WASTE PICKERS
No reclaimers,
NO RECYCLING
S
outh Africa’s waste pickers are critical to the recycling economy and green future yet, for the most par t, are still marginalised and discarded. According to research, reclaimers collect up to 90% of all post-consumer packaging and paper left behind; if they stopped today, there would be no recycling industry in South Africa. Over the past several years, Dr Melanie Samson – senior lecturer: Human Geography in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at Wits – has been leading initiatives to ensure that waste pickers are recognised and valued. Samson recently completed a three-year research project on ‘waste picker integration’ funded by South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation’s Waste Research, Development and Innovation Roadmap and the current Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE). She also facilitated the DFFE’s national stakeholder process to develop the Waste Picker Integration Guideline for South Africa (‘the Guideline’) and is its primary author. Samson previously worked for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, and led a research and education project on gender and waste privatisation for the South African Municipal Workers Union. Her research focuses on how reclaimers forge value out of waste, reclaimer dispossession and ‘integration’,
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AUGUST 2021
working in the informal waste economy. A major challenge has been that people don’t really understand the value that reclaimers bring to the South African recycling economy, Samson notes. “Each par ty [municipality, depar tment] has a different understanding of the existing recycling system. It’s therefore essential to develop a common understanding about what reclaimers do – with reclaimers sharing their experiences,” she adds. They are prevented from access to landfills in some municipalities, stigmatised by government and the public, exposed to unhealthy working conditions, and vulnerable to volatile price changes on the scrap market. Samson believes that the only way to overcome the challenges with regard to integrating waste pickers into the formal waste management sector is first to demystify the sector.
According to the CSIR, informal waste pickers (also known as reclaimers) recycle roughly 90% of the recyclables collected from households in South Africa – saving municipalities up to R750 million in landfill space ever y year.
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the political ecology of waste, and informal worker organising. Her research on reclaimers arose out of her activist work accompanying reclaimer movements. Prior to joining Wits, she was the African waste sector specialist for Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, where she worked with reclaimer (waste picker) organisations across Africa, Asia and Latin America. This, she says, is where she learned about the many challenges that reclaimers face
Who’s helping who? From her work with Latin American reclaimer organisations, Samson has been able to see what element makes those integration models successful, in comparison to the South African context. “In countries like Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, you have well-developed models where cities pay for their service,” she says.
