A waste picker is a person who salvages reusable or recyclable materials thrown away by others to sell or for personal consumption.[1] There are millions of waste pickers worldwide, predominantly in developing countries, but increasingly in post-industrial countries as well.[2]
Various forms of waste picking have been practiced since antiquity, but modern traditions of waste picking took root during industrialization in the nineteenth century.[3] Over the past half-century, waste picking has expanded vastly in the developing world due to urbanization, toxic colonialism and the global waste trade.[4] Many cities only provide solid waste collection.[5]
Terminology
Many terms are used to refer to people who salvage recyclables from the waste stream for sale or personal consumption. In English, these terms include rag picker, reclaimer, informal resource recoverer, binner, recycler, poacher, salvager, scavenger, and waste picker; in Spanish cartonero, chatarrero, pepenador, clasificador, minador and reciclador; and in Portuguese catador de materiais recicláveis.[6] A more contemporary term, focusing on the outcome of the professional activity, is "informal sector recycling". However, the word "informal" can be partly misleading, because in practice a continuum between total informality and proper organization in taxed registered formal activities may be encountered.
In 2008, participants of the First World Conference of Waste Pickers chose to use the term "waste picker" for English usage to facilitate global communication. The term "scavenger" is also commonly used, but many waste pickers find it demeaning due to the implied comparison with animals.[6]
A waste picker is different from a waste collector because the waste collected by the latter may be destined for a landfill or incinerator, not necessarily for a recycling facility.
"Dumpster diving" generally refers to the practice of anti-consumer and freegan activists who reclaim items such as food and clothes from the waste stream as a form of protest against consumer culture. "Waste picking" generally refers to activity motivated purely by economic need.
Prevalence and demographics
There is little reliable data about the number and demographics of waste pickers worldwide. Most academic research on waste pickers is qualitative rather than quantitative. Systematic large-scale data collection is difficult due to the profession's informal nature, porous borders, seasonally fluctuating workforce, and widely dispersed and mobile worksites. Also, many researchers are reluctant to produce quantitative data out of fear that it might be used to justify crackdowns on waste picking by authorities. Thus, the large-scale estimates that do exist are mainly extrapolations based on very small original research samples.[7] In his book, "The World's Scavengers" (2007), Martin Medina provides a methodological guide to researching waste picking.[3]
In 1988, the World Bank estimated that 1–2% of the global population subsists by waste picking.[8] A 2010 study estimates that there are 1.5 million waste pickers in India alone.[9] Brazil, the country that collects the most robust official statistics on waste pickers, estimates that nearly a quarter million of its citizens engage in waste picking.[10]
Waste picker incomes vary vastly by location, form of work, and gender. Some waste pickers live in extreme poverty, but many others earn multiple times their country's minimum wage. Recent studies indicate that waste pickers in Belgrade, Serbia, earn approximately US$3 per day,[11] while waste pickers in Cambodia typically earn $1 per day.[12] Official statistics in Brazil indicate that men earn more than women, regardless of age. Approximately two-thirds of Brazil's waste pickers are men overall, but this proportion jumps to 98% in high income waste picker groups (those earning between 3–4 times the minimum wage). No women were found in the highest income groups (those earning over 10 times the minimum wage).[13]
Over the past half century, in-country migration and increased fertility rates have caused the population of cities in the developing world to mushroom. The global population of urban dwellers is expected to double between 1987 and 2015, with 90% of this growth occurring in developing countries.[14] Much of the new population has settled in urban slums and squatter settlements, which have expanded rapidly with no central planning. The United Nations Habitat Report found that nearly one billion people worldwide live in slums, about a third of the world's urban dwellers.[14]
The rapid urbanization greatly increased the demand for informal waste collecting services, as cities lacked the infrastructure and resources to collect the totality of wastes generated by their inhabitants. Despite spending 30–50% of operation budgets on waste management, developing world cities today collect only 50–80% of refuse generated by inhabitants. Residents and businesses often resort to burning garbage or disposing of it in streets, rivers, vacant lots, and open dumps.[15] This is a source of air, land, and water pollution that threatens human health and the environment. Informal waste collectors help mitigate this harm by collecting recyclable materials by foot or in pushcarts, tricycles, donkey carts, horse carts, and pickup trucks.[16]
