Following global material chains, this groundbreaking book reveals astonishing connections between persons, households, cities and global regions as objects are reworked, taken to pieces and traded. With case studies from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, China, the former Soviet Union, North America and Europe, this timely collection debunks common linear understandings of production, exchange and consumption and argues for a complete re-evaluation of North-South economic relationships.
Following global material chains, this groundbreaking book reveals astonishing connections between persons, households, cities and global regions as objects are reworked, taken to pieces and traded. With case studies from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, China, the former Soviet Union, North America and Europe, this timely collection debunks common linear understandings of production, exchange and consumption and argues for a complete re-evaluation of North-South economic relationships.
Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations
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Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations
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Overview
Following global material chains, this groundbreaking book reveals astonishing connections between persons, households, cities and global regions as objects are reworked, taken to pieces and traded. With case studies from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, China, the former Soviet Union, North America and Europe, this timely collection debunks common linear understandings of production, exchange and consumption and argues for a complete re-evaluation of North-South economic relationships.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780321974 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/09/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Joshua Reno is an assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University.
Read an Excerpt
Economies of Recycling
The global transformation of materials, values and social relations
By Catherine Alexander, Joshua Reno
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Catherine Alexander and Joshua RenoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78032-197-4
CHAPTER 1
Shoddy rags and relief blankets: perceptions of textile recycling in north India
LUCY NORRIS
Introduction
Following humanitarian disasters around the world, bundles of grey emergency relief blankets are often distributed to those in need by aid agencies. Affording warmth and protection by literally wrapping abject bodies in gifts, these rough blankets materialize wider networks of care and support, while making visible the recipients' liminal status and framing their apparent lack of agency. But the freely distributed grey aid blanket is just one of the unexpected end products of a very different global flow of gifts and commodities that reconfigure categories of value: that of second-hand clothing discarded and donated to charities in developed economies. For these gritty, smelly, coarse and scratchy grey blankets are produced from second-hand Western clothing, shredded and recycled in north Indian factories. They are woven from regenerated yarn (hereafter referred to as 'shoddy'), and are usually designed to last for just one season, during which they fall apart.
Tracing these material connections reveals the transformations that occur across multiple economic, political and cultural registers as donations of unwanted old clothes are commodified, destroyed, regenerated and donated in a new form to those in need. The ephemerality of clothing and the refashionability of its constituent fabrics and fibres is key to both its use in liminal, transformational contexts, and its agency in creating movement and change. However, the chapter argues that although the production chain is bracketed by the apparent moral value of the gift, the process of creative destruction at its capitalist heart involves investing minimal value in social and environmental manufacturing conditions, a self-defeating strategy ultimately revealed in the disintegrating blanket.
The political economy of second-hand clothing
The value of the global trade in second-hand garments doubled from $1.26 billion in 2001 to $2.5 billion in 2009. Most have been bought from charities in the developed world, which cannot sell all the mountains of donations they receive themselves. In the UK, for example, charities sell only 20 per cent of their donations directly, the rest being sold to commercial dealers who export them for reuse (a further 60 per cent), sell them on to recyclers (15 per cent), and throw the remaining 5 per cent away (Morley et al. 2009). Global markets for reuse have developed rapidly, and there is an increasing amount of research into their development and impact (Hansen 2000, 2004a, 2004b, Norris forthcoming-a). Eastern Europe has become the primary destination for high-quality brands of all-season clothing, the African market buys good-quality, fashionable summer clothing, while Pakistan is the destination for the lowest-quality grades.
However, as developing economies are largely situated in warmer climates, the global market lacks the capacity to absorb high volumes of winter clothing, such as thicker wool, acrylic and mixed-fibre suits, trousers, jackets, jumpers and soft furnishings sold as bales of 'jazz'. Lacking any other avenues to avoid their wastage, these clothes form a low-value, residual category of 'recycling grades'. Yet, as remainders, they destabilize the homogeneity of that category since some are perfectly wearable garments in good condition. The consumption of second-hand clothing has become an integral part of many developing economies in the global South, but these obsolete leftovers of global capitalism remain largely unnoticed, and are sold for shredding to the machine wiping industry, the flocking industry and the Indian shoddy industry.
