Urban waste collection – An environmental justice issue?

Bell, K.; Sweeting, D.

Abstract

Despite recent attempts to improve urban waste management through increased recycling, insufficient attention has been paid to the social and distributional impacts of waste policy. This omission means that such changes appear to have reinforced environmental injustices through the re/production of inequitable social burdens and benefits. We argue that, if policy makers were to consider waste management though the frame of ‘environmental justice’, such problems could be avoided. This chapter illustrates this assertion by analysing household waste and recycling in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the city of Bristol, UK, where both authors are resident. We provide evidence of unequal and unjust burdens faced by deprived communities in relation to waste collection services. Our aims are threefold. First, we intend to make an original contribution to the literature on environmental justice which, we consider, has overlooked the distributional aspects of municipal waste collection. Second, we aim to highlight the nature of the injustices that less well off communities face in this regard, especially when compared to more resourceful actors that produce waste and who profit from its sale. Third, we suggest ways that policy-makers might ameliorate the injustices that occur in the processes of waste collection and recycling.

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2013
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Organising Waste in the City
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt9qgpsv
• Keywords: neighbourhood, waste services, recycling, social class, environmental injustice
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/936773
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt9qgpsv
• Contract Date: May 1, 2012