UC Irvine

In this ethnography, based upon multi-sited fieldwork using participant observation, I tracked the movement and transformation of waste from discarded objects in Chicago’s alleyways to fully-fledged, shiny, new commodities rolling off the lines of Jindal Steel Work’s integrated steel facility in South India. I examine scrap metal recycling as a set or relations within relations that enables this commodity circuit to stretch from Chicago through the Port of Los Angeles to mini and integrated steel plants in the South Indian countryside.

This ethnography is organized around the elements that the global scrap metal economy must wrestle with, manipulate, use, and save: earth, air, water and fire. In the alleyways and scrap yards of Chicago, I examine the above ground mining of scrappers and their earth saving labor. At the Port of Los Angeles, I examine the making of the Port into a green, environmental subject through law and environmental monitoring. In multiple locations in India, I attend to the domestication of fire and its application in metal production. In the final chapter, I examine the shipbreaking industry in India and bring into question the environmental and labor repercussions of large-scale, for-profit scrap recycling.

I envision the empirical data generated from this research project fitting into conversations—in academia as well as in more public conversations—about the pressing global concern of how we produce commodities, expend their use values and ultimately strive, or fail, to efficaciously mediate post-consumptive waste. There is a certain timeliness to this work as sustainability, environmental consciousness, questions of waste disposal, and public health are more and more pressing issues in policy design and practical municipal matters of waste collection and disposal.