Mbeubeuss: Waste, value and informal labour in Dakar

This article examines informal waste management at Mbeubeuss, Dakar's largest landfill site. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2016 with waste pickers known as boudioumane, the analysis reveals how discarded plastics traverse circuits of extraction and exchange, transitioning from worthless to valuable through everyday acts of sorting and selling. The article situates the Mbeubeuss case within discard studies, emphasizing how the circulation and material specificity of plastics shape both livelihoods and urban ecologies in contemporary Senegal. Focusing on the work trajectory of one waste picker, Badara Ngom, the article demonstrates how waste creates economic relations, spaces and alternative value systems. The conclusion addresses recent World Bank-funded modernization efforts that threaten to erase Mbeubeuss and rewrite the fate of both waste and informal workers.