A labor of disassembly: Waste labor and embodied knowledge in China's circular economy

This article examines waste labor in relation to contemporary projects of green capitalism, specifically China's pursuit of the circular economy and the development of ecological cities. The circular economy repositions waste not as disposable matter but as a resource frontier, proposing its reintegration back into systems of production. China's adoption of the circular economy signals a shift in how waste is conceptualized at the center of the state's vision of green growth. Drawing on recent writings on the role of circulation and logistics and efforts to remake waste into a site of extraction, I consider the ways in which the labor of informal scrap collectors constitutes an infrastructure of disassembly, creating a network of reverse logistics to facilitate economies of recuperation and reproduction. I show how material practices of waste labor represent a continuity between past and present state projects of material recuperation from the Maoist period to new ecological cities. In China's emerging “green cities,” the recuperation of scrap matter is facilitated by a labor of disassembly—an affective and embodied social labor that relies on collectors’ keen and embodied knowledge of scrap matter and on their ability to cultivate horizontal social relations in the city.