Waste picker
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.
"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.
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.
[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 United Nations Habitat Report found that nearly one billion people worldwide live in slums, about a third of the world's urban dwellers.
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.
[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.
[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).
[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.
[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).
[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.
First, by pooling capital, establishing microenterprises, and forming partnerships with business and government, waste collectors increase their selling power.
[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.
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.
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.
First, it facilitates exchanges of knowledge, technology, and strategies between member organizations through regional conventions, country-to-country delegations, telecommunications, and strategic reports.
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.
SEWA has created nearly ninety waste pickers cooperatives, which members use to gain collective work contracts and access to credit, training, and markets.
[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.
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.