On the supply side, urbanization has facilitated the expansion of waste picking by creating a large pool of unemployed and underemployed residents with few alternative means of earning a livelihood. Known as "the one industry that is always hiring", waste picking provides a cushion for many who lose their jobs during times of war, crisis, and economic downturn in countries that do not have welfare systems. It is also one of the few work opportunities available to people who lack formal education or job experience.[3]
In post-industrial countries
Though documentation exists of rag pickers and scrap metal collectors supplying goods to paper mills and foundries as early as the 17th century, modern waste picking did not flourish in the US and Europe until the 19th century.[3] Just as in the developing world, the combination of industrialization and urbanization led to three trends which favored the blossoming of the informal waste collecting industry: increased generation of urban waste, increased demand for raw materials from industry, and increased numbers of urban dwellers in need of livelihoods. In that era, waste pickers were known as wharf rats, tinkers, rag and bone men, mudlarks, and ragpickers. By the mid-20th century waste picking decreased, as waste management industries were formalized, and welfare states decreased the poor's reliance on informal recycling.[2]
Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, informal recycling in parts of the United States and Western Europe once again began to mushroom. Two factors fueled the boom: First, the demand for recycling surged due to the increased waste stream, declining room in landfills, new recycling technologies, and the efforts of environmentalists.[17] In 1985 only one roadside recycling program existed in the United States. By 1998, there were 9,000 such programs and 12,000 recyclable drop-off centers.[18] Laws were passed in some states making it illegal not to recycle. Second, changes in the political economy including the loss of manufacturing jobs, cutbacks to government employment, and the roll back of the welfare state increased the ranks of the poor, working poor, and homeless—thus there were more people disposed to wastepick as a full-time profession or supplemental job.[2]
American waste pickers predominantly collect cans, bottles, and cardboard.[7] Many immigrants work as waste pickers because language and documentation barriers limit their opportunities to work elsewhere. Many homeless people also work as waste pickers—some describe it as their only alternative to panhandling.[17] Some recyclers use vans to increase their yield while others work on foot with carts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most American waste pickers are male, as waste picking is widely considered too dirty and strenuous a job for women. During an ethnography of homeless recyclers in San Francisco, sociologist Teresa Gowan claims to have met hundreds of male waste pickers, but only four female waste pickers.[17]
Costs and benefits
Social and ecological benefits
A scavenger in Hong Kong pours water onto the paper she has collected in order to increase her profit by adding to its weight.
Waste picking offers significant ecological, economic, and social benefits:
Job creation: Waste picking provides a source of livelihood to extremely poor people with few other employment opportunities. Though many waste pickers practice their trade as a full-time profession, its flexible hours make it accessible to women with other care responsibilities and to people looking to supplement income from other jobs. During times of need, waste picking serves as a safety net to street children, orphans, the elderly, widows, migrants, the disabled, the unemployed, and victims of armed conflicts. Waste picking also benefits the broader economy by supplying raw materials to industry and creating many associated jobs for middlemen who purchase, sort, process, and resell materials collected by waste pickers.[3]
Public health and sanitation: Waste pickers collect garbage from neighborhoods that lack public services. Without waste pickers, residents would be forced to burn trash, or dispose of it in rivers, streets and empty lots. Waste pickers provide the only solid waste removal service in many cities.[7]
Municipal savings: Waste pickers provide between 50 and 100% of waste collecting services in most cities of the developing world, according to a 2010 UN Habitat report.[19] This effectively serves as a mass subsidy for city governments, who do not pay for the labor. Moreover, recycling expands the lifespan of city dumps and landfills.
Reducing pollution and mitigating climate change: By cutting the quantity of virgin materials needed for production, waste pickers save room in landfills, lessen water and energy consumption, reduce air and water pollution, and abate climate change.[20] Since 2009, international delegations of waste pickers have attended at least five global climate change conferences to demand that climate funds invest in resource recovery programs that will help ensure waste pickers' livelihoods, rather than waste disposal technologies like incinerators.[21]
Social costs
Waste pickers not only generate social benefits, but also potential costs as well. These include:
Occupational hazards: See discussion below.
