Recycling Class

<b>An ethnographic and community-engaged study of the class caste and gender politics of environmental mobilizations around Bengaluru India's discards.</b> <p/>In <i>Recycling Class</i> Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas flows and relationships around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru India itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions to help us understand what types of coalitions deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives. <i>Recycling Class </i>links middle-class sustainable consumption with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. Through ethnographic community-based research Anantharaman shows how diverse social groups adopt contest and modify neoliberal sustainability's emphasis on market-based solutions behavior change and the aesthetic conflation of clean with green. <p/>Tracing garbage politics in Bengaluru for over a decade Anantharaman argues that middle class communal sustainability<i> </i>efforts create new avenues for waste picker organizations to make claims for infrastructural inclusion. Coproduced DIY infrastructures serve as sites of citizenship and political negotiation challenging the technocratic and growth-based logics of dominant sustainability policies. Yet these configurations reproduce class caste and gender-based divisions of labor demonstrating that inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility. Revealing the win-win fallacy of sustainability and foregrounding the agency of communities excluded from environmental policy <i>Recycling Class </i>will appeal to scholars and activists alike who want to create a future with more transformative sustainability.