituted as a dumping ground, leaks of waste out of Palestine into the “shared environment” are marshalled as evidence in support of racialized noti ons of state incapacity and public incivility as the cause of pollution and interpreted as signs of Palestinian aggression in ways that re-affirm the idea that the West Bank is an unruly frontier that should be brought under settler control (2020: 206). Like resource frontiers, waste frontiers are a function of colonialism (Liboiron 2018). Economic growth, production and circulation are sustained by the creation of sinks that cheaply reproduce the conditions of accumulation by moving surplus materials to devalued spaces in ways that extend control over land and those who inhabit it. Connecting waste and resource frontiers If capitalist growth relies on land, labor and materials outside of itself in order to expand, one way this outside is currently constituted is through the production of wastelands. Waste regimes produce that outside by expelling material, spaces and people, 8 and then re-integrating them in new rounds of primitive accumulation. In the process, waste becomes the basis of extractive economies that Seth Schindler and Frederico Demaria (2020) call “waste-based commodity frontiers.” These include things like mine tailings re-processed for additional ores, waste-to-energy projects, e-waste recycling processes and other ventures that promise to turn waste into wealth in the name of circularity and sustainability. Two places epitomise global extraction at the waste frontier: Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, and the town of Guiyu, in China’s Guangdong province. Through environmental documentaries, NGO campaigns, journalistic exposés, scientific reports and the work of photographers like Edward Burtynsky and Pietr Hugo, they have been described as among the most polluted places on earth and have become synonymous with the problem of e-waste. Situated on the outskirts of southern China’s coastal industrial belt, Guiyu has been central to the public formulation of the tragedy of e-waste (Schulz and Lora-Wainwright 2019). A town of 150,000, it has grown since the 1990s as local residents shift from agriculture to work in the recycling sector, which by 2012 was processing 20 million tons of waste annually in 5000 family-run workshops (Kirby 2019). Renowned for its pollution, the crude technologies used in recycling and the sheer scale of the waste passing through it, Guiyu is emblematic of the dark side of globalization. Polemical depictions of the town focus on the fires, acid baths, hammers and hands used to dismantle co mputers to extract minerals, documenting the effects these have on air, water and health, and presenting Guiyu as a simple story of dumping and desperation. This narrative fails to capture the complexity of the interaction between waste and resource frontiers in the town, however, and miscasts the global problem of e-waste (Lepawsky 2018). It ignores, for instance, the repair and re-use of discarded electronics, one of the most profitable activities in this economy (Schulz and Lora-Wainwright 2019). The narrative also obscures the role of people from the nearby Chinese countryside in establishing this market, sourcing international waste and constructing the network of workshops where wastes are disassembled and remade as resources (Gregson and Crang 2015). In the name of the circular economy, the Chinese government has constructed a recycling park in the town to consolidate the industry, reduce its environmental impact and crack down on the wildness of the waste frontier, a move that has slowed waste processing in Guiyu and led to the exit of thousands of families from the trade as the ewaste market has come under the control of a limited number of well-connected individuals (Schulz and Lora-Wainwright 2019). 9 Located in a bustling area of Accra neighboring informal settlements, industrial zones, the city's largest food market and the Korle Lagoon, Agbogbloshie developed in the 1990s as a truck repair yard with an accompanying market in scrap metal, and has since grown into a regional center for e-waste recycling (Akese 2020; Akese and Little 2018). This waste frontier is assembled by Ghanian traders bringing waste from Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East to Ghana (Grant and Oteng-Ababio 2016). Like resource frontiers everywhere, it attracts workers from rural hinterlands who settle in the surrounding informal communities for whom it offers a livelihood. Approximately 5000 people work in the scrapyard, extracting copper, iron, aluminum and rare minerals from the wires and circuit boards of computers, phones, TVs and the like. The most common way to extract copper here is to burn the plastic insulation that surrounds it on open fires, which releases lead, mercury and other toxins, causing long-term invisible injuries (Akese and Little 2018). Once extracted, recovered e-wastes are exported by a small group of formal recycling firms operating in and around free-trade zones at the Tema Port that connect the scrapyard to global commodity markets (Grant and Oteng-Ababio 2016). Agbogbloshie, then, is where the waste frontier meets the resource frontier. NGO efforts to formalize and sanitize this work by implementing green technologies have met with resistance because they exacerbate inequalities between workers and are associated with municipal efforts to close the scrapyard, evict residents and eliminate the opportunities afforded by the frontier (Little 2020). These two cases illustrate that the waste frontier is not just constituted by dumping, but through the labor and knowledge of waste workers who source scrap and bring it to the frontier. They also show that environmental-justice efforts to close waste frontiers