The problem of traceability in informal plastic recycling

Abstract

Informal recycling economies in India show the limits of standardized and technology-based assessments of process efficiency and material quality as well as health and environmental effects in plastic recycling. This is where questions of “traceability” are raised – the “ability” to “trace” the life, path and socio-chemical entanglements of polymers and plastic products from production and processing via their multiple use (including potential contact with hazardous substances) towards their designated “end-of-life” as commodities in capitalist growth economies. Traceability concerns are voiced especially with respect to informal plastic recycling networks, like those in Kolkata, East India, which function in stark contrast to the reductionist, standardized and threshold-based assessment practices of modern waste management. Informal plastic recycling necessitates different ways of “tracing” the socio-material biographies of wasted plastics, and thus, enable diverging logics of quality assessment through the embodied labor of recycling agents. However, informal plastic recycling also provokes complicating questions about environmental justice in the circulation of plastics – and the provision of “safe” plastics for “the poor”.