Child labor: Children commonly work as waste pickers. This may interfere with their education, or harm their physical, emotional, and social well-being.[12]
Litter: Waste pickers working on streets sometimes spread waste from trash bags, sullying the sidewalk and creating more work for city street sweepers.[22]
Public nuisance: Many people view waste pickers as a nuisance or source of shame for their communities. Waste pickers' perceived poverty and lack of sanitation makes some people uncomfortable or fearful. In developing countries especially, many argue that modern services should replace waste pickers.[23]
Pilfering of public property: In some cities, waste pickers have been known to steal, melt down, and resell public property such as telephone and electrical copper wire, steel fencing, or manhole covers.[3]
Occupational hazards
A young man in Uganda who is working in a waste dump. Because of work locations and conditions, there is a high chance of catching disease or injury while working as a waste picker in certain environments.
Health risks
There is a high prevalence of disease among waste pickers due to their exposure to hazardous materials such as fecal matter, paper saturated by toxic materials, bottles and containers with chemical residues, contaminated needles,[citation needed] and heavy metals from batteries.[24] A study in Mexico City found the average lifespan of a dumpsite waste collector to be 39 years, compared to the national average of 69 years,[25] though a later World Bank study estimated life span to be 53 years.[26] In Port Said, Egypt, a 1981 study showed an infant mortality rate of 1/3 among waste pickers (one out of three babies dies before reaching age one).[27]
Risks of injury
Among the most common types of job-related injuries for waste pickers are back and hand injuries caused by lifting heavy objects with little equipment.[28] In a study of 48 waste pickers in Santo André, Brazil, almost all workers reported pain in the back, legs, shoulder, arms, and hands.[29] Waste pickers who work in open dumps are exposed to large amounts of toxic fumes, and face other severe threats including being run over by trucks and caught in surface subsidence, trash slides, and fires.[24] On 10 July 2000, several hundred waste pickers were killed by a trash slide from a huge garbage mountain after monsoon rains at an open dump in Payatas, Philippines.[30][31][32]
Stigma, harassment, and violence
Most waste picking activity is illegal or unpermitted, so waste pickers commonly face harassment by police and authorities.[24] Also, there is widespread public scorn against waste pickers due to their poverty and perceived lack of hygiene. Women are subject to greater harassment, particularly sexual harassment due to their low social status and lack of social support.[33]
One of the most extreme manifestations of such stigma occurs in Colombia, where, since the 1980s, "social cleansing" vigilante groups, sometimes working with police complicity, have killed at least two thousand waste collectors, beggars, and prostitutes—whom they refer to as "disposables" (desechables). In 1992, around the peak of this activity, eleven corpses of murdered waste collectors were discovered at a university in Barranquilla. Their organs had been sold for transplants and bodies sold to the medical school for dissection (Medina 2009, 155).
