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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Scrap: The Social Life of Recyclable Metals in the United States and India Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cf3955q Author Lane, Matthew Riley Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Scrap: The Social Life of Recyclable Metals in the United States & India DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Anthropology by Matthew Riley Lane Dissertation Committee: Professor William M. Maurer, Chair Professor George Marcus Associate Professor Valerie Olson 2019 © 2019 Matthew Riley Lane TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Things in the World 12 Towards a theorization of recycling through the lens of first / 16 second nature(s) Things on the Move: Anthropology tackles the embedded thing 28 in the commodity circuit Things as Actants, Patients, Assemblages and Actor-Networks 34 Semiotics and Things 41 CHAPTER 2: Saving the Earth: Above-Ground Mining in Chicago 47 Regimes of Value 61 Scrapping as a Tactic and Form of Labor 76 Making the Mine 86 Shaping a Market & Selling the Mine 90 CHAPTER 3: Air & Water: Generating Revenue and Making Shipping and Transport 100 Site, Earth Movement and Logistics 104 The End of Backfilling and Beginning of Environmental Subject Making 109 Double Tenancy: SA Recycling 124 CHAPTER 4: Fire: Recycling, Smelting and Steel Production in the Indian Subcontinent 131 Theory and Indian Steel 132 Waste and Recycling in Bombay / Mumbai 139 Scales and Sites of Indian Recycling 148 Scales of Unregulated Recycling and Calls for Regulation 152 Entering Formal Production: Jindal Steel Works (JSW) 156 CHAPTER 5: Coda: Earth, Air, Water and Fire through the Lens of Shipbreaking 159 A Ship out on the Ocean 169 Corporaelity in the Post-colony: Laborers, Land and Water 177 The Body of Legal and Law-like Decisions 185 ii CONCLUSION: Towards A Politics of Hope—New Architects, New Possibilities 199 REFERENCES 208 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express the deepest gratitude to my committee chair, Professor William M. Maurer, who challenged me to push myself intellectually and academically while also encouraging me to foster creativity and possibility in my scholarship and research design. I would like to thank my committee members, Professor George Marcus and Associate Professor Valerie Olson for their time, inputs, and encouragement to push forward with this project and writing while acknowledging the simultaneously import of supporting my young family. I would like to thank all of my collaborators on this project: the men and women in the United States and India who welcomed me into their homes, places of work, institutions of education, government offices and businesses and shared their knowledge with me. Without the graciousness and openness and willingness of the multitudes of people I met over the decade of this project, I would not be writing these lines and the many lines that follow in the body of this document. I would also like to thank the organizations that hosted me during internships and affiliations: Stephen Cheung at The Port of Los Angeles; Jhyoti Mhapsukar at Stree Mukhti Sanghatana, Debartha Banerjee and Jayanth Nataraju at Tata Institute of Social Sciences and SMS, and Dr. Bhosale at The University of Mumbai. Finally, I would like to thank the many institutions and organizations that supported my fieldwork financially: The National Science Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, The University of California, Berkeley Human Rights’ Center, The University of California, Irvine Public Impact Fellowship Committee, The UC Irvine Anthropology Department, The UCLA Center for Work and Labor Studies and The UC Irvine Asian Studies Summer Fellowship. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Matthew Riley Lane 2019 PhD in Anthropology, University of California, Irvine 2008 MA in Social Sciences (Anthropology Cohort), The University of Chicago 2001 MEd. in English Education, The University of Florida 1999 BA in Anthropology Summa Cum Laude, The University of Florida 1999 BA in English Magna Cum Laude, The University of Florida FIELD OF STUDY Anthropology PUBLICATIONS “A Conversation With William Rathje.” Anthropology Now (Volume 3:1), April 2011 pp. 78- 83. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Scrap: The Social Life of Recyclable Metal in the United States & India By Matthew Riley Lane Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Irvine, 2019 Professor William M. Maurer, Chair 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 vi 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. vii INTRODUCTION Scrap metal is not commonly viewed by the general population as a commodity, and is often neglected as a recyclable during curbside collection,1yet it operates as a formal object of circulation that is tied to the economic livelihood of vast, underrepresented populations who span the globe. More visible and accepted commodities disappear from the public imaginary of what count as valuable objects once they reach the dumpster.2 However, the dumpster in fact serves as a starting point for a new path to valuation. In this ethnography, I examine how a variegated host of brokers in a commodity circuit of scrap metal recyclables shifts the value of discarded metals and transforms these new commodities into objects that index meaningful labor, environmental good and sound sustainability measures. At each stage, what was once devalued and thrown away is given new value – economically, socially and environmentally – and is reformed, through the process of for-profit recycling, to serve particular goals. I ask, how are the actors in this commodity circuit connected through their mediation and transformation of the value of scrap metal? What then are the mechanics of their connections, and how are these mechanics made to matter for the people who handle this commodity, for the environment, and for the economy? Using the anthropological field method of participant observation, in a multi-sited (Marcus, 1995) research paradigm, I followed the commodity chain travelled by scrap metal from dumpster to factory; from Chicago’s alleyways to the Port of Los Angeles; from the Port of Los 1 U.S. EPA, 2009, “Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures of 2009,” http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/msw2009-fs.pdf. 2 Mary Douglass, Purity and Dange. (New York: Routledge Press, 2002). 1 Angeles to Mumbai, India; to the mini-steel plants in South India. At each stage, I worked alongside the people who structure their economic livelihood around this commodity, in order to document the tangible (if invisible) value of scrap, economically, with regard to the environmentally sound activity of recycling, and for the gendered, racially marked and ethnic populations who divert these newly formed commodities from the waste stream. This study explores how informal circuits and their connections to formal scrap metal economies offer the possibility for more carbon neutral practices than the alternative of strip mining for virgin ores. In this commodity circuit—or what anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars refer to as an “actor network”3—economic profit is the root cause of action, yet this action contributes to the public good and global environment by reducing strain on natural resource extraction and landfill burden, while also helping to reduce pollution to water and the air.4 Despite the public good in terms of environmental impact, the social impact of the global scrap trade is more complicated. Pinioned between creating environmental good and sourcing low cost labor, the global scrap trade creates inequalities by sustaining labor hierarchies while raising barriers to forms of social and political solidarity despite the common linkages of the dispersed workers involved in scrap commodity chains. Scrap is a metal and it abounds. Scrap is the broken refrigerator in your garage waiting to be hauled away. Scrap is the water heater in your basement that gave out. It is also the broken 3 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).