A Waste of Wealth: How Indian Cities Are Ignoring the Recyclers but Asking for Recycling

India's primary recycling system is through the labor of the informal recycling sector, comprising wastepickers, a range of traders, big and small; agents, and reprocessors. Their livelihoods are based on access to recyclable waste, such as paper, cardboard, plastics, metals, and glass. A typical flow of waste starts the moment someone trashes something in urban India. If it contains any of these materials, a wastepicker will pick it up. At the end of the day, or a few days later, such waste will be sorted out into dozens of categories, even various kinds of plastic and paper. This is sold to a local waste trader, who in turn, hyper-segregates it into even more categories. When the quantities are large enough, they are bailed and sold to large traders. Each large trader specializes in a specific kind of material, such as plastic water bottles. Traders sell these materials, typically via agents, to reprocessing plants, where the material is transformed into something new. Plastics are typically pelletized and molded into suitcases and plastic bags. The recycling chain plays out primarily as a trading chain, and often stretches across states and regions. At the bottom of this pyramid, working as the backbone, lie the wastepickers. Most of them are unregistered, part of what is called the informal sector. Yet, they recycle over 20% of the waste generated in an Indian city.

In Delhi, over 150,000 persons are engaged at various levels in the chain. Of these, at least 30,000 are adult wastepickers, and about 10,000, children wastepickers. The rest are traders, sorters, reprocessors. Across India, estimates are that 1.5 to 2 million people work as wastepickers alone, ¹ approximating about 10% ² of the world's total. Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group's own research showed that in Delhi alone, the waste recycling system run by the informal sector saved more than 3.6 times the greenhouse gas emissions any single formal project that had applied for carbon credits had ever done. ³ While the projects received carbon credits, the wastepickers, far greater emission averters, have never been thanked. They add value to discards, as much as 750% ⁴ to a unit of plastic. In every large city in the developing world, nearly one percent ⁵ of the population comprises people who earn their living off of waste recycling.

Many—in fact 80%—of the reprocessing plants in Delhi are informal. They do not have the required licenses to operate. Several have reopened illegally after they were shut down, for being located in areas that were not allowed to host recycling plants under the city's master plan. Yet, about 3,400 such plants in the plastic sector alone create livelihoods for 25,000 persons. Plants such as these depend on waste plastics, gleaned by wastepickers, for their operations. When such plastics are sent off to waste-to-energy plants, they lose feedstock, and livelihoods become insecure. ⁶

Of these, wastepickers are the most vulnerable as they are already poor, scavenge in neighborhoods, and often face the ire of the police and public due to the stigma related to their work. On the other hand, their homes are located on landfills or highly degraded and underserved areas. Often, they do not find space in a slum. In cities like Delhi, many wastepickers have accumulated capital to become small traders, a move-up on the ladder. This author believes that the trajectory of the work and lives of wastepickers and small traders in India is embedded in the environmental justice debate because through their back-breaking work, bodies and exposures, and their marginalized socio-economic position, they bear the brunt of middle class consumption as well as cleanse the planet of (some of) it. Yet, in modernizing India, they find themselves losing even these livelihoods as corporate entities are privileged for contracts. They continue to work, but under becoming more marginal than previously, while continuing recycling services.

This article details environmental justice as it plays out in the arena of Indian waste handling and recycling, through the case study of India.

The year 2013 was a watershed year in South Delhi. A much unwanted, disliked, and contested waste-to-energy plant run by Jindal ITF Ecopolis began operations, with subsidies and permissions from the Delhi Government. The technology required 1,200 tons of paper, plastics, and cardboard every day, which it would convert into energy, after burning it. The plant was opposed by several interest groups as soon as it was announced. Residents of the densely populated South Delhi locality, where the plant was sited, protested against having to bear the brunt of the pollution that the plant was expected to generate. Some environmental organizations were opposed to the plant because of pollution, too. Wastepickers from the nearby Okhla landfill, organized as Safai Sena, protested because the waste they once picked from the landfill would be diverted to the plant, leaving them without a livelihood. A study conducted nine months after operations showed the impacts—significant depopulation (approximately 40%) among those dependent on landfill wastes, since such waste was no longer being dumped on the landfill to be picked by wastepickers, but sent to the plant. Landfill pickers reported a 24% decrease in incomes. Respondents noted a five percent decrease in the percentage of children attending school between last winter and now. About 67% of these cited having not enough money and having to enlist children as income earners as the primary reasons for their children stopping schooling.

