Jiwon Kim

To recycle is to make waste into a resource. But is recycling only an industrial act—or also an aspirational one? Can it reshape not only materials but also the social and financial relations, obligations, and institutions that surround them? This research explores these questions by studying the urban recycling initiative known as bank sampah (waste banks) in Indonesia. At a waste bank, residents bring their household recyclables and deposit their monetary value into a savings account—a simple mechanism that turns trash into currency. Waste banks operate alongside municipal garbage collection, informal waste pickers, and household sales to middlemen, yet they occupy a distinct moral and gendered niche. They are built on familiar neighborhood administrative structures, sustained by residents’ social obligations within households and communities, and strategically leveraged by local leaders to attract government and corporate recognition and funding—with women at the center of each of these relations. This research draws on ethnographic fieldwork to show how these diverse actors all, in their own way, bank on waste. In doing so, it situates waste as a site for thinking about how finance and domestic life meet, and how urban communities navigate ecological and economic frustration at once.