 I should probably introduce myself first, so I'm Laurie Bassam, I was and am assistant curator for the plastic re-making our world exhibition, so the exhibition you saw this morning, me and a team of five other curators curated that exhibition over two years, so this sort of conference feels like a great, I don't know, accompanying piece to the exhibition, it expands on things that we thought about, things we didn't get to come to include, so it's been really wonderful listening to all the speakers today. Just reflecting on the various problems that colonialism poses for plastics across design histories and sort of in environmentalism currently and now, so I'm running this last session, there'll be, me and Lanjala will have a sort of conversation and then Heather and Sarah who's works in the exhibition will also then have a conversation as well and then we'll end with compound 13 who's work also features in the exhibition, so this is sort of the context and why we're in Vienna. I really wanted to just say thank you so much to Lanjala for making your way up to Dundee, I know you've had a hectic travel schedule so we really appreciate this. Lanjala sort of contributed a really amazing portion to the plastics catalogue, so Lanjala is a writer and journalist from Kenya who extensively writes about society and politics, particularly with the African and Kenyan context. Her section in the book, Homo plasticus, always a bit of a tongue twister, really deals with contextualising the plastic problem within a Kenyan context, so we'll sort of chat about that briefly and then Heather and Sarah will discuss Sarah's work which features in the exhibition. Undergarments as well as Untitled Crocodile are both really important pieces that we're really pleased to include as part of the exhibition, we're just really pleased you've all made it here today so thanks so much again to everyone for coming. Then obviously compound 13 is another video piece that we'll be seeing which actually again does feature in the exhibition and that project is sort of a combination research project but also on the ground in Daravie itself. So it's a really interesting project which looks at kind of Daravie and compound 13 as this kind of epicenter for the informal plastics recycling that goes on in Mumbai and India. And I won't spoil too much by sort of describing it in great detail, the video does a really great job of looking at that informal economy. So yeah, I hope you enjoy that as well but for now I'm just going to kind of have a chat with Manjala and you'll sort of see me pull through some of the ideas that feature in the book just so you get a taste of what we talked about when we were writing the plastics catalogue. And yeah, if you have questions you can come up and do those as well. All right, thanks so much. Hi. It is slightly underspot though, definitely. It is like looking out onto a big audience. Yeah, so I suppose I wanted to sort of focus on the article from the book just because obviously it really relates to the work we've done here but also yeah, your kind of experiences of plastics in Kenya itself. So I guess your piece in the publication starts with the change of use in plastics within your lifetime and how you've seen it come and sort of morph and grow between sort of you say 1995 and 2005, this huge kind of upsurge of plastic usage. And I wanted you to sort of explain and explore that and how you felt, whether that has legacies and colonialism, whether it's kind of part of the network and changing economy in Kenya. Yeah, I guess your thoughts on that to begin with. Sure. I think when you are part of a former colony, it's all too easy to kind of think about colonisation in relation to the former direct imperial power. But I think it's very important as we're thinking about colonisation and power and power disparities to also really think about contemporary imperialism. That they are still very many shades of imperialism that are underway in the world today that might not flow in the same directions that we are accustomed to but have similar rhythms to what we saw in the past. So when we think about plastics and imperialism, there is I think what has happened in the exhibitions that mapping that goes to traditional routes through which goods services people circulated. But then there's also this modern imperialism of shifting patterns, of being, of shifting patterns of community, of kind of outside economic primarily, but also social and political forces reshaping social, political, economic organisations in less powerful countries for the economic benefit of the metropole. And that really is the if you want to break it down to its simplest form, it's the use of force to reorganise this society for the economic benefit of this society. And so when we think about contemporary imperialism, we also have to think about multinational corporations. The fact that I do a lot of work in very rural remote places and I used to live in Madagascar and there are places in Madagascar where you cannot find clean water, you cannot find a supermarket, a shop, forget a supermarket, a little kiosk, but you will find a Coca-Cola, you will find a Coca-Cola bottle. And so I remember we were going to rural Madagascar to do some work for this, I used to work in development and I was being told if you get food poisoning or if you get anything that kind of messes up your insides and you can't find drinking water, what they tend to do is to prescribe is you take a bottle of coke and you put a tablespoon of salt in it and you drink that as oral rehydration salts because you're going to find a Coca-Cola somewhere in there. And I found that to be really interesting as a really how we've disrupted, you know, water should be one of those fundamental things that everybody who wants it should have access to clean water. So it's really to reframe the way our idea of origins, directionality and thinking about imperialism, I think that's like a foregrounding thought. To go back to your question, you know, it is partly the economic disruptions of structural adjustment sort of late 70s, 1980s, leading to the collapse of the economy in the 90s, but also, you know, we have to also take responsibility for the domestic transformations. We lived under an authoritarian regime for 40 years, for the better