At the crossroads of environmental and housing justice: options, opportunities, and challenges for household waste diversion in a diverse community


Lisa Kowalchuk, University of Guelph

Since participation tracking began for household recycling and waste reduction programs, multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) were seen to lag far behind single-family dwellings in their waste diversion rates. This paper identifies and investigates the challenges faced by residents of high-rise buildings in their efforts to increase rates of waste source streaming and waste reduction, and to improve overall recycling practices. Our focus is on renters in a diverse, densely populated, high-rise based community in the downtown east of Toronto, where the proportion of racialized immigrants and newcomers is high, and where most buildings date back to the 1970s. We also explore whether the barriers and opportunities differ between privately owned and rent-subsidized city-owned properties. Our study is framed by literature pertaining to class and environmentalism, the political economy of housing conditions, and environmental justice. Within the scholarship on household waste in MURBs, some analysts observe a popular assumption that renters, especially those in subsidized housing, are unconcerned with recycling and waste diversion. Such thinking finds a parallel in a contested but still extant theory in international development studies that low income correlates with environmentally destructive behaviour; the poor are said to be compelled by everyday survival needs and subsistence crises to consume in an extractive and polluting way. Further, in affluent country urban contexts, environmental and climate activism remains largely a white and bourgeois phenomenon, with little presence of newcomer, immigrant, racialized, and low-income groups. Martins (2016) challenges classist assumptions about renters and environmental values, arguing that for all high-rise dwellers, not just those of low income, the decisive factors for waste reduction are those under the control of building management, particularly infrastructural accessibility, informational clarity, and convenience of segregated waste disposal. To this we would add the policy context: governments play a role in incentivizing private landlords to shape the ease of waste sorting, and in funding robust and ongoing education of tenants. If renter-predominant communities cannot avail themselves of the means for diverting recyclables, organics, bulky and hazardous waste as easily as residents of condos and single-family dwellings, this is an aspect of environmental justice. This dimension of the issue is all the more pronounced for rentals where many live with disabilities and mental health struggles as is the case with subsidized housing. In collaboration with a community hub organization called the St. James Town Community Corner, we collected data through two main methods. One, a mixed modal survey of residents in two rental high-rises (n=103) and secondly, observations and insights from lived experience shared by teams of resident participant-collaborators. Resident collaborator teams will use study results to develop action plans for improving waste practises in their buildings. A key finding is that while many residents understand household waste as an environmental issue for the society and planet, they also experience mismanaged and poorly maintained disposal as a dimension of the aesthetics, health, hygiene and safety of their immediate surroundings. In other words, it becomes part of the housing conditions and quality of life, making waste a housing justice issue. We also find that waste diversion and reduction are a high-priority concern among study participants, but that they are constrained by inconvenient, unsafe, unwieldy or entirely absent infrastructure, and an informational void about what goes where. Underlying this are landlords’ under-investment in supporting better practises, and an unhelpful provincial policy regime governing the waste practises of MURB owners. For example, landlords that use private waste haulers are not compelled to collect organics separately. We suggest that the values and insights found in this dense community of renters are an untapped opportunity for provincial and municipal governments to reach the ambitious goals they have set for greenhouse gas reduction through waste diversion.

Non-presenting authors: Trisha Einmann, University of Guelph; Aravind Joseph, St. James Town Community Corner; Alaa Mohamed, St. James Town Community Corner

This paper will be presented at the following session: