726083

research-article2017
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17726083Latin American PerspectivesMarello and Helwege / Social Inclusion Of Wastepickers

Solid Waste Management and Social Inclusion of

Wastepickers
Opportunities and Challenges
by
Marta Marello and Ann Helwege

As informal workers, wastepickers gather recyclable material without adequate social

benefits and occupational protection. In response to wastepicker demands for legalization
and access to the waste stream, cities have created inclusion programs to improve liveli-
hoods and promote recycling. While inclusion yields benefits for many participants, it
brings challenges at each step of development. In the poorest countries, workers lack the
skills, capital, and managerial experience to operate profitably, while projects in wealthier
cities employ few wastepickers and face stiff competition from the formal sector. The most
sophisticated municipal systems mechanize waste processing and threaten wastepickers’
livelihoods because capital-intensive methods yield few jobs. To realize genuine inclusion,
policies to support wastepickers must enable workers to compete throughout the broader
economy.

Como trabajadores informales, los recolectores de basura se encargan de recoger

materiales reciclables sin prestaciones sociales o protección laboral adecuadas. En respu-
esta a sus demandas de legalización y acceso al flujo de residuos, las ciudades han creado
programas de inclusión para mejorar las condiciones de vida y promover el reciclaje.
Mientras que dicha inclusión brinda beneficios a muchos participantes, también
conlleva retos en cada etapa del desarrollo. En los países más pobres, los trabajadores
carecen de las habilidades, capital y experiencia administrativa necesarias para operar
de manera rentable, mientras que los proyectos en las ciudades más ricas emplean pocos
recolectores que enfrentan una dura competencia por parte del sector formal. Los
sistemas municipales más sofisticados mecanizan el procesamiento de los desechos y
amenazan los medios de subsistencia de los recolectores dado que los métodos intensivos
en capital generan pocos puestos de trabajo. Para que haya una genuina inclusión, las
políticas de apoyo a los recolectores de basura deben permitir que dichos trabajadores
compitan en el grueso de la economía.

Keywords: Wastepickers, Recycling, Inclusion, Municipal solid waste, Cooperatives

Marta Marello is Climate Action Plan Project Manager at Boston University’s Pardee Center, and
Ann Helwege is a research fellow at that university’s Global Economic Governance Institute.
Marello participated in the Bluefields and São Paulo projects through the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s D-Lab and Co-Lab, both under the supervision of Libby McDonald. The Bluefields
project was partially funded by the United Nations Development Program. The Latin American
Studies Program and the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University provided
travel support.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 218, Vol. 45 No. 1, January 2018, 108–129
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17726083
© 2017 Latin American Perspectives

108
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   109

Somewhere between 500,000 and 4 million people sort through trash for a
living in Latin America. Most are poor, socially marginalized, and politically
disenfranchised. In recent decades, however, wastepickers have organized and
pressed municipalities to respect their rights and to meet their basic needs.
Where sorting through trash was once condemned and illegal, it is now more
commonly seen as useful in a green trend toward building sustainable cities. In
fact, many cities now employ wastepickers to extend collection and to promote
recycling. Cooperation between wastepickers and municipalities offers the
hope of achieving better waste management as well as the social inclusion of
these marginalized citizens.
In this paper we explore the opportunities and challenges inherent in coop-
eration between municipal solid waste systems and wastepicker cooperatives.
There is growing enthusiasm about wastepicker inclusion, often as part of
“integrated solid waste management.” The World Bank and the Inter-American
Development Bank have both funded projects to support wastepicker integra-
tion into formal sector recycling (e.g., World Bank, 2013; IADB, 2014). Advocacy
organizations such as the Latin American Wastepickers’ Network have called
for an intensification of such efforts through access to credit and technology, as
well as through partnerships to collect recyclables in underserved communi-
ties. These measures have given many wastepickers higher standards of living
and economic security.
Yet closer inspection reveals problems that emerge as cities move from sup-
porting independent, informal wastepicking to subcontracting municipal ser-
vices to competitive wastepicker cooperatives. Among the poorest recyclers, a
lack of wastepicker organizational and technical skills limits what can be
accomplished without an effort to address a broader set of poverty-related
needs. In wealthier cities, where wastepicker cooperatives have sophisticated
business operations, inclusion is less successful because capital-intensive meth-
ods generate too few jobs to accommodate the vast number of wastepickers.
While integration of wastepickers into formal sector systems yields real bene-
fits for many people, it faces significant hurdles in providing most wastepickers
with sustainable livelihoods. At its worst it can be no more than tokenism in a
process of dump closure and wastepicker displacement.
Using three cases (Luz del Futuro in Bluefields, Nicaragua, six recycling
cooperatives on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, and Mexico City’s Bordo
Poniente dump), we identify policy opportunities and challenges presented by
inclusion of wastepickers at different stages of development. We also caution
against expectations that these programs can stand in for more substantive
social and economic reform.

The Evolution Of Wastepicker Cooperatives And

Municipal Inclusion Initiatives

The terms “wastepickers,” “waste collectors,” and “recyclers” refer to peo-

ple who make a living by selling recyclables found in the trash. They work on
city streets, in dumps, and on municipal garbage trucks (Scheinberg et al.,
2011). The different names for waste collectors in Latin America are witness
110   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

