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Patrick O’Hare. Rubbish Belongs to the Poor. Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons. 
London: Pluto Press. 2022. 218 pages. 

 

This lucid and engaging, at times amusing, ethnography of waste-pickers in Montevideo, Uruguay, 

challenges readers to think critically about the role of waste in contemporary society, the nature of 

informality within the local and global economies of advanced capitalism, and perhaps most 

poignantly, whether people should have a “right” to urban waste as a resource and as a commons. 

Rubbish belongs to the poor thus serves as a summative title for this study, as an analytical point 

of departure, and as a normative affirmation for author Patrick O’Hare. The ethnographic world 

depicted in the book is as the waste-pickers see and value it, and as the anthropologist validates 

through a “defen[s]e of waste as a category” (180), a counter-invective against hegemonic and 

even progressive visions of waste elimination, hygienic cities, and circular economies. 

 

Drawing from critical social theory and anarchist political leanings, this ethnographic study 

follows a long line of theorizing of, and fascination with, the urban poor, shantytown dwellers, the 

informal economy, and people living with and around garbage or waste. There is a particularly 

strong current of scholarship on these themes in Latin America, much of it cited by the author, but 

it is also more broadly reflected in the classic anthropological formulations of the “culture of 

poverty” (Oscar Lewis) or “matter out of place” (Mary Douglas), which have been used, and at 

times misappropriated, to interrogate both the internal sociocultural dynamics of so-called 

“marginalized” communities, as well as their role and place within the broader social order. The 

primary strength of Rubbish Belongs to the Poor, accompanying the work of others in the growing 

interdisciplinary field of “discard studies,” is in foregrounding the lived worlds and perspectives 

of these so-called marginalized people, and of centering and privileging the apparent marginalized 

spaces of urban informality as a taking off point, a staging ground from which to critically view 

and analyze society writ large. 



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The dominant, modern social order, what O’Hare refers to as “bourgeois infrastructural 

modernity,” posits informality as a pre-modern economic anomaly. According to this logic, trash 

is in need of scientific management, concealment, or ultimately elimination. The informal waste-

pickers who cohabitate with trash, consequently, are primary agents of urban disorder and even 

criminality. Waste, according to this dominant view, is inherently dirty, useless, and dangerous if 

left exposed. Waste-pickers, who sift through bins and dumps, often transporting their goods by 

horse and cart, embody vestiges of tradition and backwardness hindering the forward march of 

modernity. For a middle-income country like Uruguay nestled in the global South, these 

assumptions and understandings often take on politicized dimensions with almost existential 

undercurrents. Waste-pickers become positioned as both an uncomfortable mirror reflected 

internally, and an embarrassing postcard to the outside world. For instance, the proliferation of 

street waste-pickers, disparagingly referred to as hurgadores, or rummagers, during the years of 

profound economic crisis at the turn of the millennium, became symbols and metonyms of national 

crisis. At stake then are not just questions related to the political economy of disposal and 

recycling, but also the “moral economy” that judges the human character of pickers as individuals 

and as a social category (22). 

 

In Rubbish Belongs to the Poor, the protagonists- Montevideo’s clasificadores, or classifiers- 

come alive as fully fleshed subjects. Rather than matter out of place living in urban cultural 

enclaves of poverty, O’Hare demonstrates why and how exactly their lives matter, whether as 

crucial cogs in the local and global waste economy, as protagonists in the national labor movement, 

or as complex human characters with relatable needs and desires. His account thus avoids the 

stigmatizing narratives of the suffering subject that predominate in media and some scholarly 

accounts of the urban poor and the waste economy. After detailing an interlocutor’s memories of 

the dump as a place of children’s play, swimming, picking flowers, and other bucolic summer 

days, for instance, O’Hare concludes: “These images contrast sharply with the dystopian malaise 

of foul smells and creatures found in risk-based municipal and journalistic descriptions of dump 

sites” (64). 

 



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The author also depicts the intricate ways the lives of clasificadores are connected to local and 

global circuits of economic, political and symbolic capital. The book flips around the “waste-poor 

nexus” by highlighting a social world, “where rubbish is coveted rather than rejected, and where 

life is threatened by waste’s absence rather as opposed to its presence” (27). Urban waste, the 

symbolically stigmatized material substance which normative assumptions suggest no one wants, 

is instead subject to at times intensely disputed political claims between the urban clasificadores, 

the state, and private corporations. One of O’Hare’s central arguments is that the state attempts, 

often through public-private partnerships, to “enclose,” control and monopolize the urban disposal 

economy. Rather than accomplishing a hygienic modernity, he argues, the result is more often new 

forms of dispossession and capital accumulation that do little to ameliorate entrenched forms of 

social inequality. “Rubbish belongs to the poor” then is a rallying cry for the rights of the poor and 

the working class to the waste commons and through this to a means of livelihood, however 

complex and at times contradictory, that offers one of the few remaining avenues to evade the 

wage labor relationship and to “live freely” in a modern bureaucratic and stratified class society. 