Despite a well-reported Public Interest Litigation filed by the local residents, the plant continues to run.

The impact of the waste-to-energy plant was much felt much further away, in the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) area. From 2001 onwards, the NDMC has engaged with Chintan to help handling waste through a system of doorstep collection. This greatly reduces the amount of waste to be transported. The wastepicker-delivered doorstep collection was widely praised in a customer survey by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Private Limited. ⁷

In 2013, as the waste-to-energy plant began operations, mid-level NDMC officials informally asked that the wastepickers stop taking segregated waste away for recycling. The officials explained that the waste-to-energy plant was not receiving enough waste, and the NDMC was obliged to give them this quality and quantity of waste. The wastepickers ignored the persistent requests, since it meant a loss of livelihood. To a large degree, this is was because they were well organized and able to share a strategy.

This points out how often, institutional decisions related to the mode of contracting sideline services from smaller actors, and impact wastepicker and other livelihoods. These decisions indicate how deeply rooted municipal trust in large private companies is.

Such trust has previously proven to be counter-intuitive, as empirical data shows.

Hanjer Biotech Energies Pvt. Ltd, set up a plant in Nagpur, Central India, that resulted in livelihood loss for over 300 Dalit women wastepickers, who picked waste off the landfill. That waste was diverted to a plant, barely 500 meters away. Many of these women were illiterate, without other opportunities. They were not given jobs in the plant. “Surely some of the women wastepickers could have been hired for such work?” I asked Dr. Irfan Furniturewala, one of proprietors, a few months later, ⁸ in another meeting. “Firstly, these women, we waited for them. They never came from the front,” he replied. “They always came jumping over from the back. This is not correct.” In addition, he also informed me that he didn't think that what he could offer would be “women's work.” In Nagpur, the women seek daily work as laborers through a labor contractor. The work pays less, does not allow them flexibility, and is erratic. ⁹

In Rajkot, Gujarat, the courts have ordered Hanjer to compensate farmers for the pollution they have caused. In Pune, Maharastra, it is running a plant without renewed licenses. In Faridabad, Haryana, the plant is being shut down by the authorities. Despite this track record, Hanjer has not been blacklisted.

Another company, A2Z, has similarly demonstrated the poor quality of services and marginalization caused to wastepickers by waste management companies. Their contract for the city of Kanpur allowed them to pick up waste from the doorstep and process it. An investigative film by a wastepickers' association, Safai Sena, traced this. The film interviewed young wastepickers, school dropouts, who explained how they had to eat before they considered an education for themselves. They filmed waste dealers, who had been hard hit by this privatization. They filmed women who continue to pick trash, in lesser quantities, because there was nothing else for them to do. ¹⁰ A2Z also disrupted the work of wastepickers in Patna, where it was contracted for doorstep collection. And before A2Z was contracted for Nainital, a hill town in Uttarakhand, a scheme called Mission Butterfly tried to convert Nainital into a zero waste town. Unfortunately, the municipality did not consider the process as important, but began to seek public-private partnership (PPP) with private waste management firms.

Five companies bid ¹¹ for this contract. Of these, three of them had already tarnished their reputations by displacing wastepickers and small waste dealers. M/s SPML had provided similar services in three zones of Delhi. As they began to fulfill their contractual obligations to the city, Chintan observed that nearly 50% of Delhi's informal sector ¹² waste service providers in the area quickly became unemployed or underemployed. The work of another bidder, M/s Ramky Enviro Engineers Ltd, had resulted in the same outcomes for wastepickers, as we have seen previously.

Such PPPs are unable to tie up with wastepickers in ways that are equitable, fair, and enable the terms of contract to be fulfilled. In their model, wastepickers are not people, part of the recycling chain, but cheap labor. Since many wastepickers earn at least minimum wages, being paid minimum wages with no flexibility is no incentive for participating in a PPP. Moreover, they manage their work through unique process innovations—often the individual's work is actually undertaken by the family, when he or she leaves for the village, or is ill. Such informal arrangements are a poor fit in the current PPP system.

From the municipal point of view, they are not credible enough to be given a task as responsible as handling the city's waste all on their own. There are exceptions in Delhi, Patna, Pune, and in Mumbai, but there is little evidence that this is the case in other cities. So deeply rooted is the image of the credible as the image of the corporate, that it continues to be the most favored choice for handling urban Indian waste, even after it has repeatedly demonstrated its failure to do so. The popular image of the wastepicker, as the other of a white-collar corporate employee, too, underscores such under-confidence.