Waste picker organizing
Traditionally, scholars assumed that informal workers such as waste pickers could not collectively organize due to structural barriers such as lack of legal protection, widely dispersed worksites, porous borders to their profession, a culture of independence and individualism, lack of institutional experience, and lack of money and time to build organizations.[34][35][36] Nonetheless, in recent decades waste pickers across Latin America, Asia, and Africa have begun collectively organizing to win a place within formal recycling systems.[6]
Waste pickers use many organizational formats including cooperatives, associations, companies, unions, and micro-enterprises. Despite the differences in format, most of these organizations share three primary purposes. First, by pooling capital, establishing microenterprises, and forming partnerships with business and government, waste collectors increase their selling power. Second, by securing uniforms, safety equipment, and work permits, cooperatives increase workplace dignity and safety. And third, by demanding recognition and compensation from the state for their environmental and economic contributions, cooperatives increase members' political might. These three functions—political influence, workplace dignity and safety, and increased earnings—are mutually reinforcing, like legs on a stool.[37]
Some waste pickers have created "women's only" organizations, which seek to combat gender-based discrimination at worksites and in communities. A study in Brazil indicates that women are heavily overrepresented even in coed organizations, making up 56% of the membership despite the fact that they represent only a third of the total waste picking population.[13]
Beginning in the 1990s, waste picker organizations in many parts of the world began uniting into regional, national, and transnational coalitions to increase their political voice and economic leverage. In March 2008, delegates from 30 countries gathered in Bogotá, Colombia, for the first World Conference (and Third Latin American Conference) of Waste Pickers (WIEGO 2008). One of the key issues discussed was the global trend of privatization and concentration of waste management systems. Normally, privatization is thought of as the handover of government functions to the private sector, but in this case, privatization often means the transference of services formerly provided by informal waste collectors to private firms.[23] As waste streams have expanded due to increased consumption, the waste management industry is becoming increasingly lucrative. Governments around the world are granting private companies monopolies on waste management systems, meaning that the cooperatives' survival hinges on building political and economic alliances needed to win contracts—often an uphill battle given authorities' distrust of waste collectors and the cooperatives' lack of capital for modern machinery.[22]
Organizing in Latin America
A picker in Brazil who has collected cans and bottles
In 1962, the first known Latin American waste picker's organization, Cooperativa Antioqueña de Recolectores de Subproductos, was created in Medellín, Colombia. The Colombian waste pickers movement did not emerge as a veritable political force until 1990, however, when four cooperatives who had been fighting the closure of a landfill united as the Waste Collector's Association of Bogotá (Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá, ARB). Today the ARB is one of the world's most active and established waste picker organizations. In 2013, the Goldman Environmental Prize was awarded to Nohra Padilla (representing the ARB) for her contribution to waste management and recycling in Colombia.[38][39] Throughout the 1990s, powerful waste collectors associations began to form in other Latin American countries as well—most notably in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.[40]
In 2005, Brazil hosted the first meeting of the Latin American Waste Picker Network (LAWPN)—an organization that now represents waste pickers movements from 16 countries. LAWPN has four key functions. First, it facilitates exchanges of knowledge, technology, and strategies between member organizations through regional conventions, country-to-country delegations, telecommunications, and strategic reports. Second, it organizes transnational solidarity to aid in local battles. For example, when waste pickers in Montevideo, Uruguay, needed support in a local campaign, member organizations across Latin America issued solidarity statements and pressured their national ambassadors in Uruguay to do the same. Third, LAWPN sends leaders from countries with strong waste picker movements to countries with weak movements in order to promote the development of new leadership and organizations. Fourth, LAWPN organizes global waste picker committees to make appeals for support to transnational governance organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank, the UN Convention on Climate Change, and the International Labour Organization.[40]
In Argentina, The Movement of Excluded Workers (excluded in the sense that their work is not recognized by the government and they are excluded from receiving rights) is the largest waste pickers organization. It is a social organization, independent from political parties, which brings together more than 2,000 cartoneros (waste picker) in Capital Federal and the suburbs, specifically in the neighborhoods of Lanús and Lomas de Zamora. After years of sacrifice and struggle, they managed to improve their working conditions. They have established a more logistical system—they no longer travel by hanging off of trucks, they have obtained a work incentive and uniforms, and lastly they have founded a nursery for 160 children, some of whom worked in the past as cartoneros. However, they still have to advance in designing a social security program that includes all the cartoneros of Buenos Aires. Additionally, they have to raise awareness among residents of the city to separate their trash so that they can collect door to door, without having direct contact with wet materials.
