Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (review)

Most studies of environmental justice focus on heavy industry's impact on politically vulnerable communities. Sociologist David Naguib Pellow presents a more complex approach by looking at how the process of managing wastes has environmental justice dimensions both past and present. The result is a slender book that integrates social, environmental, and business studies and raises questions concerning American consumption patterns past and present.

Garbage Wars is not a comprehensive history of the waste trades. Pellow devotes two chapters to an overview of solid waste management strategies over the twentieth century as they relate to current problems, featuring some excellent photographs and background on the development of the sanitation industry giant Waste Management, Inc. (WMX), and, to some extent, waste management technologies. He discusses varied private efforts for urban waste disposal, including dumps and incinerators, choices that had adverse effects on the air and land of communities—invariably low income and African American—adjoining the facilities.

The historical section is brief, and the book is not comparable to Martin Melosi's Sanitary City (2000) as a history of the evolution of solid waste management and should not be used as a substitute. Pellow instead uses history to lay groundwork for an excellent ethnographic examination of present-day recycling and disposal operations in Chicago. He uses the concept of a treadmill of production to demonstrate that once waste management businesses enter communities they grow and produce greater environmental burdens on both workers and residents. All too often local political leaders allowed these polluting businesses into their communities because the businesses offered jobs to constituents where jobs were scarce, or they bribed the politicians. One of the more notorious local corruption scandals in recent Chicago history, Operation Silver Shovel, stemmed from waste management companies bribing aldermen.

In the ethnographic chapters of Garbage Wars, Pellow examines recycling operations in nonprofit collectives organized in the wake of the environmental movement and in large for-profit operations such as WMX. His conclusions will trouble proponents of recycling. Though recycling reduces the amount of refuse entering landfills and incinerators, Pellow concludes that sorting and processing materials at recycling centers is as unpleasant and dangerous as any job in the waste trades, exposing workers to loud noise, jagged objects, chemicals, and biohazards. The smell and noise at recycling facilities affect the surrounding neighborhoods, which in the cases Pellow studies remain low income and primarily African American. The burdens of waste management continue to affect poor people of color disproportionately, even as the rhetoric of recycling espouses a general public good.

Pellow's book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of what we commonly perceive as a simple environmental practice. Recycling is an industrial activity that, like other industrial activities such as power generation, may have negative effects on its workers and neighbors. The environmental justice framework of his study allows Pellow to bring understanding of race, ethnicity, and class to this environmentally sensitive industry. His historical chapters suggest a long history between marginalized urban ethnic and racial groups and waste management, indicating the need for further investigation into the interactions between communities and the businesses charged with handling their waste. The history is more complex than simple exploitation of minorities by the rest of the population, because the businesses that handle waste not only were staffed by immigrants and African Americans, but they were also founded and owned by first-generation immigrants. The exploitation of poorer neighborhoods of cities is aided both by political leaders of those communities and by entrepreneurs from marginalized communities who achieve upward economic mobility through waste handling. Pellow recognizes this irony in noting that Dutch immigrant Harm Huizenga founded WMX at the end of the nineteenth century. He more thoroughly points out that the nonprofit recycling center in his study, though it attempted to mitigate discomfort and risk and to act to benefit...