Hand-in-hand with this is the trend of how recycling is being framed. Wastepickers are part of the recycling trade, a profitable business that enables materials to be reprocessed after a long chain of trading and sorting. That is why only materials that can be reprocessed are traded. But many policymakers fail to understand this. They believe that paper, plastic, metals—are as much of a problem as wet waste and handling it through waste-to-energy plants or companies will improve the cleanliness of a city. For many municipalities, recycling must be visible, and loaded with signage, as it is in the Global North. As more municipal officials visit the developed world, they return raving about those systems. But India has one of the highest recycling rates, and such waste is not much of a problem at all. The poor understanding of recycling therefore identifies the wrong problem and results in their exclusion from city plans, illegalizing their important work.

The landscape of waste contracting in India today shows how public properties are being ring fenced, and waste, once considered a public resource by the poor, is now privatized. This fencing of the commons is happening with the knowledge that the urban poor are paying a heavy price for this policy. In each case, local non-profits and advocacy groups informed the municipality about the problem with the privatization model, and asked that alternatives be tried out. In most cases, they have been ignored, and the wastepickers in the area either completely or partially lose their livelihoods. Almost every contract assigns the contractor the right over the dry waste, enabling him to sell it, to barter it with wastepickers as unequal payment for work, or to process it. All these hit the livelihood prospects of wastepickers, with severe impacts; once living off the waste, are transformed from informal to illegal.

Such a transformation could itself be termed illegal; several rules and policies in India mandate their inclusion. They are listed here:

• E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2011

• Plastic Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2011

• The National Action Plan for Climate Change, 2009

• The Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) Audit on Municipal Solid Waste in India (December 2008)

• The National Environment Policy, 2006

Chintan's 2012 report, Failing the Grade, ¹³ researched five years after the CAG's performance audit of solid waste management in India, suggested violation of these rules. Chintan studied Patna, Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Varanasi, Mathura, Allahabad, Hyderabad, Indore, Bangalore, Nagpur, Rajkot, Cochin, Pune, and Delhi, using project proposals for the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), masterplans, ground visits, and interviews. Chintan observed that none of the 14 cities had fully implemented these rules and policies.

Such violation of rules and policies, would, in an ideal world, render the solid waste system itself illegal, and contracts null and void. That this has not happened is, in some part, because of the understanding of solid waste as a crisis, which requires centralized technology and formal management principles for its quick and best handling. Equally consensual is the understanding that wastepickers are subjects for a social service project, if such a project is set up at all. Their manual or even semi-manual operations, cycle-rickshaws not trucks, uniformed personas, all contribute to their being framed as labor, rather than persons with a unique, sustainable service to offer. Increasingly, as the examples show, they have to compete with large companies and on an uneven playing field during several sections of their work, from collection to recycling.

The trends across India suggest that the informal recycling sector, particularly wastepickers, are increasingly being edged out of their livelihoods. This matters on a larger scale to India, because of economic, environmental, and ethical reasons.

A United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) study ¹⁴ underscored how the informal sector contributes to urban well-being. In Bangalore, India, it estimated the sector recycled 15% of the waste, compared to 10% by the formal systems. In Delhi, the estimates were 27% to the formal sector's 7%. Globally, the trend persists in developing countries. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the numbers are 6.9% to the formal sector's 0.1%. Who would do this recycling if they didn't? Who would pay for it? This efficient recycling is on account of an incredible, indigenous entrepreneurship. It is a poor person's entrepreneurship, from which business managers can learn many lessons yet.

From just their skills and networks, wastepickers earn a living. Why block that? Why deprive them of being able to feed themselves with dignity? Who would pay for their work otherwise?

Of course, their work itself must be upgraded and made safer, because there is nothing green about recycling if it is based on human health and misery. With such interventions, wastepickers can be part of the green economy that India urgently needs if it is to grow sustainably.

The Indian government has recently decided to build a hundred smart cities, acknowledging the rapid, ongoing urbanization. But older cities can become smart too, and both cities can only flourish as sustainable entities if they are to foster green jobs, among other growth strategies in the era of climate change. Cities today have to re-examine and embrace people who live in them—both as citizens and through the gifts their work offers to citizens. Wastepickers are part of our urban landscape, and it is thanks to them, and others in the recycling chain, that we enjoy much cleaner cities than we otherwise would. That alone should ensure we ensure they enjoy a formal space in our municipal waste handling systems.