Organizing in Asia
India is home to Asia's largest waste picker movement. Self-Employed Women's Association of India, a trade union that exclusively organizes women in the informal economy and has membership of over one million, began organizing waste pickers in the late 1970s. SEWA has created nearly ninety waste pickers cooperatives, which members use to gain collective work contracts and access to credit, training, and markets.[7] One of Asia's largest waste picker associations is The Alliance of Indian Waste Pickers (AIW), a national network of 35 organizations in 22 cities. The AIW facilitates peers support, advocacy and cross-learning among waste pickers, iterant buyers, and support NGOs.[6]
Also in India, the All India Kabari Mazdoor Mahasangh (AIKMM) is locked in a battle with the New Delhi Municipal Council, which closed a deal with the Hyderabad-based company, Ramky Energy and Environment Ltd to manage the waste, in effect criminalising the work of more than 100,000 unorganised waste pickers that currently sort about 20% of Delhi's garbage.[41] The EJOLT project made a video on what they call the Delhi waste war.[42] Waste pickers in Thailand have also organized, including the Khon Kaen scavengers.[43]
In Delhi, the NGO Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group makes the work of waste pickers safer (by providing gloves and mouth masks) and it also provides for a steady source of income (by paying a monthly wage to the waste pickers).[44][45]
An Indian waste pickers union known as KKPKP recently carried out a mapping initiative to identify organizations of or that work with waste pickers across the continent—a first step towards the development an Asian network. Several NGOs and trade unions that work with waste pickers, as well as loosely formed groups of waste pickers, were identified in Cambodia, Indonesia, The Philippines, and Thailand.[7]
In Bangladesh, Grambangla Unnayan Committee is working with the waste picker community at Matuail Waste Dumpsite of Dhaka City Corporation. A daycare centre and a non-formal primary school has been established for the child waste pickers where 112 child waste pickers are given early childhood care and education. Women waste pickers of Matuail has formed a Waste Pickers' cooperative.
In Pune (India) there are a worker cooperative of Waste Pickers, called SWaCH. SWaCH is an acronym for Solid Waste Collection Handling that also means clean, in the local language. This initiative empower all members. They all work, they're not merely shareholders. Among the workers, in most age groups, women constitute a bigger group than men, with a total of 78%. However, men are the majority in the youngest age group. Before joining SWaCH, most members used to work as waste pickers or itinerant waste buyers. There's also another group that is constituted by former housekeeping and cleaning workers. The predominant group of SWaCH belongs to the Scheduled Caste, although other Backward Castes, as well as the middle castes, are also represented in SWaCH. This initiative is a result of Inclusive cities project that has the objective of integrating Waste Pickers into Municipal Solid Waste Management in Pune (India).[46]
Organizing in Africa
Egypt has one of the world's most well-established and robust informal recycling systems. The labor is done for the most part by the Zabaleen (informal waste collectors), a predominantly Coptic Christian community, which in the 1940s began collecting garbage—work viewed as impure by Egypt's Muslim majority. In 2003, the Zabaleen's existence and way of life came under threat when Cairo authorities awarded annual contracts $50 to three multinational garbage disposal companies, pushing the Zabaleen to collectively defend their livelihood.[47]
The South African Waste Picker organization held its first meeting in July 2009, which included 100 waste pickers from 26 landfills across the country. There are no present plans to create an African waste picker's network, but Shack/Slum Dwellers International organized meetings between waste picker leaders in Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa.[6]
Waste management or waste disposal includes the processes and actions required to manage waste from its inception to its final disposal. This includes the collection, transport, treatment, and disposal of waste, together with monitoring and regulation of the waste management process and waste-related laws, technologies, and economic mechanisms.
A waste collector, also known as a garbage man, garbage collector, trashman, binman or dustman, is a person employed by a public or private enterprise to collect and dispose of municipal solid waste (refuse) and recyclables from residential, commercial, industrial or other collection sites for further processing and waste disposal. Specialised waste collection vehicles featuring an array of automated functions are often deployed to assist waste collectors in reducing collection and transport time and for protection from exposure. Waste and recycling pickup work is physically demanding and usually exposes workers to an occupational hazard.
Municipal solid waste (MSW), commonly known as trash or garbage in the United States and rubbish in Britain, is a waste type consisting of everyday items that are discarded by the public. "Garbage" can also refer specifically to food waste, as in a garbage disposal; the two are sometimes collected separately. In the European Union, the semantic definition is 'mixed municipal waste,' given waste code 20 03 01 in the European Waste Catalog. Although the waste may originate from a number of sources that has nothing to do with a municipality, the traditional role of municipalities in collecting and managing these kinds of waste have produced the particular etymology 'municipal.'
