In this interview, Elana Resnick reflects on the evolution of her research on recycling and waste in Bulgaria. She highlights the longer historical contexts shaping what counts as waste and critiques the relationship between capitalism and the fantasy of “zero waste.”

Dana McLachlin (DM): Can you share a little about the development of this project and how you came to research recycling and waste in Bulgaria?

Elana Resnick (ER): I began research in Bulgaria in 2003 as an undergraduate at Haverford College. I received a small grant from the college while taking a linguistics class on endangered languages. I read about how speakers of the Romani language (Romanes) in parts of Eastern Europe were being discriminated against—placed in segregated “special schools” and labeled with learning disabilities simply for speaking what the state called “jargon.” I decided to volunteer at an organization in the region working on Romani education issues.

I sent a query to a listserv and received dozens of responses. It was important for me to support a Romani-run organization, and one based in Sofia, Bulgaria, stood out. I went to Bulgaria that summer, and the people leading that organization became some of my closest friends—and later, long-term interlocutors and co-theorists.

I went to graduate school intending to study how Romani civil society activists and leaders were looking beyond Bulgaria (to the United States, India, and the rest of Europe) to legitimize their activism at home. But by the time I returned to Bulgaria in 2007—six months after Bulgaria joined the European Union (EU)—many of the civil society organizations I intended to work with were facing severe funding cuts and staffing shortages. EU accession shifted funding from direct private donors to EU structural funds, funneled through Bulgaria’s increasingly right-wing national government. Access to resources for Romani communities thus became increasingly limited, and my planned fieldsite largely disappeared. Practically, this left me without a place to go every day.

I decided to take some time to read books, mostly fiction. One day, while reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in Sofia’s City Garden and thinking about my project, I noticed that most of the women sweeping the streets around the park were speaking Romanes. As I thought about the role of Romani people in public space and Bulgarian political life, I was witnessing that Romani women were organizing on city streets in ways that were part of a very racialized labor sector but seemed also to be a potential source of collaboration and solidarity. From there, I began to think more about waste and its labor.

Every time I started to chat with the sweepers, they looked around and whispered that they were on the job and couldn’t be seen talking to me. They knew that their positions were precarious, and they were rightly worried. I understood their concerns about workplace surveillance and knew that it would be easier and less problematic for them if I was working alongside them. So that’s when I began asking for a job as a sweeper. I discuss this extensively in my book (Resnick 2025), but the short story is that nobody wanted to hire me because the higher-ups at the waste firms considered me “too white” and “too American” to clean streets. Eventually, through years of networking and saying yes to basically every opportunity that came my way, I found someone who would hire me as a sweeper on a part-time contract. I realized I also needed to understand the waste sector from both the top-down and bottom-up. I started talking to waste consultants, recycling firm managers, and eventually got an internship at the Bulgarian Ministry of the Environment and Water.

DM: The article theorizes containability as a “realm of human-waste relations predicated on the aspirational goal of boundedness and its everyday disruptions” (219). Containability emerges within multiple, overlapping paradoxes; the impossible yet aspirational containment of waste mirrors the project of Europeanization, which depends on yet criminalizes Romani labor, as well as the paradox of waste valuable enough to steal. Can you explain a little what gives containability its “paradoxical core” (220)? Why, despite its impossibility and constant disruption, does the fantasy of containability persist?

ER: Containability is essentially, like the European project, a liberal fantasy. In the case I discuss, containability is an aspirational idea that waste can be controlled or contained. It is the idea that trash and the people who manage it can be kept out of sight, yet its persistence depends upon ongoing disruptions of it. Its aspirational, never-realized status is maintained by pushback by those who perform the necessary labor of European Union-mandated waste management and are, at the same time, racialized as disposable and imagined to be outside of true “Europeanness.”

Containability is a fantasy of material and social boundedness—that people who collect waste, racialized as nonwhite, can be sequestered out of white purview. This is the racial logic that underpins my analysis of containment and mirrors the logics of Europeanization as well. The idea of “containability” thus involves a literal and figurative attempt to manage both material waste and marginalized groups. But its realization is impossible precisely because of those who refuse to be contained.

DM: I’m curious about your fieldwork methods for studying the movement and containment of waste; you note you “consider this tension between flow and stasis methodologically” as well as analytically (222). Did you find you had to adjust your methods to follow this flow and stasis? Were there any specific challenges you faced, or methodological pivots you had to make?

ER: I did have to adjust my methods for this project. I was following waste, though not in the traditional follow-the-object sense. I was looking at objects and their pathways through use, consumption, discard, recycling, repurposing, but without a distinct linearity. This meant that my research involved a networked approach to waste in which I would explore different nodes in multiple directions, looking at how different actors thought about and materially engaged with waste in particular moments and places in the network. This also meant I did not give all aspects of the network equal attention because so much of my method was reliant on ethnographic serendipity. This research taught me how much is really beyond our control as researchers, in so many ways. I researched various aspects of the network, depending on my changing kinds of access. It also depended on what was happening politically in Bulgaria, which influenced who could and wanted to talk about what, in which ways, and at what times.

