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Technologies and practices that transform waste from valueless to valuable have become a best practice and commonsensical in environmental movements and policy as well as many industries seeking to maximize efficiency and profits. This talk examines the inequitable relations and politics baked into the recovery and revaluation of waste. In examining our sanitation systems, Mohammed Rafi Arefin argues that we must not only focus our attention to the study of waste, but also ask what are the human, knowledge, and land relations that are rendered disposable in attempts to revalue and reuse waste? To answer this question, he draws on two case studies of waste revaluation. The first examines the historical development and contemporary politics of sanitation in Cairo, Egypt; and the second follows the transformation of waste into bioinformation in the emerging field of wastewater-based surveillance. Arefin finds that, in both cases, incarcerated labour is integral to the prototyping, development, and maintenance of technologies and practices to revalue and reuse waste. Through these cases, he shows how efforts to revalue waste rely on simultaneous devaluations of certain lives, labour, and knowledge. Struggles around sanitation are therefore fundamental to struggles for social and environmental justice in the city. Tracing the logics of disposability in our waste regimes is crucial for imagining and enacting just systems of disposal in a global era characterized by the governing logics of disposability. 

Mohammed Rafi Arefin is an Assistant Professor of Geography (Environmental Justice and Social Change) and a founding member of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is trained as an urban geographer and urban political ecologist. His research examines the urban environmental politics of sanitation and hosing infrastructure. He has explored these interests in current research on the politics of sanitation systems in Egypt, the political economy of wastewater surveillance initiatives, and the intersections of housing and climate justice in British Columbia.