In the twenty-first century, waste is ubiquitous, yet its presence remains obscured in a myriad of complex relationships. On a planet with limited resources, the prevalent socio-economic system fosters ever-increasing consumption, while the growing magnitude of waste tests the limits of its management. Hence, waste is not just material but also a social phenomenon in which things, inequalities, toxic workspaces, and “customary” and “contractual” labour processes are embedded (p. 41). Waste transforms and is transformed by the working lives of people who are engaged in waste management. The expanding amount of waste is a planetary concern that transcends generations, yet waste and waste work denote particular labour trajectories within South Asia. As matter moves through its various states and statuses, the labour process involved in removing waste matter consolidates socio-economic hierarchies based on gender, caste, and religion in South Asia. Working with pollutants is associated with everyday practices that demarcate labour and bodies across the lines of purity and pollution.

In recent decades, studying the specificities of waste work has provided valuable insights into lived experiences of waste pickers and sanitation workers.Footnote ¹ Among these emerging inquiries into the world of waste, Waqas H. Butt offers a significant contribution by analysing a key point that remains underdeveloped, namely the reproductive and social reproductive dimensions of waste work. Life Beyond Waste is organized into five main chapters, with a preface, introduction, and coda. The coda locates the entire discourse of the book within the larger fields of discard studies and critical caste studies. The book’s main sections can be outlined as: (a) building the “techno-legal infrastructures” of urban planning in Lahore, Pakistan (Chapter One); (b) ordering public life through waste and waste work (Chapter Two); (c) surplus value through circulation within economies of waste (Chapter Three); (d) intimacies and proximities towards waste and hierarchies (Chapter Four); and (e) the reproductiveness of waste work (Chapter Five).

The first part of the book offers a novel entry point for exploring the contours of waste and work. Butt traces the making of the metropolitan, Lahore, Pakistan, by focusing on the development of the city’s solid waste management and sewage systems since the colonial era under British rule. Modern “techno-legal apparatus of the bureaucratic state” and urban infrastructures (p. 18), such as sewage networks and solid waste management systems, have reshaped Lahore’s spatial relationships to waste. At the same time, the workforce involved in waste removal has historically belonged to the lowest caste groups or groups considered outside the caste fold in Pakistan, such as the Dalits and Christians. Thus, the author illustrates how seemingly “customary” practices of caste became embedded in setting up infrastructures for waste management. For instance, the British administration in South Asia hired the lowest caste groups as sanitation workers for military encampments, which were the most developed sections of the city under the colonizers. Even after independence from the British, the “customarily” hired communities continued as waste workers, through modern labour market practices of “contractual work”, by being recruited as municipal workers.

Drawing upon archives and extensive fieldwork, Butt highlights how waste work in Lahore is organized through a bureaucratic regime, similar to other contexts in South Asia. These “overly” bureaucratic mechanisms include the ways in which urban territories are segregated in terms of organizing waste work, and establishing municipality-appointed supervisors (daroghah) to manage waste collectors and sweepers (pp. 71–74). While appearing rather formalized, this bureaucratic set-up constantly interacts with and relies on informal labour, since most of the waste workers operate outside labour contracts. To provide an overview of Lahore’s waste management, the author pays close attention to the flow of waste materials, which move from households and public spaces to waste pickers and collectors, then to bioparian (intermediary actors) and kabarian (junkyard owners). In these flows, waste is collected, sorted (often by women workers), sold on to bioparian, who again sort, wash, treat, and evaluate the quality and prices of materials. Depending on price, demand, and supply, materials are then sold on to the kabarian. Finally, the materials make their way back into production units as raw material.

This circulation of waste provides the basis for Butt’s analysis of surplus value. The author examines accumulation in two ways. First is the needs-based accumulation that occurs through waste workers’ labour, which is mainly for themselves. The second scope for accumulation is through the domain of circulation, as prices fluctuate in the exchange of waste materials and offer ways to extract profits. Due to such price fluctuations, which are determined by global demand and supply, all the actors – such as waste collectors, intermediaries, and junkyard owners – also relate to and depend on each other through debt relations. Indebtedness here operates through cash or mainly through securing or stockpiling the flow of waste materials (p. 97). For example, smaller intermediary actors may be indebted to larger junkyard owners in terms of providing certain sorted materials. Reducing or increasing the prices or sale of certain materials can be another means to balance debt relations. Debt not only controls the various web of actors but also creates unequal exchange and inter-dependencies. Butt carefully captures the varying degrees of trust in the short-term and long-term trade relationships forged among the multiple categories of waste workers.

Apart from the people who work with waste in different capacities, the city’s residents also interact with waste materials on a daily basis, though primarily through consumption and discard (p. 117). Here, the author draws our attention to the unequal exchange that underlies this “unevenness” of engaging with waste materials. According to Butt, relationships through touching, discarding, and working with waste conjure up intimate relations since diverse groups of communities come into contact with the same objects but in distinct spaces. While some are able to dispose of things, others collect, clean, and exchange the things discarded for the sake of “public good” (p. 36). Thus, intimacies are uneven since waste workers engage with the discard in toxic and dangerous work environments. While caste remains a socio-economically and culturally stratifying force, waste in particular “substantializes” caste, as waste through caste orders urban life (p. 119).

For Butt, waste workers move and remove waste and pollutants for city’s residents, and thus, waste work is fundamentally “reproductive labour” as it makes “public” life possible. At the same time, waste work reproduces caste-based labour segregation. This operationalization of reproduction enables Butt to gaze sensitively into the world of waste work. By tracing the life-making projects of waste workers and in turn situating them within the historical processes of unequal relations, the author illustrates how waste workers are essential to the life-making activities of a city. Here, Butt astutely analyses how waste workers are dependent on waste for their livelihoods, and, in addition, how waste work is central for the sustenance of “intergenerational life” and the “reproduction of collective life” (p. 142).

While the discussion on accumulation through circulation is fruitful and envisions a renewed focus on a theory of surplus value that is specifically curated to examine supply chains of waste, there remains greater scope to develop a feminist theory of social reproduction of waste. The insight into the exhaustive nature of waste work and the delicate balance of the possibilities and constraints fostered by working life could also be further theorized (p. 160). Here, ethnographic accounts would have facilitated such a theorization. The varying scales of techno-legal infrastructures and their relation to waste, caste, and religion could have been revisited towards the end of the book. The book does offer some perspectives on intimate interlinkages between caste and religion. However, future scholarly inquiries could further analyse these complex links within waste work.

Nevertheless, Butt’s work is a significant contribution to multiple fields, such as critical caste studies, sociology of work, and discard studies, as it considers the delineated, stigmatized, and ambivalent livelihoods encompassed within waste work in South Asia. The book captures waste work in a manner that avoids romanticizing the essential ecological labour performed by waste workers. Moreover, the discussion on relative and relational autonomy within waste work is approached in a nuanced manner, as working life continues to be embedded within intersectional hierarchies. Butt’s considerate and sensitive writing offers researchers and students insights and examples on how to provide space, dignity, and care while encountering waste and caste. Life Beyond Waste is not only a contribution to the discussions on waste and labour in the South Asian context, it also provides valuable perspectives on the centrality of waste work in the ongoing context of climate emergency.