not only to the size of the phenomenon and its long history but to the diver-
sity of specializations within this trade: cartoneros, buscabotes, and pepenadores
in Mexico, churequeros in Nicaragua, basuriegos, cartoneros, traperos, and
chatarreros in Colombia, chamberos in Ecuador, catadores in Brazil, buzos in
Costa Rica, cartoneros or, more pejoratively, cirujas in Argentina, recuperadores,
recicladores, clasificadores, minaderos, and gancheros (Fergutz, Dias, and Mitlin,
2011). Even among those who work within a single dump, differential access
to valuable materials can reflect a finely structured class hierarchy. Since the
composition of waste varies across communities, wealthier cities offer more
marketable trash with the potential to support higher incomes. Thus gener-
alization about policies to meet the heterogeneous needs of wastepickers
warrants caution.
Although many wastepickers work alone, the field is dominated by family
and micro-enterprises that include women, children, and elderly relatives, with
roles that depend on health, schooling opportunities, and family responsibili-
ties (WIEGO, 2012b). The appeal of wastepicking comes from low barriers to
entry: access is easy, and waste has value. As Latin Americans use more dispos-
able bottles and packaging, this occupation offers opportunities for immi-
grants, homeless people, and members of minorities to benefit from access to
marketable materials and food scraps (Wilson, Velis, and Cheeseman, 2006).
During economic crises, it also absorbs unemployed formal sector workers,
serving what Birkbeck (1979) refers to as a “buffer function.” For some the role
is temporary, while for others it is an established profession, making self-
organization and mobilization challenging.
The fluid nature of the profession makes it difficult to design programs that
target the most disadvantaged wastepickers. Fragmentation and hierarchies
within the wastepicker community can determine who participates and bene-
fits from policies aimed at inclusion. Many wastepickers are already members
of unions or cooperatives and others have privileged access to valuable metals.
The most disabled, least employable, and most independent wastepickers are
not necessarily those who benefit from partnerships with municipal waste pro-
grams.1 Evaluation of programs to promote a wastepicker inclusion sector
mainly hinges on how many wastepickers find jobs in the formal municipal
waste system. Without a clearer sense of the target population,2 it is hard to
assess whether a program serves a substantial share of the population.
Although wastepicking is an entrepreneurial activity closely tied to indus-
trial production, it is rarely a source of prosperity.3 In the poorest countries,
such as Nicaragua, wastepickers earn US$1.50–$2 per day (Vázquez, 2013), just
below the World Bank’s poverty line, while in Mexico wastepickers average
US$10 per day (Favela Ávila et al., 2013). Although many wastepickers are not
poor by income-based official benchmarks, they experience hardships in mul-
tiple dimensions of well-being. The job itself is strenuous and risky, exposing
workers to pathogens, fallen debris, and rabid animals. Scheinberg et al. (2011:
49) describe the working conditions of many wastepickers:

They face injuries from dogs, rats, and other vectors, combined with chemical
and biological health risks due to contact with toxic substances, health care
wastes, fecal matter, body parts, used syringes and other materials in the waste
stream. In the best of situations, pickers report ergonomic problems due to the
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   111

physically taxing nature of the work, and psychological and social disadvan-
tages stemming from their low social status.

As informal workers, wastepickers are largely denied access to social bene-

fits such as health insurance, pensions, and unemployment insurance. Physical
debilitation, lack of education to accurately assess toxic risks, and income
imperatives make wastepickers vulnerable to injury. One study in Mexico City
estimated wastepicker life expectancy at just 39 years compared with 67 years
among all city residents (Wilson, Velis, and Cheeseman, 2006). This is also one
of the last sectors in Latin America in which child labor is pervasive (Ensing,
2010). The ease of evading labor laws, low skill requirements, and proximity to
working parents draw children into wastepicking, but this exposes them to
toxins (especially lead), accidents from collapsing debris, and abusive social
contexts. The International Labor Organization has targeted this sector in its
efforts to reduce child labor (ILO, 2004).
Several factors hinder economic mobility among wastepickers as informal
entrepreneurs. Birkbeck (1979) summarized the constraints in two domains: (1)
price, which is driven by limited bargaining power with local buyers and subject
to volatile global prices for virgin materials, and (2) productivity, which can be
increased by working harder, gaining access to more waste, or using more
equipment. Wastepicker methods are labor-intensive because of a lack of access
to credit (CWG and GIZ, 2011). Without self-organization into cooperatives with
capital, the volume collected by each wastepicker is small. An absence of econo-
mies of scale and transportation to market in turn contributes to weak bargain-
ing power (Tirado-Soto and Zamberlan, 2013). Wastepickers complain that
middlemen pay them as little as 10 percent of the rate paid to commercial sup-
pliers (Fergutz, Dias, and Mitlin, 2011). In some places the landfill is essentially
a monopoly, with the leader requiring wastepickers to pay for access or demand-
ing that all material be sold to him at his own prices (Favela Ávila et al., 2013).
Furthermore, the formal waste management sector, both public and private,
does not support scaling up by wastepickers, who are viewed as competitors
for jobs and recyclable resources (CWG and GIZ, 2011). Municipal workers
shun wastepickers as informal workers because they skirt the rules, taxes, and
other costs. Where private contractors are paid by the ton of trash collected,
wastepickers are accused of “stealing” the trash. More subtly, neoliberal efforts
to sanitize and regulate the urban landscape lead to the exclusion of wastepick-
ers, who are perceived as dirty and disorderly, from wealthy neighborhoods
(Sternberg, 2013). Informality and exclusion thus mean that wastepickers are
denied both social benefits and access to the waste stream that provides their
income (Scheinberg et al., 2011).
While wastepicking as a profession is old, the idea of uniting into coopera-
tives is fairly new. Wastepicker cooperatives developed at the end of the twen-
tieth century, emboldened by democratization and human rights movements
(WIEGO, 2012b). The oldest associations include the Colombian Asociación de
Recicladores de Bogotá (Bogotá Recyclers’ Association—ARB) and the Brazilian
Movimento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis (National
Movement of Gatherers of Recycled Materials—MNCR), both established by
the early 1990s. Most countries now have active cooperatives, and international
112   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