For example, I lingered on consumer packaging in this article. As a node in the waste networks I was interested in, I would look at the flowcharts and diagrams related to consumer packaging, from production to post-use recycling. But, between phases of production and post-use recycling, there are many ruptures to the idealized, imagined flow. While there are systems and targets in place to provide the premise of a flow, imagined through the lens of European “greening,” what happens in practice is a mix of movement and stasis. Consumer packaging mostly doesn’t end up in the color-coded bins intended to promote flow and so there needs to be an extra step: dumpster-site sorting, done mostly by Romani waste collectors (kloshari). Then the idea was that the packaging from the color-coded bins would go to an official waste sorting facility but most of the time it ends up, via kloshari labor on horse-carts or on foot, at communist-era recycling points where it can sit in storage for weeks or months.

Methodologically, my biggest challenge throughout the project was access. I found my uneven, haphazard access to waste company CEOs and higher-up corporate executives to be the biggest wildcard. It also became especially hard to access multiple spaces in the same time-frame, partly because it was so uncommon for anyone to move from spending their time sweeping streets and collecting waste with kloshari to conducting interviews in government or corporate offices. I had to constantly reassure the higher-ups at the waste firms that I was indeed not surreptitiously filming them for a reality TV show, as many suspected I was.

DM: The article suggests that zero waste is also a racialized fantasy reproducing Bulgaria’s national future as white space. This double side of zero waste reminded me of Diane Nelson’s (2015) work on the simultaneous horror and hope surrounding the idea of zero itself; zero suggests the possibility of a completely balanced environmental and capitalist system yet is fraught with racial and national baggage. How did your Romani interlocutors engage with the idea of “zero” in zero waste? More broadly, what do think dislodging the frame of zero might open in terms of understanding environmental sustainability projects? 

ER: I love this question. Most of my Romani interlocutors weren’t thinking about zero waste—it was mainly a bureaucratic slogan—and everyone knew that, including the bureaucrats. No capitalist system can function with zero waste, but it sounds appealing in environmentalist projects. The fantasy of zero waste is also an imagining of what it would mean to keep on living as people are already doing but, somehow, magically, not accumulate waste. We all know, at some level, that it’s impossible; yet the fantasy persists. If we were to pull out what the role of zero-ness is in this picture, I would say it’s not about nothingness but about the idea that we don’t have to deal with all that capitalism leaves in its wake as it forcefully pushes forward.

DM: I loved the tidbit in the article noting that increases in waste production used to be seen as a proxy for economic growth and capitalist development (226). To me this reflects the ambivalent value of waste itself and the awkward incorporation of environmental sustainability efforts in capitalist projects. I’m curious how you think studies of waste fit into broader scholarly conversations about capitalism and the environment. Is there something uniquely valuable about studying waste for understanding the contemporary political moment? Why do you think anthropologists are turning to waste and discard studies now?

ER: Discussions of capitalism and the environment often assume certain kinds of “green” ideologies as truths because we are now so deeply immersed in capitalist greenwashing. But this project denaturalizes such greenwashing to reveal a longer history that shouldn’t be forgotten—of when waste was a great indicator of “progress” and capitalist development, a shift towards an ideal democratic (vs. socialist) system. This was a critical and lasting part of post-Cold War economic-environmental transition. I think this is about the constantly changing value of waste itself in relation to whatever counts as “modern” at the time. And, yes, the incorporation of sustainability efforts into capitalist projects is very much of a particular historical moment that we can locate.

Waste is a tangible, material way to think about capitalism and the environment but the kind of waste we often think about when we hear the term “waste” is part of the problem; so much public discussion about waste and recycling, since the 1990s, has focused on domestic household waste. This is the kind of waste you know and toss daily: used food containers, paper, cans, etc. Much of the environmentalist/sustainability projects we know have focused on this because it puts responsibility on the consumer, not the producer, to reduce waste. In the European Union, for example, familiar household waste is less than ten percent of all waste because over ninety percent of waste comes from industrial processes. So, it is critical that in discussions of environmental sustainability we don’t forget the role of industrial producers of waste and their role in waste accumulation (also see Gille 2007). We need to shift away from our fixation on sorting waste and recycling at the household level, which might help, but doesn’t really turn the dial.

Anthropologists are turning to waste not only for environmental reasons but also as a way to materially track racism, privilege, and inequality, which is particularly important in contexts where those in power deny such inequities. Examining how and where waste is generated, transported, collected, and disposed of reveals broader social hierarchies and makes them unavoidably clear, as we can see, smell, and feel how waste affects different groups of people in radically different ways.