Informal Waste Pickers Are Mitigating Climate Change

Informal waste pickets or recyclers are people who earn their income through the collection, sorting and selling of materials that were discarded as waste. There are many terms used to describe this job depending on where you live in the world. Binners (west coast of Canada), valoriste (Quebec term), street surfers (South Africa), bin chickens (Australia), trash pickers (San Francisco) or catadores (Brazil) to name a few.

Depending on where you live, you might have noticed people pushing a shopping buggy full of cans and plastic bottles. Or maybe you’ve seen groups of people with large loads at the recycling depot. I see people pulling the refundables out of the recycling bins on my street when they have been put out for collection. In some countries with open landfills, the informal waste claimers sift through the huge mass of waste, pulling out scraps of metal and other valuable materials.

Informal waste reclaimers have an important role to play to divert usable materials from the landfill. In some countries this service provides widespread public benefits and they help the country achieve a high recycling rate. But they have many issues to face like harsh working conditions, social justice, and health risks.

This way of life is common in all parts of the world as a way for those living in poverty to earn a living. These “invisible workers” provide important link in the recycle chain all over the world. According to World Bank and International Labour Organization (ILO), waste pickers respresent 1% of the urban population globally.

Informal Waste Picker Organizations

There are organizations that help waste pickers work together and learn from each other. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers is the biggest group that has many projects to support waste pickers by facilitating meetings, workshops and collecting data. Some of these global meetings date back to 2008.

The Waste Pickers Around the World (WAW) Database is a project that has accumulated data for waste picker organizations from around the world, mainly Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Some of these groups get together to protest causes that inhibit their work or livelihoods.

African Reclaimers Organisation (ARO) is a group of landfill and street recyclers that joined together to protest the privatization of waste management. The city was paying companies to do the work that waste pickers do for free.

The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers is protesting incineration and the privatization of waste management and the UN-backed Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) ‘waste-to-energy’ that burn recyclable materials. Burning the materials is wasteful and has it’s own problems with pollutants. The waste pickers claim that reyclcing those resources is environmentally better than burning them.

Waste picker leaders form associations in Costa Rica, Senegal, India, Brazil and South Africa attended the UNFCCC’s (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) and they were able to remove ‘waste to energy’ projects backed by the CDM. They also helped push forward a Green Climate Fund (GCF) which would give $100 billion per year towards climate change projects.

Nonhlanhla Mhlophe has been a waste picker in South Africa for eight years. Her background as a domestic worker did not provide for her as well as waste picking. She works at a landfill and has organized a group of other waste pickers called Hlanganane Ma Africa “Come Together as Africans”. She created this group because the government was not listening to her has an individual so she created a voice for the waste pickers. As a group they were able to get a materials recovery facility built which her group will be in charge of managing.

As waste pickers are an important part of the recycling chain globally they are gathering together to raise awareness as to the importance of the service they provide to their communities and to the world. Waste pickers from around the world have participated in United Nations Climate Change Conventions (UNFCCC) to ask for recognition for their role in climate change mitigation.

Informal Waste Pickers Remove Recyclable Materials From Open Landfills

India has a low recycling rate at 20-25 percent. The rest of these good materials go to a landfill. The bigger the landfill the bigger the problems the landfill causes.

Landfill sites are places where garbage is simply dumped. The average landfill is 600 acres in area and can be 500 feet deep. The three biggest problems with a landfill are the greenhouse gases emitted, the toxins and the leachate.

Leachate is the liquid that is created by materials in a landfill breaking down and seeping into the land and water ways. This liquid is very toxic and has been known to cause issues for flora and fauna close by.

Landfills often contain electronics or other products that contain toxic materials like mercury, PVC, acids and lead. These substances also leach into the soil and groundwater and are hazardous to the environment for many many years.

The organic materials in a landfill start to degrade which releases CO2. For older landfills, the organic materials become packed down and covered by all kinds of other materials that do not degrade, they lack oxygen and then switch to anaerobically break down. This releases methane gas. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is also flammable making it very dangerous if it builds up. In a mature landfill, decomposition of organic waste produces approximately 50 percent CO2 and 50 percent methane.

There are several benefits to the removal of materials from a landfill site. The materials that can be used again will be removed saving resources and possible pollution in mining those materials from scratch. The landfill size becomes smaller, allowing it to be used for a longer period of time. The landfill mass gets aerated which reduces the amount of methane that the decomposition releases.

How Waste Pickers Collect Valuable Materials

There are many different types of waste picker around the world. Thousands of people in countries that have open landfills spend their days in the landfill sifting through trash to pick out the metals and plastics and paper that they can sell. This type of work is very dangerous, as they are usually stepping deep into the garbage that contains toxins, broken glass, cockroaches, dead animals and feces.

Other waste pickers reclaim the materials from dumpsters or city streets preventing the resources from arriving at the landfill in the first place.

In many cities like San Francisco, the trash pickers go out at night and wander the neighbourhoods cleaning the streets and bins of refundable recycling materials. This lifestyle can be difficult as pickers become territorial and they have to find their place in the system of informal pickers. They sometimes get robbed of their collections or shopping carts that they use to collect.

In Canada there is a group called Binners Project which is a group of waste pickers aided by support staff to work towards improving their livelihoods and reducing the stigma they face in the community as informal waste collectors.

Binners that are part of the Binners Project have different opportunities to participate in some of the initiatives avilable to them. “Back-of-House” waste sorting is a program set up where binners are employed to sort the mess of recycling from a residential or commercial building. This significantly reduces the amount of waste going to landfills by lowering the contamination rates. It also creates space within the bins because the materials are properly flattened and it brings a well deserved integrity to the binners who are making their living.