networks of cooperatives have also emerged. In 2005 wastepickers formed the

Latin American Wastepickers’ Network, which, in addition to sharing resources
in technology and self- management, raises awareness of the social, economic,
and environmental contributions of wastepickers, advocates for wastepicker-
inclusive policies, and supports wastepickers’ organizations (WIEGO, 2009).
Other entities work with similar goals but varying political agendas, among
them Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO),
the Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives, the Avina Foundation,
Inclusive Cities, Ciudad Saludable, and the Collaborative Working Group on
Solid Waste Management (ILO, 2013; Ruiz et al., 2009).
As social movements, wastepicker organizations have negotiated legal rec-
ognition of wastepickers as workers with labor rights. Through protests, strikes,
and dump blockades, cooperatives have secured political enfranchisement,
decriminalization, and health care. Recent laws provide legal access to waste
either as permission to gather street waste or, more generously, as rights to
specific components of the municipal waste stream. The reversal of fortunes
afforded by organization is striking. In 1979, Birkbeck (1979) doubted the
potential for unionization among wastepickers in Colombia because of their
geographic dispersion, the multiplicity of buyers, and competition among
wastepickers themselves. Yet in 1986, a time when Colombian paramilitary
groups were murdering wastepickers for purposes of social cleansing, the clo-
sure of an open dump in Manizales inspired a wastepicker cooperative to polit-
ical activism. There are now more than 100 wastepicker collectives in Bogotá,
many of which participate in the 9,000-member ARB (Medina, 2005). The city
now allocates collection routes to the ARB and directs recyclables to a sorting
facility run by wastepickers.
Similarly, until 2002, the Argentine government forbade wastepicking under
Municipal Ordinance 33.581, a decree of the dictatorship that reserved waste
collection rights to private firms created by the junta (Le Goff, 2011). As thou-
sands of workers displaced by the financial crisis turned to wastepicking, the
Buenos Aires government passed the cartoneros’ law (Law 922). It not only
legalized and decriminalized wastepicking but also provided wastepickers
with legal and bureaucratic support by creating the Office of Urban Recycling
Policy. By 2008 the office’s budget had grown to US$30 million per year (GAIA,
2012). In 2013 the municipal government signed an agreement for wastepicker
cooperatives to take responsibility for the city’s recycling, and it provides sup-
port in the form of day care, uniforms, a warehouse, workplace insurance, and
social security.4
Likewise, after decades of struggle in Brazil, President Lula da Silva imple-
mented laws to finance cooperatives and to provide low-income housing and
education for wastepicker families (WIEGO, 2012b). In 2010 the creation of the
National Solid Waste Policy through Law 12,305/2010 gave municipalities
responsibility for integrating and improving working conditions in wastepicker
cooperatives (Magni and Günther, 2014).
The main advantage of cooperativization has been an increase in productiv-
ity. By working together, wastepickers can gain access to equipment and stor-
age space, increased bargaining power with middlemen, and more effective
lobbying for access to trash (WIEGO, 2012b). Cooperatives can also employ
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   113

technology to reduce transaction costs, improve quality, and raise prices (Zeuli
and Cropp, 2004). Cooperatives not only achieve economies of scale by selling
material in bulk for better prices but reduce risk by diversifying the range of
recyclables sold, such as various types of plastics, metals, and paperboard.
They can also mitigate individual setbacks by providing more job security and
a stable social network.
Despite the advantages of cooperativization, organizing workers into coop-
eratives is challenging and is itself now considered a first step in policies aimed
at wastepicker inclusion (WIEGO, 2012b). Common obstacles concern internal
democracy and organizational management (WIEGO, 2012a). Young coopera-
tives face leadership crises, free-rider problems, transparency disputes, and a
lack of business management skills. Formerly independent wastepickers are
often unable to resolve problems, whether these involve bookkeeping, negotia-
tion with buyers, or the use of sophisticated machinery.5 Once established,
cooperatives need financial resources to expand the business by adding value
to the materials (WIEGO, 2012a). Buyers favor suppliers with the capability to
deliver, on a regular basis, adequate volumes of clean, pressed, and bundled
materials (Fergutz, Dias, and Mitlin, 2011). Adding value, known as “valoriza-
tion,” comes from collecting, washing, sorting, and reselling materials. To pro-
cess large volumes, mechanization is needed in the form of shredders,
compactors, conveyor belts, scales, vehicles, and adequate warehouse space to
store scrap, some of which may be flammable (WIEGO, 2012b).
Cooperativization has opened doors to credit by advocating for credentials
as registered businesses with the right to apply for loans (Avina, 2015). The
absence of a regulatory framework to recognize cooperatives as entities that
can assume legal and institutional commitments—despite the informality of
their workforce—is a significant barrier to raising productivity (IADB, 2011).
Brazil and Colombia were early in providing legal recognition to their com-
paratively strong wastepicker organizations; Chile granted legal status to its
Movimiento Nacional de Recicladores de Chile in 2010 (ILO, 2013). Ecuador’s
Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion recognized wastepicking as a pro-
fession only in 2014 (Ministerio del Ambiente Ecuador, 2014). Even with the
right to register, most cooperatives need outside support to navigate the legal
and financial system.While cooperativization has facilitated cooperation with
municipalities, which can lead to access to more waste, the waste management
modernization process threatens to undermine this progress. As landfills close
and waste systems are mechanized, even efficient cooperatives struggle to sur-
vive without inclusion in the formal municipal solid waste system.

Environmental Trends And Modernization Of

Solid Waste Management

Latin America generates about 400,000 tons of solid waste per day, about
two-thirds of which comes from households and is therefore a public responsi-
bility. Per capita waste generation is now 1.1 kilograms per day, half the aver-
age generated by developed-country residents. The World Bank estimates that
with rising incomes Latin American residents will create 1.6 kilograms of trash
114   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Table 1
Material Recovered from Waste Entering the System by Sector
(%) in Three Cities
Share of Recovery
City Country Formal Sector Informal Sector Total by Informal Sector
Belo Horizonte Brazil 0.5 1 1.5 67
Canete Peru 1 11 12 92
Managua Nicaragua 3 16 19 84
Source: Adapted from Wilson et al. (2012: Figure 6 and Table 6).

