Green neoliberalism: Recycling and sustainable urban development in Sekondi-Takoradi

• Recycling in Africa is part of a broader process of global change towards marketising the environment.
• The process is caught in a web of contradictions, socially, environmentally, and economically.
• Recycling for profit is fundamentally inconsistent with sustainable urban development.
• These findings arise from a case study of plastic waste recycling in West Africa.

Sustainable development has been embraced by neoliberalism in the form of marketising the environment in a ‘green way’. While political economists have considered this movement in terms of the emissions trading scheme and other price based mechanisms posited as solutions to global environmental crises, the particular nature of such discourses at the urban level in Africa is not well understood. Using primary data from Sekondi-Takoradi, a mid-size city in West Africa, this paper demonstrates the origin, nature, problems and contradictions in this form of green neoliberalism. It argues that the tenets and approaches of sustainable urban development are fundamentally inconsistent with green metropolitan neoliberalism. In turn, it is highly unlikely that, recycling, a medium of ‘marketising the environment to save it’, can provide a sustainable solution to the plastic waste glut, engendered by the private provision of urban water.