part of 40 years, and then sort of the 1990s kind of being this crucible of change and collapse and all of those things. Before structural adjustment, for example, you know, public schools were fully subsidized by the government, public health was fully subsidized by the government. People were able to, there was still this very, very simple idea, but really fundamental idea of social mobility that you could actually go from a primarily rural existence to a primarily urban existence. Hang on. I wonder if we'd get one of those. I wanted to get a bookmark. So structural adjustment is an imperial act, and for those of you who are not aware, structural adjustment basically towards the end of the 1980s, after the collapse, the oil shocks of the 1970s, you know, everybody's very happy in the 60s, oil prices are high, we're all expanding, we learned about Hong Kong trade expansion, and then the 1970s, the oil shocks, because of the way that the oil prices behave, a lot of countries that were dependent on oil for their exports suddenly lost a big chunk of their budgets, didn't have money to spend on a number of things. And so a lot of economies were in trouble, and the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, prescribed a set of policies to help balance the books, and they basically went around a lot of poor countries, primarily in Africa, but also in Latin America, telling them that you have to stop funding healthcare, you have to stop funding education, you have to stop funding all of these public services because the private sector will take care of it, meanwhile, take that money and use it to balance the budget. The net outcome of structural adjustment is that it eviscerated the middle class in a lot of the developing world, and Kenya was no exception. Suddenly teachers, lawyers, engineers, doctors, all of these people who had been in middle class professions, they couldn't make ends meet, they couldn't live the lifestyle that they had become accustomed to, but they couldn't go back to work the land because they had already undergone this personal transformation. It's very difficult to go from being a teacher, a doctor, a nurse, whatever, and then, okay, now you're going to go and be a farmer again, and you're going to do substance farming as well. So, one of the net outcomes of this economic transformation, this retreat in public services, is really the transformation of the microeconomy, how people are able to purchase of things, so you're not able to buy sugar in the big two kilogram packet, you now need it in a smaller packet, so this is what we call the Kadogo economy in Kenya, which is literally the translation is small, that people are now buying things in small quantities in order to maintain some kind of aspect of their previous life. And this is where plastic comes in because the person who is the big trader is dealing in the big 200 kg packets, but is dispensing it in smaller, smaller, smaller quantities. The thing is, I couldn't tell you exactly the moment that plastic became common in Kenya. So this is what I say in the essay, when I say now I use my age as a metric, I realize I'm not so young anymore. But I'm a child of the 80s, and all the way through primary school, going to the store meant taking a woven basket and going to the store and getting a number of things and carrying the basket home, and there was a space in the entryway for the shopping basket. And then when I was in high school, suddenly going to the store meant going and getting a plastic bag from the supermarket and getting a plastic bag from the store, and suddenly there wasn't a shopping basket anymore. There wasn't that kind of place for the shopping basket. There suddenly was under the sink this massive collection of bags that had only been used once or twice before. The same thing with water. The quality of water deteriorated so fast in Nairobi. It went from very reliable municipal water to you absolutely cannot drink the tap water. Then what would you do if you needed water and you were in town and you had to buy the single use plastic bottle? I think I must have already been in double digits the first time I used a single use plastic bottle. I was already pretty much in high school when the first time I used a single use plastic bottle. It wasn't the thing that people did. Now everybody is using single use plastic bottles and it happened very quickly. It was a very short period of time, probably a decade and a half, two decades. I think now it's become so normalised but it really starts off from the services that people had become dependent on to sustain their middle class lives being taken out from underneath them. I think it's really interesting in the piece as well that you talk about how at the same time of the collapse of municipal services there's also this sort of economy based on tourism and the idea that then you're promoting the use of a plastic bottle and safe water drinking because of that tourism, because of that incoming sort of western gaze on what we've deemed a kind of sanitised. So it's like these two things kind of happening at once is increasing the use of plastics exponentially in a really short period of time. Very, very short period of time and also this is the other thing I sort of thought about when I was writing the essay. I grew up in the city. I grew up literally seven kilometres from downtown Nairobi in what you would call row houses I think here and we didn't have running water for 11 years. Most of my childhood we just didn't have running water and so if you wanted to drink water you either had to boil it and you had to treat it and then you know whatever or you had to buy the single use plastic and it's this confluence of both well whose idea was it to start putting what in the bottle and the interesting thing is actually the Coca-Cola company wasn't the first. We have a huge Coca-Cola distribution manufacturing plant in Kenya. The Coca-Cola company wasn't the first company to do single use plastic in Kenya. It was a company that is owned by a former president or relative of the former president and so there's a nexus there also between who performs the gaze for whom. The initial target market for single use plastic in Kenya was not Kenyan people. It was the hotels. It was the tourists who were coming in and sort