Waste collection is a part of the process of waste management. It is the transfer of solid waste from the point of use and disposal to the point of treatment or landfill. Waste collection also includes the curbside collection of recyclable materials that technically are not waste, as part of a municipal landfill diversion program.
The Zabbaleen is a word which literally means "garbage people" in Egyptian Arabic. The contemporary use of the word in Egyptian Arabic is to mean "garbage collectors". In cultural contexts, the word refers to teenagers and adults who have served as Cairo's informal garbage collectors since approximately the 1940s. The Zabbaleen are also known as Zarraba, which means "pig-pen operators." The word Zabbalīn came from the Egyptian Arabic word zebāla which means "garbage".
There is no national law in the United States that mandates recycling. State and local governments often introduce their own recycling requirements. In 2014, the recycling/composting rate for municipal solid waste in the U.S. was 34.6%. A number of U.S. states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont have passed laws that establish deposits or refund values on beverage containers while other jurisdictions rely on recycling goals or landfill bans of recyclable materials.
Environmental issues in Brazil include deforestation, illegal wildlife trade, illegal poaching, air, land degradation, and water pollution caused by mining activities, wetland degradation, pesticide use and severe oil spills, among others. As the home to approximately 13% of all known species, Brazil has one of the most diverse collections of flora and fauna on the planet. Impacts from agriculture and industrialization in the country threaten this biodiversity.
Toronto Solid Waste Management Services is the municipal service that handles the transfer and disposal of garbage as well as the processing and sale of recyclable materials collected through the blue box program in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Recology, formerly known as Norcal Waste Systems, is a waste management company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company collects and processes municipal solid waste, reclaiming reusable materials. The company also operates transfer stations, materials recovery facilities (MRFs), a number of landfills, and continues to spearhead renewable energy projects. Recology is the largest organics compost facility operator by volume in the United States.
Brazil's overall recycling rate is 4%, according to Abrelpe but differs a lot from city to city. Brazil has no structured municipal recycling programs. Only 6.4% Brazilian Municipalities have official waste recycling programs and more than 70% of Brazilians do not separate their recyclable materials into proper bins. The recovery of recyclable material is largely left to waste pickers, who earn a living by collecting recyclables and selling them to private recycling companies.
The San Francisco Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance is a local municipal ordinance requiring all persons located in San Francisco to separate their recyclables, compostables and landfilled trash and to participate in recycling and composting programs. Passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009, it became the first local municipal ordinance in the United States to universally require source separation of all organic material, including food residuals.
Nohra Padilla is a Colombian environmentalist. She grew up in Bogotá. She has assumed a leading position in the Association of Recyclers of Bogotá, and of the National Association of Recyclers in Colombia, which organizes about 12,000 members. She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2013 for her contribution to waste management and recycling in Colombia.
GFL Environmental Inc. is a waste management company with headquarters in Toronto, Canada. GFL operates in all provinces in Canada, and currently employs more than 8,850 people. The company provides environmental services to municipal, residential, commercial, industrial and institutional customers. On July 6, 2021, the company announced the formation of the Resource Recovery Alliance (RRA) and an agreement to acquire Canadian Stewardship Services Alliance.
Waste management in India falls under the purview of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC). In 2016, this ministry released the Solid Wastage Management (SWM) Rules, which replaced by the Municipal Solid Waste Rules, and 2000 of which had been in place for 16 years. This national policy plays a significant role in the acknowledgment and inclusion of the informal sector into the waste management process for the first time.
Qoshee also known as Koshe is a large open landfill which receives rubbish and waste from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The name means "dirty" in Amharic.
China's waste import ban, instated at the end of 2017, prevented foreign inflows of waste products. Starting in early 2018, the government of China, under Operation National Sword, banned the import of several types of waste, including plastics with a contamination level of above 0.05 percent. The ban has greatly affected recycling industries worldwide, as China had been the world's largest importer of waste plastics and processed hard-to-recycle plastics for other countries, especially in the West.
Waste management in South Korea involves waste generation reduction and ensuring maximum recycling of the waste. This includes the appropriate treatment, transport, and disposal of the collected waste. South Korea's Waste Management Law was established in 1986, replacing the Environmental Protection Law (1963) and the Filth and Cleaning Law (1973). This new law aimed to reduce general waste under the waste hierarchy in South Korea. This Waste Management Law imposed a volume-based waste fee system, effective for waste produced by both household and industrial activities.
