In January 2025, 75,000 people watched the music group Coldplay perform in Mumbai and left behind more than 9,000 kilogrammes of waste: Mostly plastic bottles and food wrappers. While the city had devised a detailed action plan — strategically placed bins and multiple vehicles to collect trash during the concert — these efforts did not stave off the nine tonnes.
This generated criticism towards elite consumption behaviour: One man’s entertainment, another’s drudgery. While fair and perhaps necessary, this argument risks obscuring a dirtier truth: Concert-goers did not start the waste problem. Even before Coldplay’s hymns reached our shores, various stakeholders — including municipal authorities — had produced a colossal mass of waste in the event’s planning and execution.
Globetrotting musicians and record-breaking online ticket sales make kingdoms of plastic. But this is common to waste management, proliferating garbage and the solutions for it are commonly framed as problems of the individual. In her book A Public Sociology of Waste, Myra Hird argues that this insidious framing distracts us from the capitalist machinery that views waste as an ‘entrepreneurial opportunity’.
At barely 100 pages, Hird’s book is tiny, but its ideas are weighty. Her anger at corporate manipulation is clear, and so is her deftness with waste studies, having worked on it for more than two decades. The anecdotes are precise. Fitting. Hard-hitting. Secondary tidbits are informative and place Hird in conversation with experts like Lepawsky (on electronic waste) and Liboiron (on solutions and recycling). The six chapters are not always distinguishable — the chapter on COVID-19 feels random — but overall, the argument is clear: Individualism will be our ruin.
At the heart of the book is the age-old myth of recycling as a solution. Hird unpacks it with fury, fact and the careful simplicity of a primary schoolteacher. Her argument is direct: Plastic is oil; its demise in a landfill is rarer than its manufacturers would care to admit.
This lie by omission is deliberate, to protect their finances: Plastic is a money-spinner. Oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil depend on it to offset their losses in other sectors.
Public communication around recycling is deracinated from this background, painting the misconception that it protects the environment, when it benefits the industry more. For instance, in 2017, scientists estimated that only 9 per cent of the total plastics ever produced in the world — around 8,300 million tonnes — had been recycled. The narrative allows companies the moral license to avoid more meaningful accountability.
Sometimes, this is a literal license, like waivers under provisions like corporate social responsibility. On an individual level, such framing creates a bubble for conscientious consumers, who are likely to feel that buying ‘green goods’ and recycling are solutions enough, often drawing them to an environmentalism that is exclusionary and righteous, running on the moral economy of such ideas rather than material realities. Recycling is a marketing trick, not magic. Poof, the waste is still there.
Myra Hird ushers us towards a nuanced solution. She says that the problem lies in how governments and companies — dominant stakeholders — frame ‘waste’ as a resource or an individual problem and not as a social justice issue. To do this, Hird says that she is going to draw from the sub-discipline of ‘public sociology’ — which enlarges sociology’s boundaries to encourage community dialogue on social issues — and ‘framing studies’, a theoretical approach that examines how communication constructs a public issue. The disciplinary inter-mingling is not always clear, but the attempt to make claims from the aftermath of toxic colonialism is sometimes pure and endearing, even if occasionally underdeveloped.
For most of us, the problem can often feel insurmountable, less technical with paths left and more the work of grief, of mourning. Foraging for hope when industries swamp our world with waste can feel like a fool’s errand.
Manufacturing things requires a lot of energy and waste. Companies and governments divert attention away from these sources, focusing instead on post-consumption waste.
Recycling has thus offered a hopeful, riveting story: That what we make and refuse can have another life. It begs to be believed. Sometimes, realism and cautious pessimism are useful; they can help us be hopeful in a meaningful way.
At its core, ‘framing’ is storytelling. It is important because the power relations between key stakeholders determine which stories get told, how problems are seen and which solutions are chosen. Thus, reframing waste from a social-justice point of view — as opposed to an individual consumption or energy perspective — could allow us to see the disproportionate damage that oil and gas industries cause, how they slyly push the burdens onto individuals.
Globally, waste management is usually arranged as a municipal (or village-level) issue, but a large part of it is also governed through international treaties. Often, the scenarios across scales — local versus international — can seem disconnected.
But many problems that seem like the domain of local administrations are connected to larger networks, of capital and oil. Overgrown landfills can look like a local issue, whose solutions are linked to poor garbage infrastructure and what is considered environmentally immoral behaviour, like overuse of non-recyclable products.
Hird points out that the world cannot be rescued from plastic by controlling the individual. Her book, which is mostly about North America, tries to capture the need for global and transnational conversations. A good example is her critique of the United States, which, despite being one of the largest waste producers and dumpers in the world, often promotes environmental responsibility through recycling while resisting global agreements like the Global Plastics Treaty.
In December 2024, after two years of negotiations, United Nations member states failed to come to a consensus on the ‘Global Plastics Treaty’. In particular, ‘major oil-producing countries’ — like the US, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Canada, as well as many countries in the Global South — could not agree on the extent to which they wanted to limit the production of primary plastic polymers — the raw materials that make plastic products — or ban avoidable plastic goods.
These are key obstacles to ending plastic pollution, especially considering most plastic production is concentrated in a few companies based in these countries. There is thus a need for collective action not only between different countries but among people’s movements across regions, to hold both companies and nations accountable.
Returning to Coldplay for a moment, is it useful then to altogether refuse to engage in individual actions? To never litter, to never purchase plastic bottles — are these worthwhile environmental choices?
For Hird, these individual actions are useful only when they meet the macro targets: When people who claim to be environmentally conscious join collectives that protest, petition governments against multinational companies and participate in green policies — even when such membership is not sought or well-received by the state and capital — to boycott, divest, sanction, even when the journey home is difficult, repetitive and long.
Hird’s position is agreeable, but perhaps not practical given that consciousness and guilt can drive many individuals towards politics. Maybe it is helpful, therefore, to look at individual acts as sparks of realisation, as rollover stops — not as ends or even as means, but nevertheless useful for movements whose unit is still a caring people.
Barathi Nakkeeran is a PhD Fellow at Université Paris Cité studying waste related labour in South Asia. She recently finished an MPhil from the University of Oxford (Faculty of Law), where her work focused on waste in colonial Madras.