Kathrin Eitel’s PhD project deals with the topic of waste handling in the urban area of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Here she mainly focuses on waste pickers, looping around in streets and picking up waste, which they then further distribute to agents in different positions within the value chain. They can be described as the infrastructure of recyclable waste handling in the city, due to a lack of “formal” establishments and are a part of Phnom Penh’s city image, part of materiality and part of natures in the city. The project questions the materiality and formality of an infrastructure per se, and puts the focus on the visibility and invisibility of the agents being the infrastructure. The ethnographic projects opens out into a critical perspective of infrastructure studies.

The PhD project, therefore, examines the metabolism on waste in the city, with particular regard to different interests agents have and, secondly, with a focus on the paths and arrangements followed by waste. Waste must be understood as something material, fluid and dynamic, varying in its form and materiality. It also arranges collaborations, where it enacts – in conjunction with others – diverse forms of naturcultures and undefinable and ungraspable pieces of an environmental moment, which might vanish or changed immediately into something else or become part of the city’s materiality. Within these arrangements, the research aims to show metabolic flows of waste in the city and, at the same time, unfold the multiplicity of the ontology of waste.

Empirical data collection was conducted between 2016 and 2018 in multiple small field trips of several months each. In addition to interviews conducted during this time with waste pickers, representatives of political and governmental institutions and from civil society initiatives, Eitel collected data through participant observation and following-the-waste-methods.