Trash, Ownership, and Environmentalism

A video released by the New York Department of Sanitation explains how the city's recycling program is being threatened. The threat is "an organized, sophisticated mob of scavenger collectives." How are these scavengers threatening the NYC Department of Sanitation? They are removing scrap metals before the city can collect it. Who owns the trash? And who has the right to profit from the excess and waste of society? The NYC Department of Sanitation is quick to point out that as soon as the refuse is put on the curb, it is the city's property. These "scavengers" who remove high value materials are described as common criminals, a nuisance that threatens the effort to recycle by depriving the Department of needed revenue. This seemingly "green" eco-economic policy pits the poor against the city government. The NYC Department of Sanitation stands in stark contrast with the policies of Hamburg, Germany. Germany has long had in place a deposit system for reusable bottles, nevertheless, these bottles regularly end up in the garbage. "Pfandsammler" or "deposit gathers," are not routinely penalized. While a property owner can claim that waste is their "property," the courts have yet to convict anyone of the removal of recyclable material for personal profit. Further supporting rather than prohibiting "gathering," waste bins in Hamburg are increasingly equipped with special deposit boxes for bottles so that gathers need not dig through the garbage. In our paper, we contrast these approaches to understand how the idea of trash is constructed and commodified, how the claim to waste and trash is transformed by and transforms social relations.