The world has a pollution problem, and different countries around the world all have different ways of dealing with this problem. But Delhi, India has a system of informal waste collection that other countries could learn from, says UC Santa Barbara Sociology professor Dana Kornberg. 

In Delhi, waste collection is managed by “informal workers” who are not employed by the government. Instead of everyone pulling their green, blue, and brown plastic bins to their sidewalk every Thursday night for Friday morning collection, informal workers collect all waste and do their own sorting. They sell whatever materials they can salvage to make their living. 

How does this system of waste management affect how cities operate, how workers organize, and how local economies run?

Kornberg explores this topic in her new book, The Garbage Economy: Caste Capitalism and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Delhi, which won the 2025 Joseph W. Elder Book Prize in Social Sciences from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and is set to publish in 2026. The project started as her dissertation when she was pursuing her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She recently sat down for an interview.

What is The Garbage Economy about? 


It is about the politics around waste in Delhi in the last two decades. It raises these questions of urban development around how infrastructures will be set up and managed. For a long time, most of the door-to-door household waste collection in Delhi was done by informal workers. They're not paid by a company, they're not employed by the city. They don't generally pay taxes, they don't have any worker protections. It's all off the books, but it’s organized. There's a mutual recognition of customary rights.

There is no municipal system like we have here, like a city recycling program. Instead, the government was introducing new programs, which are public-private partnerships, where the local government was forming these new entities along with preparations to introduce multimillion dollar garbage collection programs that included mechanized trucks instead of push carts that the informal workers use. They have truck-based collections, and they're building really large waste to energy facilities or incinerators. There are about five of them in the city. The book is looking at how the informal recycler managed to continue working and why they're still there today. This system, which I think of as an economy, is very much tied up with social relations based on caste.

How did the project start?

This project started when I was living and working in Delhi because I was able to get to know people and see what was going on in debates over urban development that were happening there at that time. I came to understand that garbage collection was a contentious issue for this city. It was not only important because of the engineering side of things, but what do we do with all of this trash that we're producing? 

What will readers find surprising in your book?

When we think of recycling in the United States, it's a very moralized activity, and there's a long history to that. That has a lot to do with manufacturers, trying to make us responsible for waste instead of them taking responsibility for waste. Ultimately, it's seen as a virtuous thing if we recycle as individuals. I thought it was really interesting when I was researching this project that middle class people in Delhi didn't think that there was any recycling that happened there because they saw recycling as something that was only done in places like the United States, where you have bins and separate things. Their system doesn't have anything like that, but their recycling grades are actually substantially higher than in the US. I think it's important to think about how environmental practice is not the same thing as environmental commitments. Like sometimes there are better environmental practices even without that commitment to environmentalism. 


What is the Joseph W. Elder Prize? 


It's from the American Institute of Indian Studies, which is the main convener of scholarship on India in the United States. They have two prizes each, one is for humanities, one is for social sciences. They recognize a pre-published book, and so this one was unusual because they asked for a manuscript before the book was actually published. I think it's important because it's an interdisciplinary group of people. I'm a sociologist and there aren't a lot of sociologists who work in India. It's really challenging to say something that's going to matter to both sociologists and South Asian scholars who are typically in other fields. One person who reviewed my manuscript told me they're in literature, so it was really meaningful for me just that it was valued by people who have different disciplinary backgrounds and thought my argument stood up and made an important contribution. 

What advice do you have for other researchers in your field? 


Academia is really, really slow. I submitted a draft of my manuscript last year in May and I didn't get reviews back until December. Be aware of that and cultivate patience and trust in your process. I think a lot of graduate students get told they should be writing every day and if you're not, you're never going to be a good researcher. This is not true. Everyone works differently, and that’s okay. You can always keep working on any piece of writing forever and always. At some point, you have to put it out into the world. It’s important to be able to accept the fact that you're probably not going to hit perfection in your own mind and that's okay. 

Claire Trask is a third-year English major at UCSB. She is the Literature Editor for The Catalyst Literary Arts Magazine on campus.