Living on Trash: Wasted Identities and Wasted Bodies among Belgrade’s Ashkali and Romani Trash-pickers

Abstract

Amid global economic restructuring and increasing precarity, more and more people are reusing and reselling discarded commodities. For Ashkali and Romani refugees living in Belgrade’s informal settlements, trash work is essential for survival. Clothing, building materials, and food are all sourced from dumpsters, as is cardboard, plastic, and metal, which are sold to recycling corporations for cash. Trash-picking is not simply an economic strategy; it requires negotiating a complex social, political, and material environment. Following Ashkali and Roma as they collect and recycle trash from city dumpsters, this article argues that waste is not simply a livelihood, or means of survival, but rather a process through which people and places become wasted. Through trash, Ashkali and Roma are consigned to living in substandard settlements, made to assume a series of stigmatized identities, and left vulnerable to the structures of global capitalism, and the debilitation of their bodies.