India’s waste pickers: indispensable but invisible

India's waste management sector is projected to reach a valuation of around $14 billion by 2025, with an expected annual growth rate of seven per cent. However, as waste increasingly becomes a valuable resource within a growing commercial waste management market, traditional waste pickers – who pick and sell on recyclable materials from streets, bins and landfill sites – are being marginalised from the roles they have quietly undertaken for many years.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines the informal waste management sector as “individuals or small and micro-enterprises that intervene in waste management without being registered and without being formally charged with providing waste management services”.

These workers play a critical role in supporting overall waste management and resource efficiency in countries like India by collecting, sorting, trading and sometimes even reinserting discarded recyclable waste back into the economy. However, although these workers – known in India as ‘rag pickers’ – play a crucial role in environmental sustainability by acting as the main collectors of recyclable waste in India, they face systemic marginalisation due a lack of recognition, representation and exclusion from social security and legal protection systems.

‘Up to four million waste pickers in India’
In India, there are between 1.5 and four million informal waste pickers, who recover, sort and sell on reusable and recyclable solid waste from streets, bins, landfills and material recovery facilities: a practice they have engaged in for decades, long before ‘recycling’ became a popular term.

A fundamental aspect of effective management of solid waste is the segregation of waste at its source, which involves separating valuable recyclable materials from general refuse that has no potential for cost-effective recovery or re-use. Waste pickers are essential to this process, diligently searching through discarded materials to recover valuable items such as plastics, paper and metals for re-use, recycling and recovery of value through other means, such as electricity generation from waste. Many of these waste pickers have developed the local intelligence and expertise essential for supporting a ‘zero-waste cycle’ – meaning they can identify valuable materials for collection and have developed relationships with scrap merchants who can ensure value is recovered from the collected waste. 

In Delhi, reports suggest that these individuals – who almost exclusively work in the informal sector – manage to recycle around 20–25 per cent of the 10,000 metric tonnes of waste produced each day. Their careful work not only reduces the amount of waste that ends up in landfill – with its resulting negative environmental impacts, such as contributing to climate change through methane emissions – but also contributes to resource conservation and energy and cost savings.

Formalisation of waste management
However, organisations that collaborate with and support the waste picking community report that a significant number of the workers are being displaced and marginalised as waste management systems become more formalised.

The Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, which superseded the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000, incorporated a number of measures aimed at integrating and formally organising the informal waste picking community (comprising rag pickers and ‘kabadiwallahs’, the latter of which collect recyclable solid waste from households, calling door-to-door), into India’s wider waste collection system.

The management of solid waste, generated from residential, industrial and commercial activities, involves a large number of stakeholders, including waste generators, municipal bodies (local authorities) that collect a proportion of the waste generated by businesses and households, and informal waste pickers. As a result, the SWM 2016 rules were intended to make solid waste management more inclusive, participatory and decentralised, and granted legal recognition to informal waste pickers, to help prevent them being subject to harassment and marginalisation.

In 2020, the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy (Vidhi) – an independent think-tank which conducts research into ways of improving legislation and governance for the public good – undertook a study to assess the extent of implementation of the SWM Rules 2016 in Delhi-NCT, India’s capital city. The researchers found that the state government of Delhi–NCR has instead “prioritised the privatisation of the waste management process over the integration of the informal sector” into the overall waste management system. In short, instead of empowering informal workers to manage waste better, Vidhi says Delhi–NCR’s municipalities have “given the task to private waste collection concessionaires”, pushing the informal rag pickers and kabadiwallahs further into the margins. 

Waste collection ‘outsourced to the private sector’
Experts say that although the 2016 SWM Rules seek to enhance the inclusivity, participation and decentralisation of solid waste management practices, they also allow the use of technologies such as incinerators, which compete with waste workers for high calorific waste. This has displaced many of the waste workers. Also, the privatised door-to-door collection of household garbage has been outsourced to larger, more formal players.

For example, Vidhi says that in Delhi, the waste-value chain consists of two parallel collection and management streams – the formal chain involving private concessionaires (private waste collection and management firms) and municipal bodies; and the informal chain involving the unorganised sector. However, Vidhi says the local government in Delhi has chosen to work with private concessionaires, allowing them to collect refuse from residential areas.

“As a result, the informal sector has been denied access to those areas,” concludes Vidhi. “Many waste pickers said they are left to pick up waste on main roads, and don’t enter most neighbourhoods due to fear of being misconstrued as thieves and harassed. This has largely affected the livelihood of this unorganised sector.”

Waste picking is commonly viewed as the lowest in the hierarchy of informal jobs in urban areas, and a significant proportion of the workforce are women and children. A high percentage of the waste pickers are also drawn from marginalised and minority communities.

Mistreatment of workers
Saira Banu, a waste picker who lives near the Bhalswa landfill in north-west Delhi, told researchers from Vidhi about instances of informal waste workers being mistreated by private concessionaires at the site. She also claimed that Delhi’s municipal corporation had made little effort to provide the informal workers – who pick recyclable material from the landfill – with identification cards and other necessary support.

