Disaster and the Political Economy of Recycling: Toxic Fire in an Industrial City

The case of a large toxic fire occurring at the Plastimet plastics recycling facility in Hamilton, Ontario is used as an empirical referent to investigate the structural origins involved in the incubation of a technological disaster. Hamilton is known as the "recycling center of Canada," and this paper examines the role of the broader socio-historical forces that led to this development and then relates this to the general issue of how specialized communities with a narrow economic base may become particularly vulnerable to the onset of technological disasters. As such, a political economy of place is developed to help understand how historically based regulatory, industrial, political, economic and social processes may interact in a complex manner to produce devastating results. Specifically, this paper identifies and discusses several particularly important features involved in disaster incubation, including: (i) a lax regulatory and enforcement framework related to land use, as well as, building and property codes at the local level; (ii) a legal loophole in the regulatory policy that governs materials recycling; (iii) the market dynamics of materials recycling; (iv) the transformation of spatial fix; and most notably, (v) the deviant industrial practice of "sham recycling."