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Abstract
This dissertation is a political, economic, and environmental history of solid waste management in Southern California. It argues that local politicians, waste industry leaders, and environmentalists remade household trash into a commodity across the late twentieth century. As a stopgap solution to an ongoing crisis of dump space, this commodification produced a thriving market for garbage by the new millennium. The result has been the expansion and creation of landfills along Los Angeles’s periphery as well as the increased flow of waste across Southern California’s political boundaries in a “domestic trade in trash.”
This project begins in the midcentury, when local politicians responded to a populist homeowner politics and created a publicly funded landfill network across Los Angeles County. However, during the 1970s, communities living near urban landfills struggled with air, water, and soil pollution (and plummeting property values) and leveled political protests against urban waste sites. This homeowner opposition produced acrimonious debates between local politicians over which communities should bear the brunt of urban disposal. As a means out of the crisis, some looked to the urban periphery, considering plans to export the entirety of Los Angeles’s waste out of the county. These plans emerged in tandem with economic and political crises rattling throughout Los Angeles’s hinterlands. In these peripheral spaces, local politicians hoped to capitalize on trash by accepting Los Angeles’s waste for money. Concurrently, environmentalists worked to pass legislation limiting the amount of trash California municipalities generated. As this dissertation shows, the confluence of all these factors—the rush to create new landfills on LA’s edges, the drive to bring trash to existing ones, and environmental laws limiting garbage production—served to facilitate the rise of a competitive market for garbage. By the late twentieth century, waste in California was sought as a municipal resource.
Tracking the rise of this competition for waste, this dissertation makes three key interventions into environmental and urban history. In the first instance, it suggests that waste is not simply the negative externality of capitalism’s ordinary operations. Instead, it shows how waste itself is reincorporated into the market and imbued with non-ecological forms of value. Second, this dissertation complicates narratives of environmental justice that focus solely on community resistance against unwanted waste sites. As trash became a lucrative proposition, some communities organized to accept trash and build landfills. This project suggests that these political movements need to be understood alongside open resistance to landfilling. Finally, this dissertation opens up new ways to think about urban inequality. Many studies considering the question have focused on the neoliberalization of urban space and have centered three neoliberal forms: deregulation, privatization, and public-private partnerships. However, the domestic trade in trash is more akin to public-private competition. As municipalities began seeking waste, they vied with other municipalities and waste corporations actively trying to profit from garbage. This political mechanism has been decisive in moving waste through the urban landscape, often with devastating environmental consequences.