With checkered hats and colorful clothes, and carrying heavy pushcarts full of recyclable waste, the Ed Jais of Cambodia are the key figures in Kathrin Eitel's Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh. In the book, Eitel explores the role, dynamic, and practices of the Ed Jais (waste pickers/waste collectors) in Cambodia and identifies an emerging practice within a complex waste network that the author labels infracycles. Eitel explains how the work of the Ed Jais contests the global capitalist system through their labor autonomy, freedom, and will to survive. The author traces the flow of recyclables collected by Ed Jais along the waste supply chains and uncovers how Cambodia is exploited as a global waste sink while at the same time challenging some of the dominant “waste fantasies” around solving the waste crisis pushed both by international and local actors (e.g., policymakers)...

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