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The single-use plastic bag is the most legislated item of plastic in the world, banned in over 92 countries. The bans are largely concentrated in Africa and the Caribbean, where the plastic bags are often black and the plastic footprints small. The bans have destabilised essential economic, social, and technical arrangements of marginalised communities reliant on plastic engagements and adaptations to improvise against multiple, overlapping, incursive forms of violence. This article seeks to understand the spatial and material nature of these legislative actions and the particular item of single-use plastic they target. Acknowledging the (spatialised) material realities of the single-use plastic bag, this article argues that these bans are a legislative response to the black plastic bag as spatialised, racialised, sexualised, abject Other. Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) and politics are common themes in environmental justice. However, insights garnered from the experience of the global north cannot be applied directly to the global south since local processes shape unique landscapes of waste. To this end, my fieldwork in Oaxaca de Juarez, a rapidly urbanizing city in southern Mexico, concentrates on the history and politics of MSWM in the area. Here, the livelihood struggles of local neighborhoods are imbricated with the management of the existing official municipal dump. I argue that it is the marginality of these neighborhoods, both physical and social, that makes it possible for them to block the flow of municipal trash and so reveal it to visitors, residents, and politicians. This case presents a reworking of traditional concepts of environmental justice by examining the contradictory processes of abjection and political activism particular to the global south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]