Rarely do we stop and question where our waste goes and who collects and sorts it. Waste pickers work at the margins of our lives, removing things we don’t want to see. In a new book, The Life of Waste, sociologists Wu Ka Ming and Zhang Jieying describe these unknown lives that play out on the outskirts of Beijing. They visit the village of Lengshui, 50km north of Beijing, home to a community of waste pickers.

Part of this world is as one might expect it to be. Piles of rubbish and pools of foul water gather, while pets and children play in the waste. Yet homes are often spotless, as if domestic life becomes more orderly the more chaotic the surroundings. The families from all over China form close-knit communities that extend beyond blood relationships. Chinadialogue (CD) spoke to the authors about life in these recycling communities.

CD: The Life of Waste treats recycling as an informal economy. How does this informal process relate to official waste collection?

Zhang Jieying (ZJY): Municipal solid waste is an inevitable product of urbanisation and industrialisation. In 2004, China became the world’s largest producer of waste, overtaking the US, but not all waste is handled by the government, individual waste pickers play a major role.

Wu Ka Ming (WKM): Although we talk about this being unofficial, the government has been trying to bring waste pickers under its management to resolve issues such as secondary pollution from inadequate recycling, albeit unsuccessfully. The waste pickers aren’t willing to be brought within the system. This has become a way of life with its own set of work ethics. Some regard their work as providing more freedom than a factory job, with lower risk of wages going unpaid.

CD: How did you get close to these groups? Were their circumstances as you expected?

WKM: We travelled to the outskirts of Beijing with some colleagues that work on migrant worker issues and discovered this particular group of workers.

WKM: I’m from Hong Kong and I knew very little about waste pickers before meeting them. I realised they are paying the price for our shiny new urban lifestyles. They make sure we don’t have to see the rubbish or worry about the dirty and wasteful aspects of economic development.

ZJY: I began working with these groups maybe eight or nine years ago. When I started in sociology I wanted to find the “biggest victims”. I had fixed, romanticised ideas about a gang working at society’s lowest levels. Once I met them I realised that wasn’t the case. They’re rational people, their industry has rules, and if you gain experience or use more technology you can do better.

CD: What kind of rules?

WKM: Many people think this is an unattractive job, but we found it’s hard to get. If you don’t have a contact, if you don’t know someone from your village already doing it, you won’t get anywhere.

ZJY: For example, the waste pickers have a mutually beneficial arrangement with the management firms of apartment complexes. These firms need people to remove waste but using the government service means they have to help load the truck. The pickers do their own loading and know how to negotiate and build stable and trusting relationships, ensuring they get all the waste from an entire residential complex.

CD: Is it hard to carry out field studies on these populations? How do they react to outside attention?

ZJY: Waste picker groups are quite wary as in Beijing there are often efforts to remove migrant workers. So they don’t know if they might be moved on, and they don’t want to risk any links with outsiders unless there’s some benefit in it for them.

As anthropologists all we can do is spend a long time building up trust. Other low-status workers, such as migrant workers on building sites, are much more willing to chat. Why the difference? That spurred us to look at their lives, their thoughts, their homes and leisure.

WKM: Our research subjects were also curious about us – they didn’t understand why we were interested in them. We had to get to know each other. They are looked down on, vilified, but working with us gave them a sense of equality and respect.

CD: In the book you say that as Beijing expands, waste pickers are constantly moved further away, to the point they’re now renting rooms from farmers. Can you describe where these people live?

WKM: Waste is a part of their lives. To save money, they live and work in the same place, occupying rooms around a farm courtyard, with the yard itself piled with sorted and unsorted rubbish. There’s a foul stench in summer. But we also saw that some families keep their simple homes spotlessly clean, in sharp contrast to the mess outside.

ZJY: The village of Lengshui is almost an ecosystem. Local farmers and the migrant farmers rent their buildings alongside a state-owned firm and a high-end residential complex. It’s a complicated place.

WKM: During gentrification, property developers try to acquire places like this. In the past, the waste pickers could still make it into the city to work but now they live so far out that transportation costs are mounting.

CD: The book talks about the waste pickers’ nostalgia for their home villages, which is very moving. Do you think an idealised view of home helps them to survive?

WKM: It’s an important issue. The difference between the pickers and other migrant workers is that they live close to where the city meets the countryside. Conditions aren’t that different from their villages at home. The odd thing is that their home villages are modernising, while they are living somewhere even more backwards.

ZJY: Often home is a symbol, or a dream. The waste pickers aren’t old enough to retire and it’s not certain they ever will. They exist in a dual reality, with a far-off home promising success, respect and a happy life, allowing them to endure their lives of exploitation in the city.

The book examines the psychology of self-deprivation; they live in terrible conditions, making no purchases, investing all their money in their houses back home, even though no one lives there. They might only go back every few years, while in day to day life they endure the most basic conditions. That’s the dual reality for many migrant workers.

Wu Ka Ming is assistant professor of the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Research interests include the interplay between state, society, culture and capital in contemporary China.

Zhang Jieying is assistant researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Sociology. Research interests include environmental anthropology, waste, social movements, and the sociology of science and technology.