per capita per day by 2025 and overall tonnages will increase by more than 60
percent (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata, 2012). Municipal collection of trash is now
the norm in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela, where
most households have some type of collection at least once a week (IADB,
2011). However, compared with other regions, Latin America has relatively low
rates of waste diversion through recycling and composting (Worldmapper,
2015). Around 60 percent of the waste generated in the region ends up in inad-
equately controlled landfills (dumps) with little compacting, covering, or lea-
chate control (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata, 2012).6 These dumps pose a hazard
to local residents in the form of diseases, pests, water contamination, and air
pollution. In addition, the release of methane from decomposing trash accounts
for a significant share of Latin America’s greenhouse gas emissions (Lino and
Ismail, 2013).
Recycling offers a way to divert waste from ill-equipped dumps. Until
recently, the primary aim of municipal solid waste systems has been to protect
public health through waste collection (Marshall and Khosrow, 2013). Recycling
rates are very low in the formal waste sector (see Table 1), in part because of the
high labor costs of sorting and processing scrap. Despite the disadvantages of
operating in the informal sector, wastepickers recycle much more material than
the formal sector (Scheinberg et al., 2011).
Collaboration between the formal and informal sectors thus seems desirable
to promote greener disposal and to raise wastepicker income. Instead two
trends—privatization and modernization— threaten the viability of wastepick-
ers, whether or not they work in cooperatives. Privatization adds new large
competitors to the waste sector and transfers rights to waste from the public to
the private domain (WIEGO, 2012a). Because private corporations tend to use
technology-intensive systems, they limit access to waste by compacting it and
incinerating or burying it for disposal (WIEGO, 2012a). Commercial recyclers
also gather the most valuable recyclable waste, such as aluminum or polyeth-
ylene terephthalate (commonly known as PET), leaving lower-value waste and
scattered litter to wastepickers (WIEGO, 2012b).
A disadvantage of such technological progress is that in reducing formal
sector labor costs “expensive technologies create reverse institutional and sys-
temic linkages that drive out the informal sector in order to pay for themselves”
(CWG and GIZ, 2011). In addition to whatever cost-saving is inherent in a
capital-intensive approach to waste management, the involvement of politi-
cally disengaged international actors carries a bias toward techniques used in
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   115

developed countries regardless of the social consequences.7 At the extreme of

this modernization process is mechanical separation of recyclables, now com-
mon in the United States and Europe. In modern recycling plants, optical sen-
sors, conveyor belts, and pneumatic blowers sort materials by type. Chile’s
waste management firm, Empresa Metropolitana de Residuos Sólidos
(EMERES), for example, has already begun construction on one such plant with
funds from Spanish investors. One official commented, hyperbolically, that it
will be the first plant in Chile with “zero” human intervention, implying that
only a handful of people will oversee equipment, with few jobs for wastepick-
ers (La Tercera, 2013). As Birkbeck (1979: 166) anticipated, “even if recuperation
becomes more important, the garbage picker may well play an increasingly
residual role in the system.”
Municipalities are also under pressure to modernize unhygienic landfills
and to adopt waste-to-energy schemes. This entails closing dumps and exclud-
ing wastepickers from the most concentrated disposal points. The World Bank
and the IADB have supported dump closure for the sake of local public health,
energy cost savings, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency has provided technical advice for biogas
conversion in Managua, Nicaragua, Heliconia, Colombia, and Belo Horizonte,
Brazil. The Clean Development Mechanism also financed this trend by funding
projects that promise to reduce or avert greenhouse gas emissions;8 as of 2010,
25 percent of these projects in Latin America were waste-related, and most
entailed dump closure (IADB, 2011).
Dump closure and mechanization is not happening without resistance.
Since many wastepickers work in dumps, landfill closure has accelerated
pressure to develop alternative livelihoods through wastepicker inclusion
programs. Among the most controversial cases of closure and conversion of
landfills into energy plants are Lomas los Colorados II in Santiago de Chile,
La Chureca in Managua, the Kara Kara dump in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Jardim
Gramacho in Rio de Janeiro, and Bordo Poniente in Mexico City. While pro-
tests rarely succeed in stopping landfill modernization, few such projects
now move forward without some effort to address the needs of displaced
wastepickers.

Inclusion As A Solution

A new paradigm envisions increasing degrees of wastepicker participation

in municipal waste management. From the municipality’s perspective, it has
several benefits (World Bank, 2015). From a public health perspective, the inclu-
sion of wastepickers in the municipal collection system removes workers from
danger in the dump and allows for more frequent collection of neighborhood
waste, reducing illegal dumping and backyard burning of trash. Outsourcing
to the cooperatives’ cheap labor can also save the cost of unionized labor. In
fact, as independent entities that acquire revenue from the sale of scrap, coop-
erative members often earn much less than the minimum wage. Finally, cost
saving comes from reduced landfill costs as wastepickers divert more material
to recycling.
116   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Inclusion is also used as an antipoverty program, particularly in poor coun-

tries where budgets are strained. Without the resources for cash transfers,
housing, or jobs, communities can support families’ own income-generating
streams by allowing wastepickers to work within municipal solid waste system
facilities. In wealthier countries, dump closure is almost inevitable as pressure
increases to reduce the air and water contamination from open dumps, and
carbon credits cut costs. Inclusion is then used as compensation to losers in the
modernization process, with protesters being offered collection routes or jobs
in recycling centers.
While inclusion has appeal as an idea, the ways in which it is done
vary widely, with consequences for the distribution of benefits. Rarely are
wastepickers simply brought on board with jobs in the formal waste collection
system. Although this would surely constitute full inclusion, it meets fierce
resistance from formal sector workers, who fear job loss and claim that
wastepickers are unprepared to meet job expectations. Politically, such full
inclusion of wastepickers seems to be a nonstarter. More common is a parallel
system in which cooperatives are given access to waste in municipal solid
waste system facilities or tasked with collecting recyclables along certain routes
while the formal sector continues to collect trash. Municipal workers’ accep-
tance of this arrangement depends on scrap prices, since formal workers them-
selves seek valuable materials while collecting trash.
Because wastepickers are not brought on as formal workers, partnerships are
easier to set up if wastepickers are organized.9 Basic steps toward inclusion
involve creating wastepicker cooperatives, building a sense of unity and com-
mon purpose among members, and initiating the engagement of municipal
authorities to give wastepickers access to materials and underserved neighbor-
hoods. Uniforms, safety vests, and identification tags instill a sense of profes-
sionalism and facilitate social acceptance as wastepickers move about the city.
Public awareness campaigns can promote household sorting, which may reduce
wastepickers’ labor costs by as much as 80 percent (Lino and Ismail, 2013).
Where cooperatives are already established, the challenge is to raise produc-
tivity by capitalizing them with trucks, processing equipment, and warehouses.
Municipalities often donate or subsidize access to facilities. Inclusion can take
the form of geographic sectors within the city that are independently served by
wastepickers’ cooperatives, as in Colombia and Brazil. In another model, seen
in Mexico City, wastepickers ride trucks with the formal municipal solid waste
system workers and withdraw recyclables while gathering trash. However, a
system of this type runs the risk of creating hierarchies on trucks in which for-
mal workers determine who gets what, including tips, while all workers keep
an eye out for valuable scrap. At its worst, the system helps truck drivers exploit
wastepickers by demanding payment for a place on the truck.
A private waste collection industry usually exists alongside the municipal
system, serving restaurants, retailers, industry, and sometimes the residential
sector. This sector includes firms that compete with wastepickers in gathering
recyclables such as paper, cardboard, plastics, and vegetable oil from busi-
nesses.10 Some municipalities have spun off waste collection services to quasi-
state enterprises with independent budgets and decision making. Chile’s
EMERES, formed through an association of 22 municipalities in the south of
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   117