The pivotal place in this particular sequence of creative destruction is the industrial town of Panipat, north of Delhi. Drawing on ethnographic research in the town and its factories, this chapter focuses upon the local perceptions of those working in the industry concerning where the clothing comes from (and why) and where it goes to, contextualizing these constructed imaginaries with a description of the embodied engagement of workers with used clothing. Thus it provokes comparison with Halvorson's work on donor imaginaries concerning charitable chains of medical discards from the USA to Madagascar (this volume); her work addresses the complexities of how waste is recategorized as a resource in redemptive economies, carefully avoiding the moral pitfalls of certain destructive practices. This chapter takes as its starting point materials that have already been transformed from discard to gift to commodity, and are precisely located at that point in the production chain where the means through which they are destroyed is not necessarily productive of successful recuperation.
What emerges from this ethnography are the moral tensions inherent in these processes of conversion, which are symbolized by the decomposing aid blanket. Framed by the moral value of the charitable gift, this recycling industry produces waste and pollution, processes rags in unregulated factories using unorganized labour, and creates disintegrating end products that may even fail to deliver the care expected of them (Norris forthcoming-b). Textiles cannot be infinitely recycled, but this industry cuts to the quick, rapidly downcycling materials into rock-bottom products; the shock is the sheer waste of the wealth of social, moral and labour value(s) that have been previously added in order to create marginal returns. The deregulated neoliberal Indian economy described by Bear (this volume) underpins the recycling industry dependent upon the exploitation of subcontracted labour, but here the landscape of waste materials comprises the alienated discards of Western over-consumption; they have been imported to be reconceptualized and regenerated.
The global recycling trade often processes materials in liminal spaces, before they are reintroduced back into the market, a key theme in this volume. Industrial textile recycling is demonstrably downcycling, where value is constantly falling, and I argue that the processes and products revealed here show how value systems fail to fully reintegrate and revalue these materials and the people with whom they are entangled. Instead they remain waste products in the shadowy margins of global capitalism, reproducing social and economic inequality and conjoining people and things as waste.
Panipat industry
India imports 220,000 tons of worn clothing a year, some of which is sorted for reuse and re-exported via the special economic zones around Kandla, Gujarat. Approximately 15 per cent of these garments legally enter India as wearable clothing under a strict quota system, but the rest consists of 'mutilated hosiery', clothing destined for commercial recycling that has to be slashed to allow it through customs. Panipat, north of Delhi, imports roughly 100,000 tons of worn jumpers, coats and suits annually, to be shredded and recycled into 'regenerated yarn' in over three hundred mills and hundreds of smaller units; it constitutes the world's largest remaining shoddy processing industry, and comprises between a third and a half of the total output of the Indian wool industry.
Panipat is an old hand-weaving town north of Delhi, and was a colonial wool centre. Industrial spinning and weaving was developed after Partition (1947). Because of the expense and shortage of imported long-staple wool, and the coarseness of black Indian wool, the shoddy industry was established as a cheaper alternative, importing used woollen rags from Europe and the USA, and second-hand, rag-tearing machinery from Italy and Poland. By the 1980s, cheap rags were being imported in large volumes to be processed by growing numbers of migrant labourers. There have always been crossovers between the wool and shoddy industries depending on the market (Jenkins and Malin 1990; Malin 1979), with larger factories running shoddy mills alongside other manufactures, and new entrants finding it a low-capital start-up business.
