Unleashing Waste-Pickers’ Potential: Supporting Recycling Cooperatives in Santiago de Chile

Unleashing Waste-Pickers’ Potential: Supporting Recycling Cooperatives in Santiago de Chile. World Development, Volume 101, January 2018, Pages 293-310.

• Full text

Highlights

• Waste-picker performance is affected by the policy environment in which they operate.
• Traditional policies that repress waste-pickers systematically hurt their collection rates, wages, and working conditions.
• Governmental support improves the performance of waste-pickers by increasing their economic, social, and environmental outcomes.
• Inexpensive policy measures working toward a more organized picture of waste-pickers dramatically increase their sustainable performance.

Our empirical results suggest a positive association between the level of government support and waste-pickers’ sustainable performance. Consequently, further positive government intervention, particularly in supporting a stronger structural organization for the waste-picker recycling system, is advocated as the primary policy recommendation of this paper.

SWaCH Across Bharat Promo Video

SWaCH Across Bharat is a short documentary film that explores the work of the SWaCH Co-operative, (a co-operative of waste pickers in Pune, India).

SWaCH Across Bharat, offers viewers one model of waste management that is not only good for the environment & financially efficient, but also one that safeguards waste-pickers’ rights.

Weaving in reflections of Supriya Bhadakwad (a waste-picker and member of SWaCH Cooperative), Lakshmi Narayan (a founder of SWaCH) and Varsha Chitale (a citizen whose apartment is serviced by SWaCH), the film brings together different perspectives on why the SWaCH model really works.

SWaCH Across Bharat is Directed by Lakshmi Anantnarayan, produced by TERI and supported by the Films Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India.

Unpaid and undervalued, how India’s waste pickers fight apathy to keep our cities clean

Unpaid and undervalued, how India’s waste pickers fight apathy to keep our cities clean. The News Minute, November 30, 2017.

There are an estimated 1.5 million to 4 million waste pickers in India, who pick up, clean, sort and segregate recyclable waste and sell it further up the value chain. 

Shoba Bansode has been working as a waste picker in Pune for over 15 years. She started doing this for a living since nobody would give her work as a domestic worker.

“My son was also very small then, and citing that reason too, nobody would give me work in their households.

At that time, one of my friends taught me waste picking. Using this as my only source of livelihood, I was able to provide for my child and raise him,” she says.

Shoba’s case is not an exception. Waste picking (or rag picking as it is commonly called) is a job that many end up in due to lack of other options.

According to a study published in the International Research Journal of Environment Sciences, titled, Studies on the Solid Waste Collection by Rag Pickers at Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, India, 94% of the 150 waste pickers interviewed in the Jawahar Nagar landfill in Hyderabad, stated that they chose this job since there were no other alternatives available to them.

Read the complete article.

At stake in Johannesburg’s ‘recycling wars’: more than trash

At stake in Johannesburg’s ‘recycling wars’: more than trash. Christian Science Monitor, April 2017.

Informal and formal sectors of the economy work side-by-side in many African nations – but can they work together?

APRIL 11, 2017 JOHANNESBURG—In another lifetime, Louis Mahlangu was an electrician. It was a good job, challenging and respectable, the kind of profession that could make his family proud. 

There was just one problem.

“There was no work,” he says. No matter how hard he looked, Mr. Mahlangu was barely finding enough jobs to scrape by. Then his sister invited him to tag along to her job. The hours were good, she promised, and the pay – well, it was better than anything he was likely to earn replacing wiring in suburban houses.

And so he put on a pair of rubber rain boots, hiked to the top of a squelching mountain of Johannesburg’s garbage, and began digging for plastic.

Twenty-two years later, he’s still there, along with thousands of others like him, collecting dinged Coke bottles and pulverized yogurt cartons discarded by the city’s residents and selling them on to private recycling companies. At his peak, Mahlangu says, he made up to $1000 each month, a respectable wage in a country where the newly proposed minimum wage is around $250 per month.

Read the complete article.

Trading in trash: Nairobi’s e-waste entrepreneurs – in pictures

Trading in trash: Nairobi’s e-waste entrepreneurs – in pictures. The Guardian, February 1, 2017.

From small-scale traders to a company processing hundreds of tonnes of e-waste, we explore Nairobi’s relationship with a burgeoning waste stream and visit the people turning it into a resource. Photographs and words by Nathan Siegel.  

John Obanda, who owns a repair shop, fixes a broken motherboard. Obanda sources items from collectors who work in nearby landfill sites and is one of thousands of traders who buy and recycle discarded electrical and electronic goods in Nairobi.

E-waste has ballooned in the city in the past decade due to rising mobile phone penetration and a burgeoning middle class.

Read the complete article.

Cambodian street pickers turn waste into survival profits

Cambodian street pickers turn waste into survival profits. Channel News Asia, October 26, 2016.

Sophana works through the night sorting through garbage in one of Phnom Penh’s busiest bar districts.

PHNOM PENH: On any typical night around the heaving bars full of tourists and female workers, street pickers lurk in the shadows.

They are children, their parents and the elderly. They are grimy, hungry and desperate.

Phon Sophana is one of them. He and his family, including his wife and two young children, live on the street, foraging a living by searching through discarded waste for items of value, normally plastic bottles and cans.

They work through the night, mostly in the darkness, but all around the clock if they have the stamina.

“There are a lot of competitors,” the 31-year-old said. “If I can go early enough, it would be lucky. If the others go before me, they would collect everything first.

“Life is tough here.”

Read the complete article.

Women waste pickers: living conditions, work, and health

Women waste pickers: living conditions, work, and health. Rev. Gaúcha Enferm. vol.37 no.3 Porto Alegre Sept 2016.

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Objective – To know the elements of work, health, and living conditions of women who pick recyclable waste and are members of a waste cooperative in a town of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Method – This is a qualitative, exploratory and descriptive study with seven subjects. Data were collected through participative observation, semi structured interview, and a focus group from July to August of 2013. The data were subjected to content analysis.

Results – The following thematic categories emerged: Women’s work, informality and precariousness; Experiences of job satisfaction; and Working conditions and health: experiences with accidents, illness and health services.

Conclusion – It was concluded that the women who collect recyclable material are exposed to precarious work conditions and potential health risks, such as work overload, accidents, illness, and social insecurity, and that nurses are responsible for promoting actions that ensure the health and inclusion of these workers.