Beyond the clean city paradox: Environmental casteism in women's informal waste labor in urban Bangladesh

Abstract

Urban sustainability in the Global South substantially depends on informal labor regimes that remain socially marginalized and politically invisible. In Bangladesh, approximately 400,000 grassroots waste workers, disproportionately from Dalit communities, recycle significant amounts of municipal solid waste, yet face systemic exclusion rooted in caste-based stigma, class-based poverty, and gender oppression. This study investigates how intersectional vulnerabilities produce certain bodies as “environmental outcasts” and how environmental justice principles can guide more equitable urban governance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 35 women waste workers, six policy officials, and three academics and utilizing Crenshaw's intersectionality and Schlosberg's multidimensional environmental justice frameworks, the analysis reveals three interconnected mechanisms of exclusion: (1) spatial abjection, where caste-based stigma produces interactional segregation from public spaces; (2) embodied precarity, where gendered oppression and economic survival constrain health, mobility, and agency; and (3) recognition injustice, where institutional neglect naturalizes workers’ invisibility in policy discourse. The paper extends the concept of environmental casteism to Bangladesh's Muslim-majority context, demonstrating how purity-pollution logics transcend religious boundaries to sustain occupational segregation. It distinguishes environmental casteism from environmental racism by foregrounding embodied, mobile stigma over residential geography. Thereby, this research contributes to critical waste studies and anti-caste environmental scholarship, offering a framework for reimagining urban sustainability in the Global South. The study concludes with concrete policy recommendations, that prioritize justice-centered governance over technocratic formalization, both for the short term (provide minimum wage, protective equipment, identity cards) and the long term (organize women-led cooperatives, educational scholarships, vocational training).