of going on safari especially for going on safari and things like that. And then it just became the secondary market suddenly because of all of these other things. There's now a secondary demand that also drives that economy. I think it's really interesting who Nina speakers well about this idea of waste happens elsewhere and that on safari it's in this nice sanitised bottle but on the sort of downtown streets of Nairobi it's in piles. Well it's both and this is one of the things that's actually happened and I guess we'll talk about this later. As of three years ago now single use plastic is banned in all the national parks in Kenya because it had become such a huge problem. It's a question of how people perceive the natural environment elsewhere. So when tourists come to Kenya the way that the whole construct is packaged is you don't have to interact with locals. Come and look at a lion. Come and look at an elephant. Take your pretty pictures and then leave Kenya is a backdrop for your adventure and not a place where human beings live. And so the whole construct is basically that there's no accountability. There's no responsibility for what you do. You see these images. I mean you know my government will probably take my passport for me saying this but you see these images of people in their land cruisers and there's no need for the khaki people. You're not doing anything. You're sitting in a car. There's nothing that you're doing. You know and the khaki and the boots and the hat and you're in an air conditioned car. Come on. But you see people in these land cruises you know 18 land cruises chasing after a lion across the savannah so that people can go and take pictures of it and then you drink the water and you toss it out of the land cruiser. And it had gone to the point where especially in the Maasai Mara it was out of control. There was so much plastic everywhere and of course that's not coming from us because we don't go on safari you know. I mean it's again that's changing. That's an oversimplification but the underlying thing is when you travel and not just to Kenya but really when people travel there is a more abstract sense of responsibility for the natural environment. And so you don't necessarily see what that plastic bottle is going to look like five years from now, ten years from now. When you're in the hotel and you're going through your plastic bottles you know I must drink my fresh water three bottles a day. You don't see where those bottles end up and you don't have to live with the choking rivers and the mounds of garbage and all of that stuff. And so there is that disconnect that is engendered by the whole construct of how travel in particularly in Africa is packaged and sold to Western consumers and plastic kind of cleaves to a lot of these discrepancies if you will. Yeah it's sort of yeah you don't think about it's over there it's done you've done your moment with it and you're gone again. Something else that really struck me in the piece that you wrote was you talk about sort of the lens of British colonisation through the body and particularly around sort of menstruation and periods. I wondered if you want to talk a bit about that how it's kind of sort of British imperialism kind of shapes sort of attitudes and norms as well as kind of how you deal with your body. Yeah so as a person who plays yeah. So this is very interesting when they invited me to write this essay the basis for this essay was a cup a year or two before I had gone to Madagascar and gone back to Madagascar I should say and I had written another essay about plastic and it had been commissioned as sort of a gentle piece if you will on a group of students who was doing a recycling project in Madagascar but because I had lived in Madagascar and I had really been shocked by the state of sort of plastic waste in the back of my mind I had always assumed that Madagascar was producing an excess amount of plastic and then the research kind of tells a slightly different story which is in there saying no spoilers. But then when I was asked to write this essay I was like what did I not do in the other essay that I really want to make explicit and the challenge that I set for myself is I wanted to write a feminist assessment of the plastic problem and I wanted to be explicitly feminist because the other one was feminist in that all the lead voices most of the lead voices in the essay were women and I had sought them out specifically because I wanted to tell women stories. But this one I really said to myself I want to do it in a way that makes people uncomfortable because the other thing we're having these conversations is that we tend to make the women's bodies abstract and the things that women's bodies do, people who menstruate that we do and we experience because there's this element of shame and this element of well that's private and that doesn't need to be discussed and whatever and so I went for the thing that makes people most uncomfortable which is menstruation and to really really illuminate the idea of plastic as a paradox because menstruation is kind of, it's one of those things that, well I want to say everybody but everybody's a big word, most people should know happens and the reason I say that I've been watching this thing, this is a sidebar, I've been watching this thing on Instagram where she goes up to men and she asks them questions about periods and honestly really it's, wow. But so the reason, the thing is I really wanted to go into this because I think if we are going to unravel the paradox of plastic we have to be willing to be uncomfortable. There is a discomfort that's going to have to come by the fact that all of us, every single one of us, it's become so intertwined with our lived experiences that it is impossible for anybody to take an attitude of moral superiority. It is, when people talk about vegan plastic, vegan leather, vegan leather is plastic. So then you have to think about well what is the moral calculus that you've done that says vegan leather is a morally superior product to cow leather which is organic, biodegradable and we're making use of the whole animal. There's a whole calculus there so that's why I wanted to write about this. The whole idea of secrecy and shame around the female body is in Africa in a lot of, in