In Egypt, waste and lack of proper management of it pose serious health and environmental problems for the country and its population. There has been some governmental attempts to better the system of waste management since the 1960s but those have not proven sufficient until now. In the last 10 years focus on this issue and solutions to it has increased both from the government and civil society. Some attempts at recycling are present, and growing in the country. But these are largely informal or private actors, and government initiatives are necessary to properly manage these systems and provide them with appropriate resources.
The Mbeubeuss Landfill, also Mbeubeuss Rubbish Dump is a solid waste disposal site in Senegal. It is the main solid waste disposal site for the capital city of Dakar, with a projected population of approximately 4 million people, as of 2022, serving the homes, businesses and industries of that metropolis. The landfill hosts an estimated 4,000 scavengers looking for anything recyclable, primarily plastic. The landfill has been in existence since 1968, however the Senegalese authorities propose to shut it down and set up smaller recycling centers instead.
Informal waste collection is the activity of "manually sorting and extracting various recyclable and reusable materials from mixed waste, at legal and illegal dumpsites, on top of or under piles of waste, in bins, at various transfer points, in transport trucks or elsewhere". When this activity is carried out in bins, the term "scavenging" is used. This activity is one way of collecting waste, the other ways consisting of collecting it at source or collecting it in an organised way.
1 2 3 Gowan, Teresa (1997). "American Untouchables: Homeless Scavengers in San Francisco's Underground Economy". International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 17 (3/4): 159–190. doi:10.1108/eb013304.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Martin, Medina (2007). The World's Scavengers: Salvaging for Sustainable Consumption and Production. New York: Altamira Press.
↑ Wilson, D. C., Velis, C., Cheeseman, C. (2005). Role of informal sector in recycling in waste management in developing countries. London: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Centre for Environmental control and Waste Management.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑ Scheinberg; Justine Anschütz (December 2007). "Slim pickin's: Supporting waste pickers in the ecological modernisation of urban waste management systems". International Journal of Technology Management and Sustainable Development. 5 (3): 257–27. doi:10.1386/ijtm.5.3.257/1.
↑ Bartone, C. (January 1988). "The Value in Wastes". Decade Watch.
↑ Chaturvedi, Bharati (2010). "Mainstreaming Waste Pickers and the Informal Recycling Sector in the Municipal Solid Waste". Handling and Management Rules 2000, A Discussion Paper.
↑ Simpson-Hebert, Mayling, Aleksandra Mitrovic and Gradamir Zajic (2005). A Paper Life: Belgrade's Roma in the Underworld of Waste Scavenging and Recycling. Loughborough: WEDC.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
1 2 Tarchi Crivellari, Helena Maria, Sonia Maria Dias and André de Souza Pen (2008). "Informação e trabalho: uma leitura sobre os catadores de material reciclável a partir das bases públicas de dados" in Catadores na Cena Urbana: Construção de Políticas Socioambientais (V. H. Kemp, & H.M.T. Crivellari, ed). Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
1 2 UN Habitat (2003). The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. London: Earthscan.
↑ Medina, Martin (December 2000). "Scavenger cooperatives in Asia and Latin America". Resources, Conservation and Recycling. 31: 51–69. doi:10.1016/s0921-3449(00)00071-9.
↑ Hart, Kieth (1973). "Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana". Journal of Modern African Studies. 11:61–89.
↑ Sethuraman, S. V., ed. (1981). "The Urban Informal Sector in Developing Countries: Employment". Poverty and Environment. Geneva:JLO.
↑ Tokman, V. E. (1978). "An Exploration into the Nature of Informal-formal Sector Relationships". World Development. 6 (9–10): 1065–1075. doi:10.1016/0305-750x(78)90063-3.
↑ Arroyo-Moreno, J.; Rivas-Rios, F.; Lardinois I. (1999). Solid waste management in Latin America: The role of micro- and small enterprises and cooperatives. Lima, Peru.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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