A just green agenda starts by fully admitting past injustices that still shape the present, and it rejects treating informal workers as less than human. That means privileged environmentalists accepting leadership from frontline workers and building coalitions where both sides take risks. It also means putting social repair ahead of a clean look or cheap efficiency.
Whose environmental habits count as virtuous depends on who is doing them, not on their effect. Comfortable households that sort, compost and shop ethically gain moral authority and public standing. The poor, who reuse and recover materials out of necessity, get no credit and are often looked down on.
Bringing marginal workers into an official green system can be a way to profit from them more cheaply rather than to free them. Formal recycling schemes take on waste pickers because they are the cheapest option available. Sold as a win-win, the arrangement serves growth and profit, cuts the workers' independence, and makes old exploitation easier to accept.
When groups divided by class and caste are bound together by shared material work like handling garbage, the meeting point can go in either direction. It can harden old hierarchies, or it can give the excluded new ground to demand recognition and a place in public infrastructure. Do-it-yourself local systems become places where citizenship gets negotiated, outside top-down, growth-driven policy.
Adding excluded workers to a sustainability project without changing the social order beneath it keeps the old division of labor, risk and blame in place. Neighborhood zero-waste schemes reached their goals only because the dirtiest and most intense work fell on the lowest-status women. Middle-class women, meanwhile, took on unpaid caring work that stretched their household roles.