former British colonies I should say, is very much rooted in these attitudes towards female sexuality. That the female body is something that, to be hidden, is something fragile, to be shielded from the public gaze is very much rooted in this Victorian Puritanism. Because I speak to elders, I speak to, now there are fewer and fewer of them, you speak to elders and there's a slightly different approach to it. Everybody of a certain age, if I speak to my grandfather, he's now deceased about periods, he's like, yeah, women bleed. People who have uterus, they bleed and that is life. But if you speak to people who would be of my father's generation, that's not something that we speak of. So I ask myself, well what is this transformation? What is this generational shift that happens that is our reorientation towards the female body, towards the body in general? And what I think a lot of people who live in the West take for granted is that colonisation was not just about the violence and the force, even though the violence and the force was a big part of it. It goes back to what I said in the beginning. It's about the fundamental reorganisation of a social and political order for the economic benefit of another. So the violence is a means to an end. It's a big part of it, but it's also a means to an end. And the idea of creating a pool of labour, a reliable pool of labour that could be called upon in order to produce the raw materials that were needed for industry. Well how do I break these people? How do I get these people to become a pliable ready source of labour? It starts with the breakdown of the psyche. Steve Bico, who was a South African freedom fighter, he said, in the end the most powerful tool in the hands of the oppressed is the mind of the oppressed. It's to shift that belief system whereby instead of occupying your situation with pride and self-awareness, there is a shame attached to it. So what I tried to get at the essay is that there was an element of shame that was introduced to the way in which our societies were restructured that I think feeds into this idea that not only do we, we don't even acknowledge this very basic biological function. It's not even so much that we don't know what to do, it's that now we don't even acknowledge it. Given your long-winded answer, but I wanted to end with an example. A couple of days ago, weeks ago now, there was a Kenyan lady who tweeted something and she said, I find it so heartbreaking that when we talk about, when we go to schools, to give rural schools to give girls period products, to give them reusable products and not single-use products. I looked at it and I thought, why is that shame? Why should girls be ashamed? Why is that a shameful thing? And the subsequent conversation was basically that having to deal with menstruation, having to think about it, having to talk about it, having to be in a body that bleeds is itself shameful. I think that is something that needs to be interrogated a little bit and that's what I try to do in the essays. Where does this thinking come from and then what does it do? It's also really interesting, I guess, in thinking about, if you're talking about workforces and an imperial mindset, the idea that single-use products are there to essentially aid you working constantly rather than this idea of a slower, more regimented pace to a month or a cycle. So it has a kind of double-edged element to it in that way. I thought it was a really interesting and powerful way of exploring the microcosms of plastics and how we don't think about them in that context, but actually they have this kind of imperial root. I really, really want to emphasise this. It wasn't like a blanket condemnation of the plastic products. What I really am leaning into is this idea of paradox. This idea of when I was in school, I don't know about other women in this room, but we used to hide our pads in the sleeves. You know what I'm talking about, right? When you had to go, you had to hide it in the sleeve. I went to an all-girls school. Who am I hiding it from? You know, there were literally two men on our campus, the security guards, they were at the gate. So why was this necessary and is really unpacking that? I really wanted to think about that, but at the same time, you think about the menstrual huts in Nepal that are still a feature of rural life in Nepal whereby women, young girls, when they're on their menses, they have to be separated from their community and they go to these huts and sometimes they're not heated and it's very cold because people have died, young girls have died because Nepal is, you know, Himalayas, all these mountain ranges, it's very, very cold. And so I really also then want to not sort of idealize and romanticize the fact that menstrual hygiene products have really improved the quality of life for a lot of people, but here's an uncomfortable statistic. If you are in your 40s and assume that you had your first menses when you were 12, 13, the very first pad that you used is still in landfill. Anybody who has ever used a non-cotton pad, anything that is not 100% cotton, the very first one that you used is still in landfill. And so if you extrapolate that and you think about what that could mean, if, let's assume for the sake of statistics, 50% of the world's population were 8 billion, 4 billion people, 12 to 14 times a year assume, you know, 7 is probably very generous, but let's average it out and say 7 per cycle. We're not going to make it as a world with that amount of plastic. So it's to, well, what is the construct that necessitates the, I think if we're going to get to the solution we have to then go, what is the construct that necessitates the plastic? What is the hygiene context that makes the plastic necessary? What is the shame context that makes the plastic necessary? What is the fact that, you know, when you tell people about reusable products, there is disgust? What is that disgust and what does it say about our relation to the body that is gendered female? And sort of, I think if we are going to get to the heart of entangling this paradox, we have to also do that contextual work and figure out what to keep and what to let go off. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great way to end, and it sort of echoes what you've said in the book, which is that we need to connect those hard actions with consequences and sort of pull out that nuance and the entanglement we've talked a lot about today. I'm going to wrap up, I think, and then we can pass over to Heather and Sarah, but thank you so much. Thank you. It's really fabulous to be back up here. But not to talk about myself or my own thinking, but to talk about your beautiful work. So I thought we would just start off by giving a sense of, could you get kind of introduce us to this work and maybe a little bit in terms of your larger practice or how you came to it? Yeah, so I'm a multidisciplinary artist, but I do work a lot sculpturally. And I have two works in the exhibition. One of them is the large hanging sculpture in the foyer space, so if you missed it, take a look on your way out. And the other one is in the plastic lab. This is the one that's pictured on the screen, so hopefully you had a chance to see it earlier today, but it's titled Undergarments. It was a commission by V&A Dundee to make a materials library out of recycled plastics. It needed to be interactive. It needed to be accessible to all ages. And what else? There's quite a brief. Oh, and yeah, there was probably some other things that I'll come to them, but I decided as an artist to maybe choose a different format for a materials library to choose the garment. I decided to... Each garment is a different type of plastic, and within each garment it has made reconfigured plastics of that type. So, for example, the more purple-y object that's hanging over the railing is kind of like trousers. It includes a paddling pool, a PVC roofing, and some tubing that is reconfigured to make that garment. And each of the garments also have, next to them, a sort of extended or expanded care label that includes the qualities of each of the types of plastic, how maybe out of my experience, best to interact and use the plastic and how to care for it, and also thinking about its lifespan. I was thinking about how maybe like plastic fabrics or Petro textile fabrics have also always included this care label. It's one form of accountability, but it goes only so far. And yeah, my sort of plan or hope for the work was really to think about the way in which we are often coming in contact with plastics, but actually not really thinking about the specificity of it. So, in my work, I've used, I've mostly worked with HDPE plastic, but outside of that, each plastic has its own quality. And I think because we're so entrenched in this recycling system, certainly in the Western world, and ideas of greenwashing, that we don't actually hold the objects very often, unless we're part of a production line. So, I wanted to maybe think about really engaging what that plastic actually was. So, which ones are waxy, which ones are brittle, which ones are cold, which ones smell a particular way. There's a very fancy machine in the exhibition that you can put something underneath it and it will tell you what the plastic is. But we've got to be... I think it's good for us to learn ourselves experientially what they are. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's super important, the kind of chemical literacy and the ways in which plastics are so obfuscated, intentionally obfuscated, as a way of being able to push this material on to all of us. But I also wanted to pick up on something that I think is really important in your work that also Angela really brilliantly discussed just now, which is the relationship of intimacy and the choice of using clothes and the choice of using undergarments as the title. And if you could talk a little bit more about what went into that specific artistic decision and what are you thinking about when you're making these objects. Yeah, so how did I come to a collection of clothes anyway? I was thinking about how collections of plastics already exist in the world and I was in a charity shop and I was, I don't know, statistically I was thinking about how the racks were like these vertical slices, like geologic strata and you know, a massive accumulation of petrochemical time because of a lot of its plastic in charity shops these days. And yeah, so that was one thing. I wanted a collection that existed already and the garments. So I guess intimacy with the material, the tactility of the material was important to the work and to the commission. I wanted this idea that rather than maybe hanging racks on the store we had this more playful and participatory and I guess gestural suggestion of having taken on the garment or taken it off. So some of them are kind of like the waistcoat which is second from the right is kind of slung over the railing. But how far can we take these clothes off? I guess these like plastics if they've become part and a part of our bodies. So here we are maybe taken one layer of the plastic off and are we really based in our undergarments is kind of the sort of suggestion to the work. So yeah. Yeah, that's super interesting. I was also wondering if you could talk a little bit more. You've talked a little bit already about like what's included in the labels and why you chose to do the labels like that like in addition to the kind of chemical literacy that you were talking about. What else do you include in the kind of label section of the clothes and what does it have to say to the kind of overall project or the state of our knowledge about plastics. I mean I guess I was picking out something that as I said like a care has some kind of accountability and even the idea of a care label but it's mostly in terms of protecting the consumer object against like legal warranties and so on. But I included so I've included a list of qualities with each of those plastics which sort of talks to material a kind of material labour format but also just thinking about garments as something that you know may be reused and what might have another life as a different type of object and thinking about what those qualities of that particular plastic might be in its next permutation or reconfiguration as a rag or as something that you might create a sling out of or something like this. I've tried to also include quite importantly I haven't transformed the plastics I've only reconfigured them so in doing so I've learnt how to cut things the best way or how to what the