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Cash From Trash: South Africa’s Waste Pickers Get Organized, More Formalalized

Cash From Trash: South Africa’s Waste Pickers Get Organized, More Formalalized

South Africa’s 60,000-to-90,000 waste pickers save the country up to $53 million a year diverting recyclables away from landfills, and there are efforts to organize them and encourage them to form unions.

Their contribution has become beneficial for the local economy, creating informal jobs in a country plagued by unemployment, Engineering News reported.

Pushing home-made carts along busy streets and highways, the pickers are as ubiquitous a sight around South Africa as minibus taxis. But hours spent on the landfills take a huge health toll, exposing them to disease, smoke and toxic fumes.

Each waster picker earns the equivalent of $3.50 to $14 US a day, depending on where they live, in a waste sector valued at $1.29 billion, according to Musa Chamane.

A waste campaigner, Chamane works with the nonprofit environmental justice organisation groundWork.

GroundWork focuses on supporting the emerging waste pickers’ or waste reclaimers’ movement. It collaborates with the South African Waste Pickers Association (SAWPA), helping pickers organize and develop local strategies to participate in waste management.

Where informal dumps are being formalized as landfills, groundWork advocates for waste pickers to form unions and avoid being marginalized from the formal waste management system. South African Waste Pickers and groundWork helped ensure that waste pickers were recognized as an important part of the waste management system in the National Environment Management Act: Waste Act 2008, according to an interview with Engineering News.

A growing number of informal workers make their living earning cash from trash. The number of informal workers in South Africa increased by 245,000 — almost 10 percent — from 2014 to 2015, Statistics South Africa reported. About 2.63-million people were employed in the informal sector – excluding agriculture –in 2015.

Waste pickers have have a positive impact on the environment, Chamane said. “Most waste is not separated at source, which means recyclables get dumped with nonrecyclables at the landfill site. This not only takes up a lot of space resulting in the need for more landfill sites, but also means that there is more waste to decay and emit climate change-inducing gases like methane and carbon dioxide.”

Based in KwaZulu-Natal, SAWPA works to improve the livelihoods, promote the rights and unity among waste pickers and reduce risks for them. It also aims to promote recycling and the Waste Picker Law, organizing to campaign against privatization.

Privatisation leads to exploitation, Sawpa believes. Recycling should be driven by a cooperative of waste pickers and not by certain individuals.

Informal employment makes up more than half of non-agricultural employment in most developing regions, according to Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). The group released a paper this week at a four-day Habitat III summit on urban development in Quito, Ecuador, Citiscope reported.

Despite their contributions, informal workers’ lives and income are vulnerable, the group reported. Myths persist in the minds of the public and policymakers that the informal economy is somehow illegal.

WIEGO works to break down this stereotype. “After all, the sector encompasses not only the unorganized sector but also pockets within the formal sector where work has been increasingly outsourced to informal worker,” according to Citiscope.

The CSIR conducted research to see if waste pickers could be be incorporated into the formal economy, according to a Times Live report. “The most surprising finding for me was when we started to attach financial values to the savings by municipalities as a result of informal waste pickers,” said Prof. Linda Godfrey, who led the study.

With paper and packaging, for example, a staggering 80-to-90 percent of waste is recovered by the pickers. Each picker diverts up to an estimated 24 tons of packaging waste a year. Cardboard earns them about 80c per kilogram (almost 6 cents US), plastic about 14 cents, newspaper about 3 cents and light steel about 5 cents per kilogram.

Extended producer responsibility will be in place for e-waste, lighting and the paper and packaging waste streams in 2017/18, said Albi Modise, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Affairs., Times Live reported.

CSIR’s Godfrey said 92 percent of co-operatives had failed and their members have returned to picking on landfills.

“What must be done in the short term is to move pickers off landfill sites, where they reclaim recyclables, often with considerable health risks,” she said. This could be done only by diverting recyclables “through separation at source and curbside collection programs.”