Greetings from Wasteland, USA!
Core vs. Periphery
America’s underclass of undocumented workers, Native peoples, and other impoverished peoples function as exploited outsiders contained by what is called “the Core.” The Core relies on functioning advanced technologies, so it designs systems to produce them. Though designed in the Core, these production systems are built in the ‘periphery.’ The periphery is called that because it is considered peripheral — minor, beside the point, irrelevant. This parasitic relationship further impoverishes and under-develops the periphery through coerced participation in the global capitalist economy. In the periphery, slavery is not a deviation from the norm, it is designated and regulated through the demands of the ‘Core.’
During 20th century united states, supervision of the growing Black and brown populations became more difficult as people gained more legal freedoms. Other forms of economic control emerged: bail, fines, and other legal fees became the basis of what is now the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC). The core-periphery idea illustrates the relationship between low-income areas within the united states & the u.s. PIC, itself: slavery and coerced labor exist as a means of social control. The State itself continues to produce a labor surplus by utilizing underpaid prison labor.
The strength of the core state is dependent upon the weakness of the periphery. So, the u.s. Government wages a War on Drugs and puts hyper-militarized police in Black and brown communities to terrorize and crush all mutual aid efforts for community revitalization. The global Prison-Industrial Complex is supported by the us military. The us polices and punishes Black and brown people across the globe simply because that’s the only way to maintain carceral capitalism (the system that allows such cheap labor)–through maintenance of a Core and a Periphery.
Environmental Racism
The united states was built on policies to manage the location of non-white people. Redlining, which restricted Black access to credit, kept property ownership in white hands and to this day is responsible for much of the racial wealth gap. This practice isn’t historically suspended, though. It is one of the products of the legacy of racialized waste and racist waste distribution practices in the united states. These practices pushed waste and pollution of developing industry into immigrant and Black neighborhoods and communities. These same communities were already considered socially “dirty” in contrast to “pure whiteness.”
In the united states, proximity to ‘trash’ (objects and people) has had a historically negative correlation with proximity to whiteness– the embodiment of social and economic success. The us waste-management system is inseparable from the prison system: incarcerated labor is legalized racial slavery, and waste facility placement is determined according to neighborhood racial and class makeup. White supremacy is enacted in part by regulatory non-compliance on the part of large-scale polluting enterprises–prisons, oil and gas industries, the united states military– who systematically choose to disregard laws in place as protections of human health and the environment.
“[Prisons] function like a small city packed into one building” [1]. Like any monstrously-large, unsustainable city in the United States, prisons import goods using fossil fuels and export waste and slave labor. In the US, many prisons produce waste and pollution far beyond local and federal limits. Prisons are overcrowded hotbeds of easily transmittable diseases — they create health hazards for the inmates, staff, local wildlife and nearby communities. In 2006, the Associated Press reported that Alabama correctional facilities were dumping human waste, toxic chemicals, and other raw sewage into state waterways at twice the legal limit.
Toxic Waste
Prisons across the country are built close to toxic incinerators or on top of toxic landfills. They are built upon corporate lies, promising economic prosperity and jobs to the nearby community. However, those benefits rarely come to fruition. At least in rural Californian towns, researcher Ruth Wilson Gilmore found that an average of less than a fifth of prison jobs actually go to current residents [1]. These communities, burdened by poverty, unemployment, and a lack of political power may choose to accept hazardous facilities — but only because they absolutely have to. Exploited people are expected to not fight back against the concentration of military power in the hands of their oppressors and commitment to the cause. White americans are taught that their well-being is wrapped up in the maintenance of military and cultural dominance. That is, the expansion of prisons and further separation from their own waste.
Somebody Else’s Problem
Since 2018, the year China stopped accepting the world’s recycled waste, local governments have been under fire for using prison labor to cut costs and corners in local recycling programs and other public services [1]. Before 2018, it was completely legal for corporations — including private prisons — to export waste to the Global South for much cheaper than disposing of it properly in the US. US companies once mixed one thousand tons of hazardous waste into a shipment of fertilizer sold to Bangladesh [2]. In another example, US companies attempted to convince the Marshall Islands that imported wastes “could be used to build up landmass” and ensure that islands wouldn’t be vulnerable to increases in sea level expedited by global warming (of which the US is heavily responsible).
As for “recycling,” international trade deregulation policies still allow for the shipping of post- consumer products like batteries, cell phones, heavy metals, e-wastes, and lead to be shipped to southeast Asia for disposal.
- https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling
- Faber, Daniel. 2008. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