limitations of each of those materials are and so I've included some of that information I've also tried to include as much information as I could research or find in terms of like what the material actually was so something like acrylic paint like house paint is like I think it's PMMA as far as I could trace all of these materials that are just so clouded in accessibility of knowing what their make-up is and that's part of one of the reasons why I think it's so important to learn and I've learnt I mean I guess overall the way in which that sort of detective work works is that I've really indebted to other people and other, I mean well-adherina in the audience and they've been incredibly important to me their studio is like three minutes from mine and my house and we've shared loads of conversations about what this material that we're actually working with is and I guess I wanted to communicate that back to the wider audience like I feel like it's quite important not to just be like theoretically connected to plastic but like actually experientially involved in it to some extent like I'm not advocating for mass production lines but yeah I have so many more questions but unfortunately we're out of time already but I encourage you all in case you haven't had yet a chance to go see it to go interact with it when and if you can it's a beautiful piece and I love the tactility of it so thank you so much Sarah So we're going to show a film that's actually part of the show minus the sound unfortunately so that my colleague Ben who you can see on the right hand side of the screen who's in Mumbai at the moment can also speak over the top of it and this is a film which tells the story of the journey that discarded plastic waste makes through the very intricate and complicated supply chains of the informal recycling industry in Mumbai and Dharavi in the centre of Mumbai where we've been working in collaboration with a whole heap of people who unfortunately can't be with us because it's 11 o'clock at night in India at the moment and very importantly the NGO ACORN India is one of the epicenters for sorting and sifting plastic waste so the film tells the story that the waste makes through its complicated systems of reclamation and trading and sorting and grinding and reprocessing and we've just got a commentary that we're going to put over the top of that which hopefully we can have a bit of time to talk about at the end so if you'd like to play the film so the politics of plastic waste in India and elsewhere is not simply about the management of material and environmental impacts and costs but it's also about how the brutality of wasted lives play out and the biopolitics of what Henry Drew calls the biopolitics of disposability and a lot of this is very very heavily inflected by caste and class and the particular position of people that do this work in the society where there's a vast amount of surplus labour and a lot of people searching for livelihoods so these are entanglements of material objects of extraction of supply of materials and the product chains of consumption and discard which sustain a lot of livelihoods operating right on the peripheries of the formal economy but they're nonetheless deeply entangled as we've seen all the way through the day the wider systems and infrastructures of extraction and plastic consumption and petropolitics and all of that but what's very important to understand is that what's often or often just labelled by policy makers in a very simplistic way as parasitical people or parasitical parasites or scavengers are actually based on very complicated human to human infrastructures person to person networks and very complicated integrated trading relationships that constitute all the layers of the informal waste management business and one of the things that our little lab that we have in collaboration with a lot of people working in and around Daraf i is doing is kind of mapping that out and looking at how that works because we often think a lot of that is just very much deliberately invisibilised and concealed it's more convenient to invisibilise it so what Jonathan Chapman, the designer and philosopher describes as urban mining you can see not just in the extraction of value from the detritus of the consumer society undertaken by the waste workers but there's also a wider kind of mining of value here from the wasted and used up bodies of the urban poor and this kind of important to remember there's often a moral argument about this kind of work it's not this kind of exploitation isn't at all limited to waste work it's all over the informal economy people earn probably more per day working in this industry than they will in similar industries doing low level manual labour and then there's a third point which is that this kind of work is associated often with what was described as wasteland but one of the big problems for Daraf i is actually in absolutely prime land right in the centre of the city and in the crosshairs of the developers so we see these kind of collisions of infrastructures between the informal self built user generated city of the bottom up city and the kind of top down infrastructural projects like driving metros through and in the case of Daraf i a wholesale redevelopment plan that's been fought over for the last 30 years but we would argue that these are kind of human infrastructures of repair and recovery which keep the urban metabolism moving and stop the city from being basically buried under a mountain of its own waste Ben The polished urban imaginary of the world class future city of which many policy makers speak is an urban imaginary of modernisation of fast connectivities and frictionist trading this is the so-called world class infrastructure which conflicts sharply with messy noisy everyday realities of informal city of what Raul Morota referred to as the kinetic city which is where the majority of urban dwellers make their living One of the things that we've been doing within our research at the lab that explores the intersections of these informal sorry these infrastructural collisions is the way that we're mapping out then the next intricate supply chains of waste recovery trading from the waste pickers to aggregators sorting through to washing, shredding, grinding you'll see in this film