Racializing Recycling: Environmental Politics of White Expatriates in Postcolonial Singapore

ABSTRACT This paper examines how European expatriates in Singapore assert white supremacy through a sense of environmental superiority when comparing local recycling practices with those of their home countries. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how white expatriates deploy recycling to racialize Singaporean waste practices, depicting it as (i) a throwaway society where residents handle waste irresponsibly, (ii) a place with primitive infrastructure that must be civilized, and (iii) a society lacking environmental awareness. Bringing critical race theory into dialogue with discard studies, I shift attention from proximity to waste as producing marginality to the racialization of distanced waste handling, showing how ideas of dirt and waste generate new forms of race‐making in postcolonial contexts. I further argue that the racialization is a product of white environmentality's encounter with postcolonial difference, and that the framework of “authoritarian environmentalism” fails to capture the complexity of contamination of household recycling in Singapore.