Santiago, is one example.11 It manages waste transfers as well as the area’s larg-
est landfill, and it vets bids for contracts by other companies (including French
and U.S. firms) to modernize landfills. Fully privatized trash collection also
takes place: KDM, a holding company of Spain’s Urbaser and the United States’
Danner Company, operates in Chile to provide residential and industrial col-
lection, waste treatment and recycling, and construction and operation of land-
fills and waste-to-energy plants (KDM Empresas, 2014). Its trucks can be seen
throughout Chile, under the names Vitacura and DeMarco, ferrying waste to
and from transfer stations. Other large international firms such as Petstar have
built plants to recycle plastic within the region. Inclusion is typically conceptu-
alized as a relationship between cities and wastepickers, but its bearing on
contracts with the private sector can influence program design because firms
view coordination with wastepicker organizations as an added cost. Firms such
as Petstar and the yogurt company Danone have initiated their own inclusion
programs as a form of corporate social responsibility (Danone, 2015).

Inclusion In Practice Across The Region

The benefits of inclusion are evident in several cities. In Buenos Aires, the
city partnered with the Movement of Excluded Workers, a wastepicker coop-
erative of about 2,500 members formed in 2005. The municipality provides the
cooperative with buses and trucks to transport workers and recyclable materi-
als and a monthly stipend of US$209 per member to supplement earnings from
the sale of scrap. Workers receive health insurance, liability insurance, and sub-
sidized child care (GAIA, 2012: 78).
Brazil has the most extensive inclusion programs. In the early 1990s, catador
cooperatives such as COOPAMARE in São Paulo and ASMARE in Belo Horizonte
established themselves as political activists. As mentioned earlier, with the elec-
tion of President Lula da Silva, two important laws were passed: Decree 5940/60
mandated that federal agencies deliver recyclable materials to wastepicker coop-
eratives, and Regulation 11,445/07 allowed municipalities to end commercial
contracts and exempted cities from bidding procedures that put catador coop-
eratives at a disadvantage (Diaz and Otoma, 2014). The city of Belo Horizonte
provided its cooperative with a monthly subsidy, warehouses, trucks, and envi-
ronmental education. Similar programs now exist in São Paulo, Londrina, and
Porto Alegre. While they are politically well received, each program provides
jobs for only a few hundred workers, a fraction of the wastepicker community.
Since 2013, under a court order, the city of Bogotá pays wastepicker coopera-
tives for waste collection, putting them on an equal footing with commercial col-
lectors. Prior to this, wastepickers were permitted to participate in collection but
their income was derived entirely from the sale of the recyclables, as it is in most
inclusion programs. Under the new scheme, cooperatives receive US$44 per ton
of waste as payment for collection services, providing roughly US$200 per month
per worker and doubling the incomes of the 790 participating wastepickers (IPS
News, 2013).
In poorer countries, particularly in Bolivia and Nicaragua, cooperatives
are less well developed economically and lack the technology, financing, and
118   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

regulatory framework to establish collection networks. Inclusion has been

more limited, typically allowing wastepickers to gather trash in informal settle-
ments rather than fully integrating them into the waste management system.

Luz Del Futuro: Wastepickers In Bluefields, Nicaragua

Luz del Futuro is an all-woman cooperative founded in 2012 in Bluefields,

Nicaragua. In this Caribbean coastal region, three-fourths of the population
live in poverty. The illiteracy rate among residents over age 10 is 43 percent,
with a much higher rate among females (FADCANIC, 2013). Marta Marello
observed this cooperative in 2013 in the context of a project to get municipal
approval for a door-to-door collection system allowing the women to collect
recyclables directly from households instead of from the dump. A more ambi-
tious goal was to build a comprehensive recycling network among three
Caribbean towns to reduce transportation costs. In this region, the biggest
obstacle to financially viable recycling has been the high cost of shipping. All
material is sent to Managua, near the Pacific coast, and from there to recycling
plants abroad, including China.
Before the cooperative formed, the women of Luz del Futuro picked trash at
a dump in their own neighborhood. They worked alongside children and scav-
enging pigs in an area said to be infested with rodents and snakes. The women
had little schooling, averaging three to four years, with the most educated
worker having completed middle school.12 Their homes were wooden shacks
at the edge of the town with no running water or sanitation. Two changes trans-
formed the women’s work: the municipality’s investment in a sanitary landfill
where waste is covered with dirt at the end of each day and the nearly simul-
taneous formation of a cooperative. With access to the new municipal landfill,
the women were able to collect metals and plastic from a central source of
recyclable trash. Upon formation, the cooperative also banned children under
18 from the new site.
From the municipality’s perspective, the main waste management concern
has been public health. People pay little attention to waste disposal despite
municipal collection services, often throwing garbage into the street or streams
or burning it in backyards. Thus the basic aggregation of waste into the landfill
was a priority. Permitting the women of Luz del Futuro to gather waste door-
to-door provided potential public health benefits while representing a step
toward profitability for the cooperative, but it also presented challenges.
The new landfill where the women were invited to work is located on a hill
outside of town. The uphill road is steep and the distance too far for the women
to walk. Without independent transportation, they rely on the municipal gar-
bage truck that goes to the landfill twice a day. Although they complain that the
truck is late and does not respect their work schedule, transportation to work
is an important aspect of their inclusion. The cooperative operates with little
machinery, no safety measures, and little external support. The women use a
long stick with a hook to pick recyclables from trash. They limit their collection
to plastic and metals, particularly aluminum cans, since the cost of transporta-
tion to Managua makes it uneconomical to recycle paper and glass. Collected
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   119

