Producing abjection: E-waste improvement schemes and informal recyclers of Bangalore

•Informal recyclers' contributions to urban sustainability.•Informal recyclers as the abject other of formal recyclers.•Bourgeois environmentalism of e-waste experts.•Informal recyclers' lived experience of abjection.•Informal recyclers a part of “slow classes” that must claim “second class” e-waste.

This article focuses upon informal e-waste recyclers who subsidise the environmental costs of Bangalore's information technology boom. It illustrates how improvement schemes devised by development agencies, to make Bangalore's e-waste disposal practices more sustainable, reproduced the effects of bourgeois environmentalism and effectively cast off informal recyclers from having a substantial role in the city's emerging regime of e-waste management. Being cast out and rendered superfluous has been a deeply degrading experience for Bangalore's informal recyclers. In order to foreground this experience I draw upon the notion of abjection and show how informal recyclers are constituted as abject residents who must be confined to collecting and processing waste from the most marginal frontiers of the city's e-waste circuits.