Paper 56

Waste pickers have been scratching out a living on the margins of urban solid waste systems since these systems came into being, taking advantage of the status of waste materials as common property resources and earning, in general, much more than the minimum wage.  While picking may provide a solution and a livelihood for pickers, it is often seen as a problem by formal authorities and development agents.  With the intention of helping the waste pickers, development interventions focus on pickers’ welfare needs or rights, and not on their professional activities, an approach which may disrupt livelihoods and fail to meet the needs of the pickers themselves.

The modernisation of waste management systems opens new niches and puts governments and the formal private sector into new relationships to each other.  In the process, it allocates both responsibilities and rights around waste in new ways.  In this process, waste pickers can be losers, but they can also be winners, especially when waste picking is contextualised as providing new opportunities for waste picking, and as contributing to solving the waste management problem by keeping materials out of landfills.  The best chance to support sustainable and positive change comes when there is a commitment to work with waste pickers embedded in their professional context, and to support them in finding and entering the better and more stable economic niches that can open during the process of modernising the waste management system.

This is a sector-specific conclusion, but it has broad implications for other kinds of poverty reduction actions.