plastic is trucked by municipal workers to a nearby open space owned by the

city to be washed, sorted, and compacted. Some women refused to process
material for fear of cuts and infections and confined themselves to collecting
recyclables, creating differentiated roles in the group. Under an agreement with
the municipality, the women in charge of plastics can borrow a compactor, but,
perhaps because of gender discrimination, it is operated by a male municipal
worker.
Luz del Futuro sells the plastic to the municipality for a fixed price of 3 cor-
dobas (US12 cents) per kilogram. The municipality then transports it first to El
Rama by barge and then to Managua by truck. A staff member of the municipal-
ity follows the plastic to negotiate the final price in Managua, where it is
shipped to global markets. The revenue received in Managua by the municipal-
ity ranges from 3 to 7 cordobas (US12–30 cents) per kilogram of plastic. Plastic
that has been washed, with the labels removed, and is not burned brings the
highest price. Otherwise the price depends on the quality of the plastic itself.
Most of the revenue received is needed to cover transportation, staff wages,
and electricity, leaving little to cover the municipality’s cost of support for the
cooperative. An alternative transportation route, envisioned by the Inter-
American Development Bank and the United Nations Development Program,
could make this inclusion project economical.
Before 2012, the municipality of Bluefields had never worked with recycla-
bles and thus faced a two-part learning process of understanding the scrap
market and the complexity of coordination with a new cooperative. The mayor
recognized the environmental and social benefits of the cooperative, but the
city’s financial and in-kind support was put in jeopardy when new elections
took place in November 2012. For a while it was uncertain whether the new
mayor would support the project, although he eventually did so and a small
door-to-door pilot project was implemented because of strong support from
the municipal environmental council.
The women of Luz del Futuro are extremely poor, and most needed a second
job to support their family as its primary breadwinner. Scheduling and child
care were primary concerns. From their perspective, the greatest accomplish-
ment of the cooperative was the banning of children from the dump and the
arrangement of better child care.
As a young cooperative, Luz del Futuro had yet to learn the power of syn-
ergy from teamwork. Before forming a cooperative, the women had worked
individually, fighting over every can. The decision to work together improved
matters, in part because it elicited support from the municipality and outside
organizations, but the women still needed to work as a team. Although they
were grateful for collaborating with the city, they made little money and
expressed a need to improve their livelihoods. The women lamented their lack
of administrative and managerial skills. There were complaints about the dis-
tribution of wages, inconsistent bookkeeping, the distribution of work, and the
monitoring of work. Many women felt that some members worked harder than
others or that others frequently missed work. They worked harder when the
male municipal supervisor was present than when he was absent.
Poor communication within the group and inefficient meetings also interfered
with productivity. The president wielded strong leadership with little room for
120   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

power dissemination and transparency. At the official registration of the coopera-

tive, the president received a handbook of the principles of cooperativism, empha-
sizing the shared responsibilities of each member, but illiteracy discouraged its
circulation. Technically, there was an executive board, but its members either for-
got they were a part of it or did not know what power to exercise. If long-term
ideas and plans such as opening a bank account or starting a greenhouse were
brought up in meetings, the women did not know how to pursue them.
As of 2013, the cooperative had 20 members and was not accepting new
workers because revenues were so low. Although the women wanted to expand
their collection of trash from the dump to city streets and residences, a number
of obstacles stood in their path. They needed first to strengthen their internal
organization, to clarify the rights and responsibilities of members, to run meet-
ings constructively, and to move from ideas to execution. Their poverty made
it difficult to compete with independent wastepickers. Without sufficient
equipment to sort and process trash, the skills to use such equipment, the trans-
portation infrastructure to get materials to market cheaply, and a policy context
to encourage household sorting, a project of wastepicker inclusion could only
accomplish so much.
In such a poor region, the resources available to build successful livelihoods
through wastepicker inclusion are limited. Cooperative members themselves
lack both the human and the financial capital to take full advantage of access
to municipal waste, and the municipality lacks funds to substantially support
their development. Inclusion in this context represents a relatively inexpensive
antipoverty program with a small but positive impact.

Recycling Cooperatives On The Outskirts Of São Paulo

In 2012 Marello worked with six cooperatives in the São Paulo metropolitan
area: the Cooperativa de Suzano (COURES), the Cooperativa de Trabalhadores
de Materiais Recicláveis de Arujá e Região (CORA), the Cooperativa de
Reciclagem Unidos pelo Meio Ambiente (CRUMA), the Cooperativa de Matéria
Prima do Alto Tietê (COOPERALTO), the Cooperativa da Área de Material
Reciclável de Guarulhos (COOP-RECICLÁVEL), and the Associação dos
Recicladores de Salesópolis (ARES). The project’s goal was to assess the poten-
tial of a public awareness campaign to support wastepickers by attracting more
recyclables. In addition, the project aimed to build a network of cooperatives
that would sell waste vegetable oil together, replicating a model that was
already in place for selling paper. The cooperatives observed were all well
established and had strong internal organization, working space, machinery,
trucks, and support from municipalities and nongovernmental entities. Each
cooperative had 20–80 permanent members, with nonmembers participating
as temporary workers. All six had established rules of management enforced
by elected boards of directors. Meetings to make decisions and distribute wages
were held regularly. Some worked closely with the national MNCR while oth-
ers maintained their independence and distance.
Under an agreement with local municipalities, these cooperatives collect
recyclables directly from households and sell them independently. Although
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   121

