The Waste Commons

The Waste Commons reveals the intricate lifeworlds and recycling networks built by waste pickers since 1968 at Dakar’s dump, Mbeubeuss.  Adja and Zidane, two waste pickers who are emerging as leaders contesting the erasure of their community, guide us through the dump’s material, social, and spiritual worlds. Adja is a divorced mother from Dakar specializing in plastics. Zidane, who hails from the country’s interior, supports his two families through sales of used shoes. They represent the central demographics at the dump– the urban poor rendered superfluous to the city’s growth engines and the rural poor fleeing collapsing agricultural economies bearing the brunt of climate change. Both are finding their voice in arguing for their rights to waste within the tense negotiations surrounding the future of their very way of life.

Following Adja, Zidane, and their waste picker colleagues across the colossal garbage mountain, the film zeros in on the forms of craft and expertise that have been honed over the last 55 years in the recycling of plastics, metal, food waste as well as smaller niches such as cardboard, shoes, and even baby dolls. It details the recycling economies that stretch from Mbeubeuss all the way to Asia and visits neighborhoods thriving on these second hand economies. Compelling interviews with waste pickers reveal what drove them to seek their fortunes out of other people’s detritus and how they resist stigma and confront the tectonic changes underway.

Special attention is paid to women waste pickers, for whom Mbeubeuss offers opportunities they may not otherwise enjoy. Coura details how she has taken care of her family over the last decades through plastic and metal recycling. We also focus on the minority Christian women from Southern Senegal who meticulously collect food waste to raise pigs that sustain a whole neighborhood bordering Mbeubeuss, and the particular vulnerabilities they face with the transformation of the dump. Through the course of the film, we see women rising as leaders of their local movement, becoming fearless activists for their cause on an international stage.

As we travel across the dump and beyond with these waste pickers, we see how, as Zidane puts it, “Mbeubeuss is a mirror of the city.” Far from a realm of chaos, the dump is an organized archive of Senegal’s postcolonial history and the waste pickers its careful archivists, cataloging, translating, and making valuable the afterlives of urban living. The film then dives into the politics of the dump closure and the waste pickers’ battle to assert their rights in the recycling economy moving forward. The rhetoric of State and World Bank officials in fancy office buildings is contrasted with waste picker strategy sessions hammered out in dusty shacks on top of the garbage mountain. Adja, Zidane, and their colleagues travel internationally to network with other waste pickers and contribute to discussions regarding the global plastics treaty. Along the way, they learn of inspiring battles that are being waged—and won—all over the world by waste pickers to defend their rights to the waste commons. The waste pickers of Mbeubeuss forge a worker’s cooperative that aims to protect their jobs and counter policies aimed at grabbing the value they have forged. They refine their proposal for a different future of Mbeubeuss that would honor their expertise, protect their bodies and communities from harm, and, rather than replace their labor with machines, scale up their embodied infrastructures of recycling.

In a tense standoff with the government in May 2023, hundreds of waste pickers mount a peaceful demonstration, blocking all garbage trucks from entering and leaving the dump, and thereby bringing waste management in the capital city to a standstill. Through capturing this pitched battle over the dump’s future, the film illuminates the centrality of recycling to the livelihoods of the urban poor in our era of breakneck consumption and the complexities of a just transition to a more sustainable and democratic future.

Will Dakar’s dump closure provide a model for how to integrate waste pickers into the modernization of the city or another catastrophic example of treating the poor as disposable?

Cinefemfest, Dakar, Senegal (October 31-Nov. 3, 2024)

WOW Wales One World Festival, Aberystwyth, Wales 
(March 21-24, 2025)

Ethnografilm Paris, Paris, France (April 17-20, 2025)

Vancouver Independent MovieMaker Awards, Vancouver, BC (April 30, 2025). WINNER BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM AWARD

Charlotte Black Film Festival, Charlotte, NC (June 5, 2025)

Nashville Independent Filmmakers Festival, Nashville, TN 
(June 6, 2025) SEMI FINALIST

New York Independent Film Festival, New York, NY (June 3-8, 2025)
WINNER BEST DOCUMENTARY CINEMATOGRAPHY AWARD

The African Film Festival, Dallas, Texas (June 19, 2025)

Indianapolis Independent Film Festival, Indianapolis, IN (August 5, 2025) SEMI FINALIST

Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, Middlebury, VT (August 20, 2025)

African Diaspora Cinema Festival, Florence, Italy (September 3-6, 2025)

Calgarie Indie Film Festival, Calgarie, Canada (August 21, 2025) 
SEMI FINALIST

Richmond International Film Festival, Richmond, VA (September 23-28, 2025)  FINALIST

Palermo International Film Festival, Palermo, Italy (August 31, 2025) SEMI FINALIST

Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Conference, New Orleans, LA (November 19-22, 2025)

French Film Festival UK, Edinburgh, Scotland (November 14, 2026)

Rosalind Fredericks
Director/Producer/Writer
Rosalind (Rozy) is an urban geographer and Associate Professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized study, specializing in urban environmental social movements in West Africa. She has been working in Senegal for over 20 years conducting research on the politics of waste labor in Dakar. Her book Garbage Citizenship, which was awarded the Toyin Falola Book Award for the best book in African Studies, chronicled the municipal waste workers’ union as it battled for respect and improved working conditions in the wake of structural adjustment. She also edited two volumes with esteemed historian Mamadou Diouf on citizenship in African cities: Les arts de la citoyenneté au Sénégal: Espaces contestés et civilités urbaines (Editions Karthala, 2013) and The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).  She is also co-editor, with Mohammed Rafi Arefin, of The Politics of Disposability: Discard Studies in an Era of Devaluation (Duke University Press, 2027). Fredericks is the co-director of the Discard Studies Collaborative at NYU.  The Waste Commons emerged out of her ethnographic research (supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation) at Dakar’s dump since 2016 and her advocacy work with the association of Mbeubeuss waste pickers and the non-profit organization WIEGO that defends the rights of informal workers globally.   That research is also the subject of her book manuscript in progress, titled Refuse/al.  

Sarita West
Director/Producer/Writer/Additional Editing
Sarita has been making natural history films and social documentaries for 27 years. Sarita established Alchemy Films in San Francisco in 1994. She wrote, directed and produced two award-winning 35mm short fiction films before making the orangutan documentary, The Disenchanted Forest (2004) for National Geographic Channels. Sarita co-produced the PBS documentary, The Split Horn (2003), and was an associate producer on the PBS documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006). In London, Sarita produced, directed and edited Fire Burn Babylon (2010), Exiles and Outlaws (2014), and has produced short films for The Guardian and Barts N.H.S. Trust. Sarita shot, edited, directed and produced In The Shadow of Ebola  (2015) for PBS/Independent Lens and The Land Beneath Our Feet (2016) for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sarita is post-producing Outspoken, a social justice rap documentary partially filmed in Senegal, Kenya and Liberia. In recent years Alchemy Films has sought stories that consider life in the Anthropocene.