Richard Ingham Yahoo News 8 Dec 09;
COPENHAGEN (AFP) – Ignored, marginalised or despised in many countries, wastepickers from Asia, Latin America and Africa have come together in Copenhagen to lobby for recognition as unsung heroes in the fight against climate change.
An estimated 15 million people around the world survive by sifting through trash, rooting out plastic packaging, glass bottles, scrap metal, paper and other tossed-out goods that are then resold for recycling.
In some places, the recycling rate reaches more than 80 percent, an exploit in efficiency that saves the planet a fortune in environmental terms.
By re-using old waste, manufacturers avert the need to extract new raw materials.
And they no longer emit the greenhouse-gases, measurable in millions of tonnes, that would be expended to transform primary materials into a source for new garments, newspapers, packaging and so on.
In a side event on Tuesday at the December 7-18 climate talks, wastepickers swapped their experiences as workers in a vital but informal industry.
They complained of indifference from the authorities and society at large -- and a threat to their already-precarious livelihoods from corporations and even the UN process itself.
Baby Mohite, 38, a tiny Indian woman dressed in a brilliant blue-and-yellow sari, described the painful step-by-step process with which she and other salvagers in the city of Pune had hauled themselves out of anonymity.
"As soon as companies realised there was money in recycling, they came in and encroached on what we were doing," she said through an interpreter.
"So we decided to set up a cooperative, and instead of picking through garbage containers, we now do a door-to-door collection service," she said.
Not only is the quality of household waste better -- it is easier to sort when you get it from source, rather than when it is jumbled up and spoiled by liquids -- the change has also brought respect, said Mohite.
"As long as we were working in filth, people were not concerned, we were ignored, we were considered no higher than the animals that scavenge in the rubbish," she said.
"Today, though, we are greeted by householders and they ask after our health. We value the money they give us but we also value the respect they show us."
Bald, bull-necked and with the charismatic, raw-edged voice of a man used to addressing large outdoor gatherings, Chilean activist Exequiel Estay described the tough business of organising poor, often vulnerable families who eked out their lives on what others throw away.
In the past seven years, his group, the Movimiento Nacional de Reclicadores de Chile (MNRC), claiming to represent 60,000 waste pickers, has prodded, hassled and arm-twisted local councils, regional authorities and even the head of state into deals that give them an official status.
With the power of the Internet, the Chileans have also teamed up with counterparts in four other Latin American countries to press their demands.
"Now we are called recycling professionals," Estay said proudly. "We save the country 240,000 cubic metres (8.4 million cubic feet) in landfill and 108,000 tonnes in carbon dioxide emissions."
According to a study published by an Indian organisation, the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, there are 15 million waste recyclers worldwide.
It estimated that the sector in New Delhi alone saves 962,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, equivalent to the annual emissions from 175,000 cars.
Brazilian wastepicker Severino Lina and others spoke bitterly of big corporations, many of them European, who eyed a big market in developing countries: building and operating hi-tech plants that incinerate waste and produce electricity.
Some of these projects threatening their livelihoods are being supported by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a part of the UN's Kyoto Protocol treaty on climate change, they said.
Under the CDM, corporations in rich countries can claim "carbon credits" to offset against their own greenhouse-gas emissions if their project qualifies as an initiative that reduces emissions in a poor country. The credits can then be bought and sold, like any asset.
Indian activist Mohan Nanavare, a former wastepicker and son of a wastepicker, scoffed at the logic behind this.
Not only did incineration increase carbon emissions, its automated operations put hand-picking recyclers out of a job. And in countries such as India, where environmental laws are lax or poorly applied, there was the risk of toxic pollution from the burning, he said.
"Countries who are going in for incineration technology are being supported financially by the CDM," he said.
"Instead of that, the recycling sector should be promoted. Recycling not only protects the environment, it also gives people livelihoods."
