The Discursive Power of Recycling: Valuing Plastic Waste in Cape Town

Recycling has come to be seen as a key strategy for tackling plastic pollution in South Africa, enabled by the rising popularity of circular economy policies globally. This paper explains how recycling operates discursively, positioning waste as an economic opportunity, with the effect of making it plausible to ignore the multi-scaler inequitable dynamics of waste that have been well documented by critical waste scholars. Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered over 13 months as part of the Valuing Plastic Project in Cape Town. Research involved establishing and evaluating a small-scale recycling scheme at Eluvukweni Church in the township of Crossroads on the outskirts of Cape Town. The methodology combined elements of participatory action research and discourse analysis to understand how ideas circulate in a way that perpetuates the status quo. This paper argues that the discursive power of recycling is enabled by concepts of circular economy and waste entrepreneurship, which position waste as a resource that unlocks job opportunities for people in poverty. As a consequence, environmental groups’ resistance to recycling as the solution to plastic pollution in South Africa continues to be constrained by the assumption that plastic waste is valuable, and that the plastic industry is able to regulate itself.