“Concessionaires demand payment from workers for the segregation of waste from the trucks,” she claimed. “Additionally, they require fees when we attempt to dispose of non-recyclable materials at the landfill, even after we have finished the cleaning and segregation tasks.”

According to Vidhi, integration of the informal workers into the overall waste-value chain is essential for achieving effective waste management in India. “Organising these communities would ensure effective solid waste management and encourage recycling over merely dumping of waste,” states Vidhi. “By legally acknowledging these communities, i.e., providing them with the appropriate identification and training these workers, further harassment, ostracisation and discrimination can be prevented to some extent.”

Vidhi adds: “It is clear from our field visits and desk-based review of the SWM situation in Delhi that the administration continues to work with an inadequate waste infrastructure, despite having a huge informal sector that largely contributes to the waste-value chain.

“This shows that having adopted a centralised approach the past 16 years (2000–2016), under the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000), changing one’s mindset to that of decentralisation has been a difficult transition for the bureaucracy.” 

Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a Delhi-based NGO whose mission and activities aim to improve overall environmental sustainability and boost the working conditions of informal waste pickers through improved and safer employment opportunities and training, reports that many waste pickers are being displaced and marginalised as waste management systems become more formalised.

Decline in earnings
Bharati Chaturvedi, Chintan’s founder, states that the ongoing transformation of the waste sector to allow an increasing number of private companies to become involved in waste collection, recycling and management has not benefited the workforce of informal waste pickers. “Their earnings are experiencing a significant decline. They are being trumped by waste management start-ups, facing restricted access to waste, and enduring price pressures from major purchasers,” she says.

Bianca Fernandes from Hasiru Dala, a social impact organisation that seeks to improve the working conditions and societal rights of informal waste pickers, says the central and state governments should acknowledge that waste pickers need to be formally integrated into India’s waste collection and management systems.

Fernades argues that rag pickers and kabadiwallahs are very skilled at identifying waste that can be recycled, and have excellent connections throughout the waste management chain, which helps to ensure that waste material reaches its correct destination, so the maximum value can be recovered from it. For example, a Hasiru Dala report in 2011 revealed that 15,000 waste pickers in Bengaluru saved the local municipality Rs 84 crore in collection and transportation costs every year.  

Emerging initiatives
Although the growing involvement of private companies in India’s waste management system – and the increasing use of waste management technology such as incinerators to recover value from waste – threatens the livelihoods of waste pickers, there are emerging initiatives that seek to improve the working conditions, financial security and overall living conditions of India’s informal waste workers.

Plastics for Change was established in 2015 by Shifrah Jacobs and Andrew Almack as the world’s first fair trade verified recycled plastic platform. The programme allows companies from around the world to directly source raw plastic materials produced from discarded plastic waste collected by India’s informal waste workers. Companies can also offset their own production of plastic waste by funding the collection of discarded plastic waste by India’s informal waste workers, which is then repurposed for materials such as recycled plastic packaging.

The programme provides dignified work and fair livelihoods for workers from the marginalised and poorer sections of Indian society, and Plastics for Change also uses the funds paid by companies to purchase recycled plastic material or offset their own plastic production to fund a variety of programmes to support the loving conditions and livelihoods of waste pickers and their families.

These include investment in the infrastructure of small-scale and family-run ‘scrap shops’ to improve working conditions; education programmes for the children of waste workers; financial and technological support for processing recycled plastic into materials for use in building low-cost housing for waste workers; and health camps where workers can access preventive healthcare services and nutritional support, such as free foodstuffs.

The Plastics for Waste initiative therefore both reduces the environmental impact of plastic waste in India and offers a stable income and dignity to India’s waste picking workforce.

Body Shop brand seeks to support waste pickers
In 2019, the British-based international beauty products brand The Body Shop partnered with Plastics for Waste to launch its Community Fair Trade Recycled Plastic programme. This seeks to incorporate community-traded recycled plastic into its best-selling products while helping to empower waste pickers.

Under the initiative, The Body Shop buys recycled plastic collected by waste pickers in a number of locations in India, including Bengaluru. The waste pickers receive a fair price for their collected waste and can access a range of support services from Plastics for Waste aimed at improving their livelihoods and working and living conditions.

According to an official from The Body Shop: “Socially, the initiative has created meaningful employment opportunities for marginalised communities. Importantly, over 50 per cent of those involved in the partnership are women, contributing to gender equality in the workforce.”

Andrew Almack, founder and chief executive officer of Plastics for Change, says: “I still remember the day we first empowered those women waste pickers through our entrepreneurship programme. Their initial nervous smiles gradually transformed into confidence as they took charge of their own businesses. It was a moment that filled me with immense pride, a powerful reminder that our work with The Body Shop goes far beyond just recycling plastic. It transforms lives and communities, creating ripples of positive change.”

The partnership has successfully established a network comprising over 500 recycling stakeholders, which has positively impacted more than 2,500 waste collectors by providing fair wages for waste material, better working conditions and improved livelihood opportunities.