all the way to the manufacturing of new products made from the cycle plastics they're also doing sort of the role of quantification currently of the invisible labour important to point out that the negative perception and marginalisation of informal waste work driven in particular by the social class cast and religious affiliations and the widespread stigmatisation of those people handling waste materials and human sanitation as well means that those who are working with waste who are surviving on the fate margins of the city are also seen as disposable so they're disposable people in addition there are ongoing associations of purity and impurity in the separation of cast where untouchables have historically performed the unclean and polluting tasks and work including sweepers garbage removal and so on which sadly continues despite the concept of untouchability having been outlawed by the constitution back in 1955 so many factors really continue to shape and influence the practice of cast and as handlers of waste dallit and schedule casts alongside the Muslim minority in India are frequently characterised then by their relationship to cleanliness and pollution in popular narratives of morality and value and so this complex social and economic exclusion then takes place at multiple levels throughout the city, throughout society and social and cultural networks where many people in waste work in particular are often economic migrants, they're displaced from their villages and they've come to the slums in search of work then when they're unable to find jobs many turn to waste work which is effectively existing at the bottom of the hierarchy of informal labour but also ones that have easy access great so there's a few key characteristics of this work that many of you will be familiar the vast majority of people are working at a subsistence level not what, not really able to accumulate anything but able to earn enough from this kind of work to keep themselves alive and keep their families going we think it's hard to know but we think there's at least two or three hundred thousand people engaged in that kind of activity across the greater Mumbai metropolitan region the waste recycling activities are very much geographically concentrated particularly the sorting activities that you see here because the supplies get aggregated up through a very complicated chain of trade scarce capital means that for a lot of people there's an easy entry in terms of just being able to collect but being able to store or accumulate stuff means you need access to space warehousing, capital and that also means you have to have more money so there's a hierarchy of value that the further up the chain you go the more money you make and the more easy it is to kind of sit on materials one of the things that speed is essential because value is gained through the speed at which stuff gets processed through the system not all it's largely a cash based economy but it's also now subject to a much more stricter and much more potentially punitive kind of regulatory gaze and this is to do with the kind of global spotlight being shone on plastic race generally and it also the markets for all these different kinds of plastics and every one of them every reach of these boxes here is a different type of plastic one will be a pp one will be hdpe one will be something else they all have different spot prices they move in tandem with the market for virgin plastic usually typically at about 50% or 60% cheaper but it also depends on the volumes that you're able to sell them at so it is in the sense of just another commodity market and there's a whole vernacular language evaluation and what we argue with as a kind of form of knowledge economy and citizen science economy which is highly highly self-organised and operates through largely through networks of trust Ben Yeah, thank you I think for the majority then of athletes and consumers in both the global north and the south the labour of manufacturing, distribution and disposable is rendered, abstracted and invisible so as to create a kind of scene to experience between the venerated power to purchase and the smooth, those smooth clean surfaces of the consumer goods that appear by magic on our shelves or more recently on our doorsteps so what you see is how every consumable object imaginable all the crap of the world effectively that we are producing passes through the hands of these waste workers in a similar but reverse process the labour of waste recovery then this disassembly and recycling is barely acknowledged for and this is kind of a key point so we've mentioned that idea of politics of invisibilisation of consumer that deliberately hides this labour and the working conditions which the global supply chain has been discussed today and the assembly chains depend so the byproducts or the side effects and the consequences of this kind of process of urban modernisation are loaded on to the lives and the bodies of the urban poor sustaining these illusions then of this kind of waitness and seamless economies of how our products just miraculously appear meanwhile the labouring underclasses form this kind of dark matter if you like of the informational economy and providing invisible unacknowledged infrastructures that hold the city together and we also see this appearing in different ways with the smart city furthermore then these workers are slowed down they're held back, they're constrained by inadequate basic infrastructure of shelter, of water, of sanitation just as the lives then of the elite they live side by side with are accelerated by fastest urbanisms or forms of platform capitalism so then crucial to debate around sustainable practices in relation to environmental crises is that the work of the form-waste management industry in in India and Ireland particularly is generally absent it's critically absent from the official data about the environmental social costs of plastic manufacturing consumption and disposal all disposable waste and toxic pollution more broadly so what we've found is that the work of the form-waste management industry being absent from these official narratives means that in the quantification of how much waste gets handled and disposed of via things like landfill and the quantification of ocean waste are totally