The local industry body estimates that of the yarn, fabric and blankets manufactured, about 10–15 per cent is exported, the rest is for the domestic market. Yarn is exported to Africa, or woven locally into lohi, men's shawls, and fabric by the metre for jackets and school uniforms. Up to 100,000 blankets are made every day, mostly thin, grey, one-season blankets for the domestic market and the global aid market. More expensive, thicker, dull-coloured shoddy wool blankets, intended to last three to four years, provision institutions such as prisons, hospitals, railways and the military across the world, while higher-quality, brightly coloured, checked versions used to be popular with the Indian middle classes. By the mid-1990s, the industry had begun to import acrylic jumpers to make acrylic shoddy yarn, opening up a whole new market for bright fluffy blankets featuring animals, cartoon characters and flowers. The most lucrative export market comprises the international aid agencies' emergency wool blankets, of which over 90 per cent come from Panipat. These are delivered to regional depots in Africa and Asia for stockpiling in case of emergency, or transported directly to disaster zones.
Industrial organization Most of the factory labour comes from less developed states in the north-east and eastern part of the country, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal, with up to halfof these migrants permanently settled in the town. Now, approximately 85 per cent of the town is involved in the textile industry, of which 40,000 are in the shoddy industry. The more modern, integrated mills, with international contracts, are on the outskirts of town, while the smaller spinning, weaving and finishing units are in the old part, with unmetalled roads lined with filthy brick buildings covered in lint, and fertile green slime oozing down the outside walls into channels of coloured waste water and sewage. Foreigners rarely visit, though many of these firms are unofficially subcontracted to the larger companies.
The industry operates in the informal, unorganized labour sector (Parry et al. 1999). This even applies to some large mills with up to one hundred workers, which initially appear to be one factory but are in fact broken down internally into smaller units owned or managed by family members and partners (see Breman 1999b). An ILO report estimates the Indian informal sector to be 92.9 per cent and the formal 7.1 per cent (Jha 2006), but it stresses that there are no rigid lines of demarcation and much crossover (see also Breman 2003). Jha argues that the informal economy is neither innovative nor full of opportunities, but is a 'shock absorber' for competitiveness in an increasingly globalized capitalist system (see Harriss 2005; Harriss-White 2003). As Hart (2000) comments, the decline of the formal economy in India is directly linked to the deregulation of Indian capitalism, supported by the World Bank and development agencies, with, quite literally in this case, the periphery mopping up the waste of the centre.
Many mill owners invest very little capital in the equipment, buildings and raw materials, and directly employ only a few management staff and technicians to protect their interests. The resultant labour force is completely subcontracted via the thekedar (jobbing) system and is highly fragmented. As one mill owner explained, this avoided the constant 'problems' they had formerly had with unionized workers, who were 'going slow' and sabotaging machines, a common narrative among owners disparaging the 'commitment' of their workers (Breman 1999a; De Neve 2003). It also shifts the blame for low productivity away from their own low-capital investment on to the workforce (Breman 1999a). Another owner disparagingly remarked, 'you don't need brains to run the factory because someone else is doing it for you, you just have to pay by the kilo ... the clever people are the thekedari'. The jobbers are driven by production targets (i.e. piece rates) to make their profits, and have to extract as much labour as possible from the workers. Spinners claim that this leads to workers having to fix moving machinery, with inevitable accidents such as losing fingers, hands and lower arms.
The subcontracted workforce has no job security or rights of association, is unlikely to receive the state minimum wage, and has no medical benefits or subsidized travel home. As migrants they are politically marginalized; labour laws applying to subcontracted migrant labour are unenforced. Strategies to exercise control over their labour depend instead upon their ability to manipulate relationships with jobbers, often restricted by community ties and loans paid to families back in the village (see Breman 2003; Gopalakrishnan and Sreenivasa 2009). Although a local union representative stated that there is no 'bonded' labour in Panipat, workers do get 'stuck' because of indebtedness to jobbers, a situation described by De Neve (1999) as 'unfree' labour. Locally, jobbers are also known as lathis (sticks) and goondas (thugs), referring to the potential for violence underlying their relationships.
