Marginal attachment and countercycling in the age of recycling

Discourses on the recycling of urban waste are usually articulated under ‘unpolitical’ eco-logics (Crenson, 1971). The pressure of looming environmental threats makes it harder to discern how recycling circuits benefit some agents and marginalize others. I argue that circuits of material recycling are assemblages of humans, technologies, streams of materials, and social relations that demand the discussion of notions of social justice and attention to uneven urban geographies. Contrary to what is communicated by the visual symbol of recycling, the circuits set in motion beyond each bin, commercial truck, package material, or council leaflet that displays it, are not simply flat, fluid, unilinear, and circular movements of waste from selective bins back to commercial shelves. If one follows the materials and the bodies that transport and transform them, one will encounter the transactions, attachments, interactions, hinges, mechanisms, and ‘membranes’ through which inequality is engendered and reproduced.