out of kilter with the actual extraordinary values and high levels of plastic recycling and waste recycling that happen in India so it's basically invisible but it's not recognised by the state so there's no doubt then that these kind of count efforts to raise the awareness of the problem of waste have not really taken hold amongst sections of the middle class working class so we should kind of left with this sort of rather self-consciously virtuous symbolic politics then of pre-sorting waste on doorsteps and encouraging recycling and removing some of these plastics but not really recognising the work great so these sort of pre-sorting waste and the sort of middle class environmental activism cleaning up the beaches et cetera very laudable but they're often mobilised by politicians to construct moral panics and forms of moral subjection particularly of Muslims in the context of India and also of Dalits and the urban poor, most of whom are the people who are doing this work so these discourses aren't new the figure of the downtrodden waste picker living on the margins of society and exoticised and othered is often presented as a counterpoint to the dignified labourer who's employed in a well-regulated production line or efficiently run modern factory efficient, tidy, productive compliant so this picture of the decent worker is set against the hordes of destructible vagrants and outsiders left to scaven from the scraps of what respectable society leaves behind so those sort of rhetoric summon up essentially Victorian colonial 19th century discourses and contemporary discourses about the deserving and the undeserving poor and they put a sort of moralising filter over the top of a lot of waste work so we're trying to think about this in quite a number of ways both in terms of the disposability of the people but in terms of the way that people's lives who are tied up with waste and whose livelihoods many of whom have achieved actually quite sustainable livelihoods in terms of being able to accumulate money etc are tied up with these ideas about disposability and marginality Ben We lost you Ben Another aspect of this work that's not necessarily visible is the knowledge behind this so in derbyw waste work exceeds normative discourses of say circular economy in both range and coverage the aspirational drivers of circular economy such as repair, reuse recycle and remake that advanced ecological and sustainable frameworks for implementation monitoring and management are not new principles they are already there in a highly sophisticated form embedded within communities that transfer into generational knowledge between people and things so rather than this paradigm of circular economy is very well developed rather than the society would like to impose in urban discourses in a place like derbyw the fusion of everyday objects and their social life demonstrates the intersubjectivity of people and things everything has used value everything sustains life nothing is idle and nothing is wasted so within these kind of shifting temporalities of a circular economy of the always in use these cycles of disaggregation and aggregation this assembly and assembly persistently sustain these complex assemblages of diverse and these diverse knowledges are entangled with the material flows of objects they embody knowledges that are within these momentary aggregations in which all forms all sorts of forms of knowledge are coexisting so just to give an example then in her extensive interviews with catics that process plastic loads on the outskirts of Delhi Cavary Gill whose amazing work we've drawn on that and she's been a member of our team and the generational knowledge is passed down to a younger generation who entered the trade at an early age this forms a kind of sensory knowledge as one of the catic plastic waste workers explains he says, catic knowledge of plastic and recyclers unsurpassed by smelling it seeing it and burning it we can tell what sort of plastic it is others have to check with painstaking methods because we've invited this knowledge from childhood we can tell just from experience what sort of plastic we are dealing with is mainly used to recycle it and we know around 180-200 items by site so what we see then in that sort of performativity of that happy guys you're seeing the film where at incredible speeds all these items are being separated into different polymers is also an evidence of what can be can almost be kind of disturbing in their encyclopedic knowledge of consumer objects and the polymers that they're made of even though most of the objects that they're being processed that are passing through their hands are far out of reach of the purchasing power of those particular works involved Graham just handed it to you I think we'll stop at that point Great Thank you so much to both of you and Ben for being there late at night Thanks exactly, it must be quite at 11pm or something like that Thank you Thanks to all of you for sticking with us right to the end and whistling through those last few bits and pieces I don't know if you want to say something about the day in general but for me it's been a really interesting process and thinking about the kind of continuing entanglement of colonialism through plastics now and plastics in the past I think I have to say that this is kind of what I wish for in that the last presentation of Compound 13 really brought together so many of the things that we've been thinking about and also the kind of nuances that we've been grappling with as well and I think my probably the biggest take away from the day Am I really echoing? No is the fact that we've gone through the life cycle of plastics to the very sort of aftermath of plastics and all the kind of things that happen in between but also that we really think of plastics as intersectional in the same way that the climate and ecological crisis is so you know we've talked about disability, gender, race, caste and from both here and now as well as in the past so I think thank you so much to all our speakers and all of you for sticking around this long it's been a really really interesting day and so even when my energy levels were flagging it was kind of like I had to stay engaged because I was so interested so thank you and thanks to the online audience as well