supplemental revenue comes from the municipalities, development banks, and

corporate community funds, most comes from the sale of scrap in commercial
markets. Some cooperatives sell to a large pool of potential buyers, which is
beneficial in negotiating prices, while others lack the option of ending a rela-
tionship with one of their few buyers. Even cooperatives located close to one
another are offered different prices for the same product depending on negoti-
ating skills, volume, and transportation arrangements.
All of these cooperatives have large, open warehouses in which to conduct
their operations. Warehouse space is separated into areas for unloading
unsorted trash, sorting trash into large containers, and storing loose recycla-
bles, machinery, and compacted recyclables waiting to be sold. Warehouses
have offices, a small kitchen, lavatories, and showers. Cooperatives typically
have more than one compactor, a shredder, a conveyer belt, and multiple trucks.
They collect and sell paper, cardboard, many types of plastic, Styrofoam, Tetra
Pak, vegetable oil, metals, plastic bags, and glass. Even if they lack cutting-edge
technology, these cooperatives are well-capitalized.
The municipalities help by paying for rent, utilities, or fuel for the trucks or
providing work space. The local union, Rede Catasampa, functions as the local
chapter of the MNCR and is made up of 15 recycling cooperatives. Its objective
is to improve catador livelihoods by identifying strategies to raise revenue and
by training catadores in sustainable business practices. Additional support
comes from local development banks and nonprofit organizations. However, it
is widely felt that some cooperatives receive more help than others from their
municipality and the union because of favoritism and corruption.
In contrast to the low standards of living among most Latin American
wastepickers, some of the Brazilian cooperative members own cars, and
almost all own cell phones. They all wear uniforms at work, and some use
safety measures such as gloves. Nonetheless, they live well outside the main-
stream of São Paulo’s affluent lifestyle: their children lack schools, their hous-
ing is inadequate, and most of them are relatively poor.
Even among these well-established cooperatives, one can observe a variety
of constraints on growth, highlighted by the failure of efforts to promote a pub-
lic awareness campaign. The single most important obstacle to expansion is the
lack of space. Members of at least half of the cooperatives interviewed lamented
that operations were constrained by warehouse capacity. Because of the volatil-
ity and seasonality of commodity markets, materials often sit around until mar-
ket conditions improve. Paper, for example, fetches a higher price in the months
before Christmas, and prices of other products such as copper are subject to
global speculation. Independently of this project, the COOPERALTO imple-
mented a public awareness campaign to increase collection of recyclables but
had to stop it because it could not take in any more material. With more space,
cooperatives could hire more workers.
Second, cooperatives enjoy different degrees of partnership with their
respective municipalities. Of the six, one had already partnered with the local
government to create a public awareness campaign; three seemed likely to get
municipal support for such a campaign, while the remaining two had little
hope of doing so. The COOP-RECICLÁVEL had not only a good relationship
with its municipality but a partnership with the public schools whereby
122   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

children were encouraged to take home recycling ideas. It also had a partner-
ship with Acai, a private firm that donated waste oil and scrap to the coopera-
tive. By contrast, the CRUMA and the COURES did not enjoy good relationships
with their municipalities and were excluded from decision making about poli-
cies that might affect their livelihoods.
A third obstacle was that when a cooperative partnered with a private com-
pany the latter received all of the visibility. For example, the CRUMA had part-
nered with Tetra Pak, the Swedish food packaging company, to distribute Tetra
Pak products to the community. The problem was that the products contained
no information about the cooperative. Similarly, when the CORA implemented
the oil program Cata Oleo, the company Bioauto received advertising in
exchange for minor infrastructural help. CORA members felt that the exchange
was unfair. Inclusion can thus be undermined by asymmetric benefits and a
loss of project control.
Fourth, cooperatives are not the only party interested in waste oil and other
recyclables. The market is crowded with individual catadores and middlemen
who buy and collect oil for resale to biodiesel processers. Often middlemen can
offer cleaning products to restaurants and businesses in exchange for the oil
while cooperatives cannot afford to offer any compensation. Competition also
comes from groups that repurpose waste. The president of the COOPERALTO
noted that an oil collection campaign would not work in his town because of a
local tradition of using waste oil to make soap.
For these reasons, no agreement was made to begin a coordinated public
awareness campaign in the six towns. However, there was still hope of forming
a network of cooperatives to sell oil as a way of negotiating better prices, much
as an existing network had done with paper. Lessons garnered from the nascent
paper network provided insight about the challenges of networking among
cooperatives. Before the network was formed, cooperatives sold paper for
R$0.1 per kilogram; by selling paper together, they quintupled the price they
received. The network was formed and supervised by Rede Catasampa, which
provided rules and support in exchange for advertising. Despite the dramatic
increase in price and overall success, the paper network incurred a few prob-
lems. Paper from participating cooperatives was stored by the CRUMA because
it had the most storage space, but it still lacked sufficient space and a sorting
machine for the paper. Its president was also seen as poorly informed about
potential buyers and market prices of paper. Because operations were so cen-
tralized, only the cooperatives located close to the CRUMA participated in the
network.
When presented with the idea of creating a waste oil network, representa-
tives raised doubts based on the experience with paper: Who will be in charge
of negotiations? How will transparency be ensured? To whom will the oil be
sold if cooperatives already have links to different buyers? Is it really econom-
ical to transport the oil to a centralized location before sale? How is it possible
to form a network if cooperatives collect different quantities of oil? How does
the revenue get split? A key stumbling block was hesitancy about the participa-
tion of Rede Catasampa. A few cooperatives agreed to identify the network
with the union, while others firmly refused to participate if it was in charge.
This revealed a political problem: some members believed in the work of Rede
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   123

Catasampa and the MNCR, while others challenged their lack of transparency
and consistency, claiming that they favored certain cooperatives over others
with monetary compensation and equipment. In the end, a waste oil network
including the six cooperatives was not created.
Although these Brazilian cooperatives are far more sophisticated than Luz
del Futuro and municipalities already provide considerable support, closer
relationships that might raise wastepicker incomes are possible. Yet closer
cooperation could work to the advantage of some cooperatives but to the detri-
ment of others as well as to wastepickers outside Rede Catasampa. There are
trade-offs to be made between targeting groups for their socioeconomic needs
(which might favor less competitive cooperatives) and targeting them for their
waste management efficiency.

