Waste in the tropics: Urban environments and (post) colonial infrastructure in Kochi, India

Abstract

n 2015, the Kochi government—the Cochin Corporation—announced it was planning to replace a controversial landfill on the outskirts of the city with a waste-to-energy incinerator. This incinerator was to stop unscientific landfill practices from leaching into nearby waterways and to solve the issue of plastic waste accumulating in Kochi’s famous backwaters—a series of brackish canals and lakes that the city rests within. These plans coincided with a national agenda of waste reform promoted by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his successful election campaign in 2014. However, when I arrived in Kochi in January 2018 the waste-to-energy incinerator was still yet to be installed, caught between a dilapidated landfill, a national policy promoting waste-to-energy infrastructure, and a wet tropical environment that made this infrastructure illogical and unviable. In this thesis I critique the claim to the universality of infrastructures to solve waste management crises and suggest that situated environmental conditions need to be front and centre of discussions about urban governance. Through an ethnographic study of this controversy, I draw on scholarship in environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and the burgeoning field of discard studies to explain why Kochi continues to attempt to adopt incineration infrastructure to solve a waste crisis despite its ill-suitedness to the tropical conditions of coastal South India. I expand on discussions within these fields by drawing together the (post)colonial history of infrastructure in Kochi and the specific material and capitalist histories of plastics. I also work with the situated concepts of wet and dry—as the categories of both tropical weather and waste systems—to extend ethnographic attention to tropical environments that includes the affective atmospheres and experiences of those environments. I argue that there is a need to expand what is relevant to discussions about urban governance to include specific (post)colonial histories of environmental change, the capitalist and material history of disposable plastics, and the ideological functioning of infrastructure. Part of this reckoning with colonial and material histories requires reimagining relationships between environment and infrastructure. This reimagining involves an unworking of the colonial inheritances of speed and convenience associated with infrastructural development that promotes capitalist growth. Informed by 16 months in India, and 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kochi between January 2018 and April 2019, my observations are drawn primarily from participant observation with waste activists in their advocacy throughout the city. I also draw on over 100 semi-structured interviews with environmental activists, waste workers, architects, academics, politicians, artists, and everyday citizens. Together these methods help to tell the story of a city grappling at once with the toxicity of a plastic waste crisis, the inheritances of large-scale environmental change from British rule in the early 20th century, and decades of postcolonial urban development based on extractive and polluting industries. Ultimately, the thesis provides a timely contribution to the pressing issue of plastic waste management in (post)colonial cities, while also extending recent debates on the intersection of environment and infrastructure.