Processing rags to make shoddy yarn Used clothing for recycling that arrives in Panipat will have already been manually sorted in the back of a Western charity shop (Gregson et al. 2000), re-sorted along the rag merchant's conveyor belts (Botticelli forthcoming; Hawley 2006), sold on to a specialist trader at the bottom of the market (Oakdene Hollins Ltd et al. 2006), exported to India and often re-sorted once more in the special economic zone at the port of Kandla, Gujarat. Western rag merchants claim to hardly recover the costs of these garments, yet even more labour must be invested in them to extract an alternative sequence of values from the heterogeneous contents of the bales. In stark contrast to the moral value accorded to charitable donations fuelling the beginning of this global production chain in Western countries, and that accorded to the aid blankets that are produced at the end, the following descriptive narrative of a shoddy recycling factory reveals the typically poor labour and environmental conditions in which this double conversion is enacted. This is contextualized by the widespread belief of mill owners that the whole industry is unproductive, in decline and facing a dead end.
Clothing has to be manually prepared for feeding into a shredding machine; each garment passes through another four or five hands before reaching the shredder. Workers in a shoddy factory inhabit a soft, undulating landscape of worn garments, whose contours are always in flux; a man standing atop a shrinking mountain of sweaters flings different-coloured garments with a practised swing into the ring of smaller piles growing around him; a circle of women sit in a valley carved out between a pile of stuff waiting to be stripped and the pile they have completed. A mound of grey coats slowly disappears, as a dozen women retrieve a head-load at a time, take them outside to be chopped up into several more piles, and carried off to the shredder, dropping threads, fluff and dust in their wake. As stockpiles grow, heat builds up inside them, and rats scuttle around the edges of the warehouse floor. Working on worn clothing involves engaging their whole bodies, smelling its overwhelming odours released into the dusty warmth, scanning its colours and patterns to assess its value, feeling the prickly wool and plasticky acrylic, slippery linings and ridges of seams between practised hands. To transform a mountain of clothing into a pile of rags involves a profound sensory intimacy with each and every garment, a perceptual encounter with its invasive materiality.
METAL DETECTING One of the owner's managers, Anil the 'sorting master', supervises the unloading of bales of clothing arriving at the factory, which are stood on their sides with the clothing layered in vertical bands. First the outer plastic wrapper is cut off, and then the metal bands cinching the bale are snipped off with cutters, pinging open as the tension is released. Cardboard sheets at each end are peeled off, and the compressed bale begins to expand and fall apart like leaves of filo pastry. The first value to be extracted is from this protective skin around the garments; plastic sheeting is sold into the local market for reuse, while a scrap dealer on a bicycle buys up the metal wire and cardboard by the kilogram. Anil gets a commission from the owner for arranging the sale.
As the bale collapses, the men start throwing garments into a pile near to four or five women sitting in a circle. Squatting on the floor and using traditional metal vegetable cutters, their job is to slice off all the metal fasteners, leaving the worthless plastic to the next stage; zips, buttons, coins and chains are worth money in the market, and can damage machinery.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Economies of Recycling by Catherine Alexander, Joshua Reno. Copyright © 2012 Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction - Catherine Alexander and Joshua RenoSection One: Global waste flows
1. Shoddy rags and relief blankets: perceptions of textile recycling in north India - Lucy Norris
2. Death, the Phoenix and Pandora: transforming things and values in Bangladesh - Mike Crang, Ni cky Gregson, Farid Ahamed, Raihana Ferdous and Nasreen Akhter
3. One cycle to bind them all? Geographies of nuclearity in the uranium fuel cycle - Romain Garcier
4. The shadow of the global network: e-waste flows to China - Xin Tong, Jici Wang
Section Two: The ethics of waste labour
5. Devaluing the dirty work: gendered trash work in participatory Dakar - Rosalind Fredericks
6. Stitching curtains, grinding plastic: social and material transformation in Buenos Aires - Karen Ann Faulk
7. Trash ties: urban politics, economic crisis and Rio de Janeiro's garbage dump - Kathleen M. Millar
8. Sympathy and its boundaries: necropolitics, labour and waste on the Hooghly river - Laura Bear
Section Three: Traces of former lives
9. 'No junk for Jesus': redemptive economies and value conversions in Lutheran medical aid - Britt Halvorson
10. Evident excess: material deposits and narcotics surveillance in the USA - Joshua Reno
11. Remont: works in progress - Catherine Alexander
Afterword - David Graeber