SDG Month feature
As cities around the world grapple with mounting waste crises, researchers at the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) are exploring a critical but often overlooked question: who does the work of managing waste and under what conditions?
At York University, this question is shaping an emerging area of interdisciplinary research that connects environmental change with labour, inequality and shared global priorities.
Research efforts led by Shubhra Gururani, a political ecologist, associate professor of anthropology and director of YCAR, examine how waste is a technical or environmental problem, but also a deeply political one, structured by histories of colonialism, race, caste and gender.
Waste is increasing at an unprecedented rate, expected to grow by around 80 per cent by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. “The systems that manage that growth still often rely on precarious labour performed by socially marginalized groups, including migrants, women and caste-oppressed communities,” says Gururani, who explores how these dynamics are embedded in broader processes of urban change and development. "This raises urgent questions about whether shifts to more environmentally sustainable systems may reproduce, rather than resolve, entrenched inequalities.”
A key contributor is Harsha Anantharaman, a postdoctoral Asian studies fellow at YCAR who focuses on informal waste workers – those who make a living by collecting and recycling waste outside formal, regulated systems – in urban India.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic and archival research across four cities for an ongoing book project – To Caste Away Waste: Racialized Labour and the Political Economy of Commodity Detritus in Urban India – Anantharaman studies how policies aimed at formalizing waste work often have contradictory effects. “As formalization policies reshape urban waste economies in India, the efforts to include marginalized groups can paradoxically deepen labour precarity and reproduce entrenched caste hierarchies,” he says.
His research shows that initiatives framed as inclusive, such as bringing waste pickers into formal waste management systems, can make working conditions more insecure. As municipal waste becomes increasingly controlled by governments and corporations as a private resource, informal workers are incorporated into systems that offer recognition without security. These processes reproduce caste-based hierarchies, reshaping labour relations. Anantharaman describes this as informal labour being absorbed into systems while caste-coded recognition continues.
By situating these dynamics within global political economic transformations in urban governance and political economy, his work highlights both the structural constraints faced by workers and the potential for more equitable alternatives. His findings suggest models such as the formal recognition and integration of waste pickers into municipal systems, cooperative-led recycling initiatives and policies that ensure fair wages, social protections and decision-making power for frontline workers.
Through these efforts, Gururani and Anantharaman’s work can contribute to a growing international conversation on the global politics of waste. It brings into focus how environmental governance, labour regimes and social hierarchies intersect in ways that challenge dominant narratives as municipalities and corporations transition to green and sustainable efforts.
“It is critical to remain cognizant of the ways in which such transitions often rely on the invisibilized labour of marginalized communities and reproduce existing inequalities even as they claim ecological progress,” says Anantharaman.
YCAR will continue this dialogue by hosting an international symposium in April titled Waste Work: Grounding Race, Caste, and Labour in the New Global Politics of Disposability. Organized by Gururani and Anantharaman, the two-day event will bring together scholars and practitioners working across regions, including South Asia, North Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America.
While the symposium is a closed academic gathering, it will feature two public keynote lectures that are open to the wider community. These talks will extend YCAR’s ongoing engagement with questions of labour, inequality and environmental change, offering an opportunity for broader public dialogue on the stakes of global waste economies. The symposium also contributes to a forthcoming special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
“Through initiatives like this, YCAR continues to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement around some of the most pressing challenges of our time, highlighting how questions of waste are inseparable from questions of justice,” says Gururani.