can, without attention to the social contexts of pollution, exacerbate other forms of social inequality, undermining livelihoods for the poor (Doherty and Brown 2019). Understanding these economies solely as victimizing workers ignores workers’ own understandings and contributes to policy responses that squeeze them out and, ultimately, have more to do with social control than environmental change. Focusing on these scrapyards reveals contamination, the everyday practices by which waste becomes a resource and the livelihoods that they sustain, but risks framing them as rudimentary and economically marginal survival strategies that emerge haphazardly in response to poverty. Understood as pathways between waste and resource frontiers, however, their place in global strategies of capital accumulation becomes more clear. Guiyu and Agbogbloshie are just two prominent points in the global network of 10 disposal and extraction that Freja Knapp (2016) calls the ‘flexible mine’: above-ground sources of metals in discarded materials like e-waste, slagheaps and junked vehicles. The flexible mine is an industrial strategy made necessary because post-colonial sovereignty and environmental regulation are gradually closing resource frontiers. It is attractive because the discards’ relative mobility compared to underground ores allows for the construction of transnational supply chains connecting waste and resource frontiers. This turn to waste has also been central to the discursive positioning of mining companies as green environmental saviors, reframing them as pioneers in circular economies driving the solution of e-waste crises. But because the flexible mine is assembled from a network of sites of disassembly, from Agbogbloshie and Guiyu to the ship-breaking yards of Bangladesh and the shoddy rag workshops of northern India (Dewan 2020; Norris 2012) , where waste and resource frontiers intersect and where the risks of slow violence are accepted as an occupational hazard, questions about labor conditions and the environmental impact of this extractive strategy persist (Knapp 2016; Reddy 2015). Municipal waste frontiers In addition to underpinning the flexible mine, disassembly economies also sustain and subsidize municipal solid-waste collection in cities. Urban growth, new consumer cultures, accelerating cycles of purchase and disposal and the changing materialities of the world of goods and packaging mean garbage is accumulating in cities faster than many can extend their waste-management infrastructures or develop door-to-door recycling programs. Filling this gap are a wide range of popular disposal practices, from household burning or neighborhood dumpsites to complex unofficial waste-collection infrastructures (Alexander and Reno 2012; Doron and Jeffrey 2018). For households waste is devalued matter to be discarded and for municipalities it is a technical and environmental problem, but for unofficial waste collectors it is a potential source of value. Key to this value shift is the work of assembling and disaggregating the waste stream. Mass waste refers to the mixed anonymous aggregation of municipal waste collected from households (Reno 2016) , and it is the most devalued form of waste, valuable only insofar as companies are paid to take it away to landfills, incinerators or other waste frontiers. But in cities around the world, households can pay very low rates to unofficial waste collectors who gather domestic waste, assembling mass waste before disaggregating it to remove valuable materials (Medina 2007). Similar work takes place at the waste frontier itself, at landfills, 11 dumps and other urban sinks where garbage accumulates and salvagers sort through it, identify saleable materials and remove them from the waste stream (Nguyen 2019; Sseviiri et al. 2020). Disassembling mass waste to its component parts turns waste frontiers to resource frontiers, a process that relies on knowledge of and immersion in the materialities of the waste stream as well as studying the global commodity prices for paper and cardboard, different scrap metals and plastics, together with expertise in and links to export and industrial markets (Butt 2020a; Pereira da Silva 2019). In this way, waste frontiers become a kind of commons, a de-commodified space at the margins of property regimes that support precarious ways of living (Millar 2018; Whitson 2011), but a space that often is highly contested, with violent struggles for control emerging along and exacerbating divisions of race, nationality, ethnicity and religion (Samson 2019). The conversions of waste to value that take place in these sites subsidize municipal waste collectio n in multiple ways: door-to-door collectors can offer households low rates because of the potential resources in domestic waste, municipal workers top-up their low incomes by salvaging while they work and landfill collectors extend the life of often already overstretched disposal infrastructures by diverting material from the waste frontier (Doherty 2021). These elaborate, popular waste-management infrastructures are themselves being transformed into resource frontiers through public–private partnerships and the privatization of municipal services. A prominent instance of this took place in Cairo, where an established waste-collection system operated by a Coptic Christian minority known as the Zabaleen was ousted by multi-national waste-management firms bidding on municipal tenders in a structural reform managed by the World Bank. Zabaleen collectors developed a system in which they charged clients low rates, sorted waste to separate out recyclables and fed organic wastes to their pigs (Fahmi and Sutton 2010; Furniss 2017). Seen as dirty and alien by the public, and as informal and thus inefficient by reformers, their