Binners are also involved in community events and have the responsibility to teach the community how to properly sort their waste. The binners are given matching t-shirts to clearly identify them as a wealth of knowledge.

The Binners Project provides the community with special hooks that they can install and hang their recyclables in a bag to be collected by the binners.

Binners in Vancouver worked together with the Binners Project to design a universal cart to be used to collect materials. These carts have been designed to sit in a docking station locked up until a member of the Binners Project voice activates the lock and can take out a cart. They do not need a credit card nor do they need to remember a pin number.

These universal carts support different physical capabilites, can attach to a bike and have an easy to open door that makes it easy to remove the load it was carrying.

How Much Do Waste Pickers Save From The Landfill?

You might be wondering how much materials do waste pickers actually save from landfills around the world. It is very difficult to calculate but with the help of new data that is being collected and the various organizations networking, some estimates can be made.

In many areas of the world, the recycling rates are very low. But with the help of waste pickers, this national average increases significantly.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) discovered that in South Africa there are 90,000 waste pickers who are responsible for 90% of all the materials that was recycled in 2018. In 2019, the unemployment rate in South Africa was 29%. Waste picking allows thousands of people to make a living while helping the environment.

In India, waste pickers are usually the poorest people living in giant mega cities that go through the city’s garbages and pick out recyclable materials like plastic, metal and possibly compostables. It is estimated they they recover about 20% of all waste. After that, the street cleaner come along and remove the garbage and bring it to the dumps. It is there that more people work each day sifting through for electronic parts, plastics and metals.

India recycles 90 percent of all the PET plastic that is manufacured in the country. This is largely thanks to the waste pickers that work there.

Similar stats exist in other countries in the world like Brazil and China. China is home to hundreds of thousands of waste pickers working in cities. They sort through people’s garbage, remove valuable materials and sell them. Public awareness of recycling and waste reduction is very low in Shanghai. The government has not been involved in the waste management issues. They planned to open 4 new incinerators but the people protested this for environmental reasons. Plus incinerators do not address the issues of waste in the first place.

Back over in Canada, the Binner Project in Vancouver puts on an annual annual Coffee Cup Revolution event. This is where 150 local binners collected 96,000 coffee cups from the streets of Vancouver in just 3 hours. Each cup is worth a 5 cent refund during this event and over the past five years they returned 264,815 cups.

These cups are usually part of the city’s curbside recycling program but there is a movement towards implementing a refund for coffee cups. Once these cleaned cups are collected, they are shipped from Canada to South Korea to actually be recycled.

The Problems Waste Pickers Encounter

Aside from the obvious physical dangers involved in waste picking at a landfill or in a dumpster, there are many other issues waste pickers have to deal with on a daily basis.

In the city of Ottawa, recyclable materials bring in revenue for the city when they are collected through the curbside program. A resident has the option of returning the refundable cans and bottles to a depot or they can put them in their blue box at their curb for collection day. When the city collects these bottles, they get to keep the refund.

However, when a binner comes along and removes the bottles and cans from the blue box, the city is losing that revenue. They have a law in Ottawa that stealing from a blue bin carries a fine of up to $10,000. However, the city only responds if a complaint is filed. Binners in areas like this risk getting a hefty ticket.

Similarly, the “bin chickens” (not the bird) in Australia are taking funding away from the local recycling service who would otherwise cash in the materials. This has caused some unrest between the residents and informal waste pickers.

Another difficulty faced by waste pickers is that in some areas (with colder climates), it is a seasonal job. Summer is a high time with people picnicking and having drinks outside. But in the winter, less materials are left around for collection and the physical work of collection becomes more difficult with cold weather, rain and snow.

As waste picking is not officially part of the waste management plan for most cities, pickers are vulnerable to changes in rules. For example, they increased the rate for the refund of a can or bottle from 5 cent to 10 cents in BC. The government wanted to give more incentive to people to recycle even more cans. This could be a reduction in refundable materials that binners are able to collect which would decrease their wages. But on the other hand, it does increase the amount they get for the cans and jars that they do collect! This change does not worry Davin Buotang, a community specialist with the Binners’ Project. He doesn’t think the increase in fee is going to get people to start returning the items themselves.

In areas with mature landfills, there is a risk of shutting down. This is a common problem where thousands of people pick garbage and sell it at recycling centers have to figure out a new way to earn a living.

Informal waste reclaimers in Johannesburg have been prohibited from working in the streets due to coronavirus lockdown. Beauty Ncube has been waste picking for more than 20 years and she is surprised that this important service is not part of the corona virus response plan. It is estimated that the 60,000+ waste pickers in South Africa save the municipalities up to 750 million rand a year in potential landfill costs keeping the reclaimable materials out of land fill and waste streams.

Being out of work for a three week isolation is terribly difficult in Ncube’s community. They have been receiving food donations but they have no way to know how to distribute the food and it isn’t enough. People are starving.

The choice of many of these informal reclaimers is to obey the lockdown and watch their families go hungry or they are going into the streets and risking arrests and violence from the police who are enforcing the rules.

Only 10.8 percent of the homes in South Africa separate their waste. Without the informal reclaimers services during the lockdown, the waste collected from these urban households are sent to the landfill full of recyclables.

Perhaps the waste picker communities will move from informal to formal in the near future. Their work is important in diverting huge amounts of good materials out of landfills all over the world. These people deserve a good living wage, safety equipment to make the job less dangerous and respect.

Boy Holding Box At Landfill Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

Hong Kong Garbage Overflowing Photo by Sanjog Timsina on Unsplash

Man holding branch searching at the dump Photo by Avinash Kumar on Unsplash