From Seaweed to Plastic: Gleaning and the moral economy of waste in Indonesia
Postdoctoral research fellow Lukas Fort has published the article ‘From Seaweed to Plastic: Gleaning and the moral economy of waste in Indonesia’ in Indonesia and the Malay World
The article explores practices of gleaning in Indonesia to analyse how different values are generated from residual materials under conditions of economic marginalisation, environmental degradation, and uneven governance. Moving beyond gleaning’s agrarian origins as the practice of collecting leftover crops after harvest, it compares the gathering of loose seaweed in coastal aquaculture with the informal collection of post-consumer plastic waste outside formal waste management systems.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how marginalised communities create value from materials considered waste through forms of labour shaped by subsistence needs, moral claims, social hierarchies, and unequal distributions of obligation and risk. Framing these practices within a ‘moral economy’ – in which shared values and notions of the common good are integral to economic life – it argues that gleaning is not only a survival strategy but also a contested ethical project. In doing so, it highlights how such practices both reproduce gendered divisions of labour and enable claims to dignity and belonging amid contested environmental governance and shifting regimes of value.