Follow the bottle: PET recycling economy and waste picker empowerment in Brazil
Date
30/11/2020Author
Mello Pereira Da Silva, Tatianna
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis seeks to understand and problematise waste pickers’ underprivileged
socioeconomic condition in Brazil from the perspective of their active participation
in the recycling economy. It uses a Cultural Political Economy informed analytical
toolkit that includes a political-economic, a semiotic, a material and a spatio-temporal dimension to examine how the recycling economy is configured in Brazil.
Premised on the adverse incorporation of waste pickers into the economy, it further
asks how and in what ways their participation may take place on unfavourable terms.
Academic literature concerned with waste pickers’ empowerment, especially in the
Brazilian context, typically advocates for their organisation around collectives and
the subsequent formalisation of their work by local authorities as providers of waste
management services. Implicit in that literature is the assumption that informality is
the root cause of their vulnerable socioeconomic condition and, hence, that
empowering them entails expanding the reach of our current market-oriented
development model, incorporating them into the so-called formal economy.
Critiquing the formalisation and cooperatisation approach, this thesis rejects the
dichotomous view of the economy (formal-informal) upon which the prevailing
literature is based.
The Global Production Network approach, with its focus on the social processes that
underpin the global economy, provides the methodological schema used to navigate
the complex interconnections of places, scales, actors and processes that constitute
the PET recycling economy. The investigation unfolds using ‘follow-the-thing’ as a
research technique. PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles are the thing selected to
follow.
My 7-month-long fieldwork journey started at Lixão da Estrutural, located in
Brasília, which used to be one of the biggest dumpsites in Latin America and
progressed until the point where PET bottles were repurposed into a new product,
ready to re-enter the consumer market. To move along the recycling network, I used
a snowball referral technique and a mixture of interviews and participant observation
with waste pickers, brokers, wholesalers and recyclers, as well as with
representatives of a sectoral association and of governmental bodies.
The ultimate aim of this thesis is to denaturalise and re-politicise the prevailing
academic approach to the study of the causes of waste pickers’ poverty exposing
some of the mechanisms in operation to constrain their power, their capacity to
capture value, and the extent of their embeddedness in the recycling economy. In so
doing, it hopes to contribute to opening up new forms of actions previously
unthought-of for the promotion of waste pickers’ empowerment.