by: Julianne Boulton
Everyday thousands of men, women and children in developing countries rummage through the dumps of some of the world’s most populated cities. They look for waste items that they can be sold to middlemen who will go on to sell them to factories for recycling. They are ‘waste pickers’ and they are the world’s unrecognized environmentalists.
There are more than two million waste pickers worldwide. Other estimates of the number of people engaged in informal employment as a waster picker are,
- India – 1.5 million
- Bogota, Columbia – 15,000
- Montevideo, Uruguay – 15,000
- Buenos Aries, Argentina – 9,000.
The environmental benefit of the work that these ‘waste pickers’ perform is enormous. Due to the work of these marginalized workers, a large proportion of solid waste produced by large cities in developing countries is recycled. This benefits the environment by decreasing the amount of waste that enters landfill sites and decreases the demand of virgin raw materials. In Jakarta, Indonesia 30% of the volume of waste produced is recycled due to the work of ‘waste pickers’. Without the labor that the ‘waste pickers’ provide, most of these cities in developing countries would not be able to afford to adequately process the solid waste produced. Yet in almost all these countries ‘waste pickers’ that provide such an indispensable service face many problems. The informal working conditions, the lack of occupational safety and the lack of social protection results in the deprivation of their basic human rights.
To better understand the issues and conditions that ‘waste pickers’ have to go through I would definitely recommend watching ‘Don’t Waste People’ by Julia Waterhous. The documentary that was released 18 months ago is “a film about the lives, livelihoods and efforts of waste pickers in New Delhi, India to attain basic rights”. Julia first met the ‘waste pickers’ of New Delhi while on a study abroad programme in India and then returned back to make the film. You can watch the full documentary (112 minutes) or the trailer.