stake in the economy and the service they provided were ignored in the tendering process when, early in the 2000s, Spanish and Italian firms won contracts to collect the city’s waste and dispose of it in landfills. As in Adbogbloshie, seeing waste workers as victims contributes to their displacement, as the conditions that sustain their livelihoods are targeted for eradication without alternatives being developed (Aksese and Little 2018). For companies moving in, the unofficial waste infrastructures of the Global South represent a new frontier where 12 waste-collection services are being commodified in the form of municipal contracts and new markets in waste services (Kuppinger 2014). In Cairo, as elsewhere, the contracting firms do not link waste to resource frontiers, so they cannot handle the volume of urban waste. Because they were not benefiting from recycling economies and the technical expertise of existing recyclers, they passed the full costs of disposal onto clients who, often unable to afford high rates, returned to the now illegal unofficial sector or to illicit practices of dumping (Butt 2020b; Miraftab 2004). If the privatization of cities’ waste commons and waste-management services is a classic example of neoliberal urban accumulation by dispossession (Samson 2015), social democratic reforms developed in the name of improving working and environmental conditions can equally misapprehend the nature of waste economies and so displace livelihoods. In Montevideo, Uruguay, for example, reform inspired by the International Labour Organization and advocated by trade unions aiming to reduce informal employment led to the construction of new recycling plants and the introduction of labor contracts into the sector (O’Hare 2019). These efforts assumed the absolute poverty of recyclers and ignored the existing organization of waste handling and the benefits it afforded workers, such as loans from intermediaries, access to waste for personal use, unofficial insurance schemes. Understandably, workers agitated against the new system. To make it work, managers tacitly had to allow workers to re-establish the practices of previous waste regimes that were newly prohibited, permitting illicit flows in and out of the formal plants to effectively link waste and resource frontiers (O’Hare 2019 ). In all of these cases, the transition from waste to wealth could not be fully commodified because it relies on devaluation, as materials are discarded before being reappropriated as cheap raw materials (Thompson 2017). The brief exit from the legal economy, the gap between waste and resource, is the informal grey zone where dumping becomes extraction. Here, matter is pushed temporarily off the books into cheap wastelands only to be integrated back into circuits of resource extraction and commodity production. The fantasy of the circular economy is the idea that this gap can be fully closed and capitalist crises can be solved by overcoming the ecological limits to growth (Valenzuela and Bohm 2017). This is a seamless capitalism without an outside and without frontiers, in which all the externalities are internalized. But ethnographies of recycling economies reveal the persistence of the gap between waste and resource frontiers and the essential function that it performs in the ongoing appropriation of cheap material inputs collected from wasted environments by devalued waste workers. 13 Conclusion While this chapter has drawn primarily on examples of industrial and municipal waste streams becoming new sites of accumulation, similar dynamics are at play in a number of other economic arenas. Gentrification can be understood as a process of primitive accumulation driven by the prior devaluation, abandonment and wastelanding of neighborhoods prior to their re-integration as cheap inputs into new cycles of urban development and displacement (Morell 2015; Solomon 2019). In the bio-technology industry- intellectual property also emerges from waste. Discarded tissues cease being the property of the individuals whose bodies they once formed and, through complex clinical labor and Lockean legal argumentation, become medical technologies that can be patented (Walby and Mitchell 2006). In this sense, the waste frontier refers not solely to a place and not just to waste-based commodity frontiers, but to the more general dynamic of expulsion and reintegration, of devaluation and revaluation. Waste frontiers are not simply an automatic consequence of consumption. Rather, they are produced by and precede extraction, production and circulation in a looping dynamic of disposal and accumulation. Because capitalism relies on accumulation from outside itself for growth, as resource frontiers close new outsides are constituted, in this case through the disposal of waste materials. Producing temporary outsides that remain available as cheap inputs for new cycles of valorization, waste frontiers exemplify the patchy, internally heterogeneous nature of anthropocene capitalism (Gibson-Graham 2014; Tsing et al. 2019). Understanding the political economy of waste in this light requires seeing waste frontiers not as sites of exclusion but of adverse incorporation (Meagher and Lindell 2013). This framework for understanding the duality of waste as before and after the economy, as a first and final frontier, puts growth, expansion, the ongoing process of primitive accumulation and colonialism at the center of the economic anthropology of waste, and in turn puts discards at the center of the analysis of capitalism. References Ahmann, Chloe 2019. Waste to energy: Garbage prospects and subjunctive politics in late industrial Baltimore. American Ethnologist 46 (3): 328-342. 14 Akese, Grace and Peter Little 2018. 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