 

A second, unique contribution of this book is O’Hare’s comparative approach between experiences 

in Uruguay and the UK. O’Hare draws from the perspective not only of formal economics or 

(post)colonial politics, but of the commoners and marginalized. Some of these comparisons, in a 

fascinating angle, are drawn from his personal experiences of “dumpster diving” as part of an 

activist community during his undergraduate studies at the University of St. Andrews. While 

recognizing the significant qualitative differences in relative depravation and motivation for waste 

scavenging in Uruguay versus Scotland, O’Hare nevertheless makes a compelling argument for 

comparison. As he states, the comparative approach recognizes a “common processes of enclosure 

in the global North and South that seek to restrain our access, and particularly that of vulnerable 

groups, to the excesses of production” (O’Hare 2022, 4).  

 

The book flows well and its chapters are logically structured around various “sites” of the waste 

economy. Chapter 1 provides a detailed history of Montevideo’s “wastescape,” including the 

centrality of the municipal government in turning private discard into public waste and thus 

enacting its earliest forms of political sovereignty, as well as changing strategies over time in the 



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development of legal and material infrastructures to classify, contain, or eliminate waste. This 

chapter introduces the concept of clasificadores as constituting a “shadow infrastructure,” central 

to the waste economy yet discursively and politically marginalized from it. The historical angle 

offers fascinating insight into the ways the volume and character of Montevideo’s waste and its 

various “technologies of enclosure” (51) change according to different political economic models, 

social democratic governments or military regimes, and evolving ideologies of public health and 

hygiene. While O’Hare observes that Uruguay’s long history of theorizing its modernity is usually 

not connected to waste, he nevertheless misses an opportunity here to engage more deeply with 

the vast Uruguayan historical literature on early twentieth century foundational myths of 

Uruguayan modernity and exceptionalism, and the growth of the hygienist public health movement 

in particular. 

 

Chapter 2 focuses on Felipe Cardoso, Montevideo’s largest landfill, referred to by clasificadores 

as the “Mother Dump.” Felipe Cardoso represents the ultimate hygienic enclosure where access to 

the waste is policed and restricted by authorities and local managers. O’Hare also shows how the 

landfill, or cantera, has parallels to the English commons and serves as a safety net for the jobless, 

the politically persecuted, or the addicted. It is also a refuge from low-paid wage labor and menial 

service sector jobs. He introduces in more detail the economies of survival and care embodied by 

requeche, the found items valued and used domestically (e.g. food, clothes, building materials) or 

those that become “recommodified” goods sold in informal urban markets. Chapter 3 focuses on 

the human relations of the waste commons, including practices of care and kinship. The sites 

focused on in this chapter include the municipal and NGO-run recycling cooperative, the family 

yard as a space of care, and the kin networks of what O’Hare refers to as the space of the “landfill 

brothers.” Here the author argues that access to waste is often based on pre-existing kinship bonds 

and is fused with acts of caregiving. 

 

I found Chapter 4 to be the most interesting and compelling, with rich ethnographic insight 

crystalizing several of the central analytical themes of the book. Here the focus is the Aries 

recycling plant, where clasificadores’ “value recovery practices ran parallel and in opposition to 

municipal risk-based approaches to waste” (119). The public-private partnership of the recycling 



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plant was welcomed by some clasificadores, particularly some of the women, but in practice the 

number of workers incorporated into uniformed, formal employment was relatively minimal. 

There were tensions from the beginning between plant managers and the unruly, hyper-masculine 

ethos of some of the workers. Another mismatch was over the ways managers tried to discipline 

clasificador labor into a Taylorian system, and in the prohibition of use of the horse-cart and the 

collection of requeche. O’Hare forcefully argues that authorities “misclassified” and infantilized 

workers by anticipating they would be happy with minimum wage formal work, not realizing what 

the workers were in fact sacrificing in terms of freedom, autonomy, and profits. The new forms of 

enclosure restricting requeche also violated longstanding practices and privileges associated with 

the waste commons.  

 

In Chapter 5, O’Hare turns attention to the labor practices and organizing of the waste-pickers 

trade union UCRUS. This trade union is unique in the world in that it is the only one to be affiliated 

with a national labor federation. UCRUS members struggled, however, to match their “mobile 

unionism” with the dominant “sedentary unionism” of the trade federation, as well as facing 

challenges in organizing among such a mobile and diverse urban population. The major struggles 

the trade union took on included efforts to resist or overturn prohibitions on circulation of horse-

and-cart classifiers in certain urban areas, laws prohibiting some businesses from supplying 

clasificadores directly, and multiple issues associated with the recycling plants. UCRUS unionists 

engaged in various forms of protest and a tactical repertoire of roadblocks, marches, and most 

interestingly, urban circulation itself as an affirmation of belonging. The latter reminded me of the 

much discussed and controversial moment during the leftist coalition Frente Amplio’s first 

ascension to power in 2005. Leading the procession were a handful of horse-and-cart 

clasificadores, who for the first time in history were afforded an officially sanctioned, public 

opportunity to enact their presence in urban space. 

 

Rubbish Belongs to the Poor is a fascinating and provocative ethnography. It will be of direct 

interest to scholars and students of discard studies, but also broadly of Latin American, urban, and 

environmental studies. The book is both theoretically sophisticated and highly readable, making it 



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suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses, and its reflexivity and immersive 

ethnography could be of interest in ethnographic methods courses.  

 

Daniel Renfrew is Professor of Anthropology at West Virginia University. He is the author of 
Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (University of California 
Press). Daniel.Renfrew@mail.wvu.edu 

 

 

 

© 2023 Daniel Renfrew 

 


