An army of bulldozers is currently in the process of leveling a portion of one of Africa’s largest waste dumps. The Mbeubeuss dump has been the sole repository for household waste in Dakar, Senegal, since 1968 and now sprawls across 115 hectares—a 70-foot-high mountain of refuse just a stone’s throw from Dakar’s bucolic coastline. Mbeubeuss has employed thousands of people for decades and is at the heart of a sophisticated recycling economy. Officially, around 2000 people currently earn their livelihoods there. They are now anxious about the future as a World Bank-funded government project to close the dump gathers steam. The vast majority will lose their jobs as waste picking is outlawed in the coming months or year. The scene unfolding in Dakar is not unique; shuttering open-air dumps is a fraught approach to modernizing cities worldwide. The waste pickers of Dakar join in a chorus of global waste picker groups resisting dispossession and asserting their role in alternative environmental futures.

The particular area that is currently being cleared is known as Gouye Gi or “Baobab tree,”  the oldest settlement on the dump. This is generally the territory of the waste pickers from Dakar, many of whom have been working at Mbeubeuss for 40 or 50  years. Even though the project to transform the dump has been underway for a few years, the process has been extremely tense, and the waste pickers have major concerns about how it is unfolding. Eliminating waste picking and enclosing recycling economies will be devastating to the tens of thousands of people who rely on revenue from the dump. The proposed diversion of food waste to a composting center would be especially catastrophic for the minority Christian women who collect food waste on the dump to feed their pigs and the whole nearby neighborhood that survives on the pork economy.

Though they support efforts to remediate the dump’s negative impacts and scale up recycling operations, the waste pickers of Mbeubeuss are mounting a politics of refusal to be erased by what they consider to be a grab of resources they hold in common and value they have constructed over decades. Their long-running association, Bokk Diom (“Shared Dignity” in Wolof), is organizing to legitimize their expertise and stake claims to a dump future that is both good for the environment and the working poor. They have formed a workers’ cooperative and labor union to earn legal recognition and have mounted a series of protests. Their rally in May 2023 stopped all trucks from entering Mbeubeuss, bringing waste management in the capital city to a standstill. Then, a group of youngsters formed a new group at the start of 2025 called “Mbeubeuss Gaza” and refused to move as the state began clearing their settlements. In February, seventeen waste pickers were arrested in a scuffle with the police that involved tear gas being used against waste pickers. The police were able to scare them away, and the area was cleared for the construction taking place right now, but it’s only a matter of time before there are more acts of refusal.

This struggle over the controversial closure of Dakar’s waste dump is the subject of my recently released documentary film, The Waste Commons. The film was produced in close collaboration with Bokk Diom and Sarita West of Alchemy Films, and draws on my ethnographic research at the dump since 2016. At the heart of the film and the waste pickers’ movement are Adja and Zidane, two charismatic waste pickers who are emerging as leaders contesting the erasure of their community. Adja is a divorced mother from Dakar specializing in plastics. Zidane, who hails from the country’s interior, supports his two families through sales of used shoes. They represent the central demographics at the dump—the urban poor rendered superfluous to the city’s growth engines and the rural poor fleeing collapsing agricultural economies bearing the brunt of environmental change. Both are finding their voice in arguing for their rights to waste within the tense negotiations surrounding the future of their very way of life. In Adja’s words, “Waste has given me an honorable life. If they were to close the dump today, I would be in despair.” Adja and Zidane’s testimonies reflect the paradoxes of urban marginality, where the urban poor have no other choice but to carve out a livelihood through other people’s waste. They both find deep solace in their spirituality and solidarity with other waste pickers, and they take enormous pride in their work as environmental stewards.

It is estimated that two percent of urban residents in developing countries forge livelihoods through waste picking. As the chasm widens between the rich and the poor and the production of waste expands exponentially, the reliance of the global poor on recycling is intensifying. In the era of climate crisis, many of the world’s poor, displaced by environmental change, find refuge in recycling economies, which also mitigate the negative effects of breakneck consumption. However, despite providing important environmental services, waste pickers are often treated as disposable. The story of the Mbeubeuss waste pickers is a story that is unfolding all over the world.

Wastescapes across the global North and South are emerging as new commodity frontiers and targets of enclosure and dispossession as more powerful actors attempt to grab the value forged by informal recyclers. Long a reviled space of refuge for the city’s most marginalized, Mbeubeuss is now a key target in the pursuit of modernist development in Senegal. With all recyclables diverted to the state-owned facilities, sorting and recycling contracts will likely go to big international waste management companies, like has been the case in other settings—including, perhaps most famously, in Cairo. Given the dearth of substantive proposals to remediate the dump’s impact on the neighboring environment, the upgrade appears as just the latest element of a bourgeois environmental agenda that is aimed at serving the city’s elites and tourist economy more than making real environmental improvements or serving the poor. It begs the question: Is there a vision of urban modernization that is not a bulldozer to the poor and their vibrant informal economies?

As we travel across the dump and beyond with these waste pickers in the film, we see how, as Zidane puts it, “Mbeubeuss is a mirror of the city.” Far from a realm of chaos, the dump is an organized archive of Senegal’s postcolonial history and the waste pickers its careful archivists, cataloging, translating, and making valuable the afterlives of urban living. The rhetoric of state and World Bank officials in fancy office buildings, celebrating how the remodeled dumpsite will serve as a model for “promoting ecological tourism,” is contrasted with waste picker strategy sessions hammered out in dusty shacks on top of the garbage mountain. Adja, Zidane, and their colleagues travel internationally to network with other waste pickers and contribute to discussions regarding the global plastics treaty.

Along the way, they learn of inspiring battles that are being waged—and won—all over the world by waste pickers to defend their rights to the waste commons. For instance, reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa, were able to retain their right to recycling economies through a legal battle they won against the Johannesburg Council. In Montevideo, Uruguay, waste pickers (clasificadores) have made significant progress in defending their rights to waste and improving their working conditions through cooperatives and union organizing. For their part, Mbeubeuss waste pickers continue to assert their proposal for a different future of Mbeubeuss that would honor their expertise, protect their bodies and communities from harm, and, rather than replace their labor with machines, scale up their recycling operations.

At the end of the day, will Dakar’s dump closure provide a model for how to integrate waste pickers into the modernization of the city, or another catastrophic example of treating the poor as disposable?