The Closing Of Bordo Poniente

Until its closing in 2011, Bordo Poniente was the largest landfill in Mexico
City. It received an average of 12,600 tons of trash daily, serving 20 million
people. After 27 years, it was well beyond capacity. Its rotting unprocessed
waste was said to generate a significant share—perhaps 25 percent—of Mexico
City’s greenhouse gas emissions. A consortium of Mexican and Spanish com-
panies known as BMLMX Power won a contract in 2012 to transform Bordo
Poniente into a waste-to-energy plant, generating 58 megawatts of electricity
per hour and promising to save Mexico City as much as a billion pesos. As of
2015, the project is slowly progressing through the permitting process. Among
the biggest challenges has been resistance from the roughly 5,000 wastepickers
who worked in Bordo Poniente, a third of whom belonged to the Frente Único
de Pepenadores del Distrito Federal (Federal District Wastepickers’ United
Front). Although the project proposal explicitly called for the inclusion of
wastepickers, it quickly became apparent that most of them lacked the techni-
cal skills to manage the biogas plant or the equipment in a modern recycling
facility. Eighty jobs were promised in a composting facility, with incomes to be
derived from the sale of compost, a proposal dismissed by wastepickers as
grossly inadequate.13
In response to the announcement of the closure of Bordo Poniente,
wastepickers blocked its entrance, initiating a protracted negotiation between
wastepickers, BMLMX, and the state. One of the government’s first conces-
sions was an agreement to continue delivery of trash to Bordo Poniente for
sorting before its eventual transfer to other locations.14 This was a costly con-
cession in that it involved detouring trucks, unloading their trash, and then
reloading it after sorting. As of 2014 the government had promised to leave a
sorting facility in Bordo Poniente open indefinitely, an inefficient but politi-
cally convenient outcome.
The controversies surrounding Bordo Poniente’s closure highlight several
issues that complicate any vision of wastepicker inclusion as a simple solution
to the problems of poverty, the environment, and municipal finance. First, land-
fill modernization—in which trash is compacted, covered with soil, and man-
aged for emissions—makes wastepicking difficult. While sorting machines at
124   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

dump entrances provide an opportunity for wastepickers to gather materials,

they are increasingly being replaced by more sophisticated systems that can
process many more tons of trash with little labor. Second, opportunities to
transfer wastepickers from Bordo Poniente to door-to-door municipal collec-
tion are limited. Informal wastepickers already load trash into municipal
trucks, gathering recyclables for sale and tips that they share with drivers and
other municipal employees. There is not much room for inclusion of additional
wastepickers on the streets. Third, the sociopolitical dynamics of wastepicking
in Mexico City and other megacities is more complex than is typically recog-
nized. While wastepickers exist outside the formal economy in the sense that
they do not pay taxes, few are independent entrepreneurs. A highly organized
union dating back to the 1960s controls this sector.15 Its leader, Cuauhtémoc
Gutiérrez, the son of twentieth-century dump leaders, has reportedly inherited
and built a fortune based on the exploitation of wastepicker labor. He has also
served as a legislator and as president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional
in Mexico City. While wastepicking remains illegal in Mexico City, relation-
ships between wastepickers and the government run deep. By maintaining an
informal, illegal labor force of waste collectors the city not only saves wages but
facilitates a system of favors and kickbacks across layers of wastepickers and
municipal employees. Any inclusion program must begin with an understand-
ing of this complex social structure.
While the public health and carbon capture benefits of the conversion of
landfills to biogas plants may warrant projects like the one at Bordo Poniente,
at the end of a modernization process envisioned as “sustainable” is a city
that may become greener but has yet to address the marginalization of its
wastepickers.

Conclusions

Municipalities throughout Latin America have responded to wastepicker

activism by embracing the promises of inclusion: a means of income for the
poor that does not drain city budgets and a cheap way to green the city by
increasing recycling and reducing litter. This trend has been aided by growing
environmental consciousness and by a rise in the prices of recycled paper and
plastic. Wastepicker inclusion programs are seen as contributors to the triple
bottom line—creating jobs, reducing the environmental damage caused by dis-
posable goods, and cutting the cost of landfills. Inclusion is integral to the con-
cept of integrated solid waste management, now a well-established term in an
aspirational discourse about trash. In our case studies, wastepicker inclusion
hardly proceeds naturally as a consequence of cooperativization and solid
waste management modernization. Wastepickers in all three cases face signifi-
cant challenges at each step of development. Opportunities at the earliest stages
of organization and inclusion should not be confused with a long-run develop-
ment strategy.
In the poorest countries, wastepickers need more support than most munic-
ipal waste agencies can offer. The women of Luz del Futuro required not only
access to space, equipment, and a machine operator but also day care for their
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   125

children, literacy and math skills, and management and business training.
Inclusion can be part of a broader social agenda that incorporates microenter-
prise development, but such programs depend on resources outside the typical
portfolio of a municipal waste management agency.
In middle-income countries, new wastepicker cooperatives find themselves
at odds with existing networks of wastepickers and with formal sector workers
who exert considerable political power. Where inclusion is taken up by the
municipality with the intent of increasing recycling, cooperatives must negoti-
ate access to equipment and space, prices varying with the seasons, the mate-
rial, and the location, and conflicts within the wastepicking sector itself.
Inclusion is by no means a fair and all-embracing process, and the mechanisms
for integration or exclusion are unclear. The most successful of these mid-level
inclusion efforts tend to secure income for some workers while limiting entry
by others who lack social networks and leverage.
A serious limitation of inclusion becomes apparent when one considers the
number of wastepickers involved. Few social policies serve their entire tar-
geted population, particularly when self-organization is a precondition for par-
ticipation. So far, however, inclusion policies fall far short of meeting the needs
of most wastepickers. In Bogotá, for example, an estimated 14,000 people sur-
vive as wastepickers, while the inclusion process provides incomes for 700
people. In Brazil, where at least 86,000 people live as wastepickers, inclusion
provides jobs for 700 people in São Paulo, 450 in Porto Alegre, 400 in Londrina,
and 380 in Belo Horizonte (IADB, 2011: 142). Although these numbers are crude
approximations, the gap between need and solution calls into question the
prospects for full inclusion.16
The most sophisticated municipal solid waste management systems, which
seal dumps for biofuel production and mechanize sorting, pose a significant
threat to the livelihoods of wastepickers. Efficient waste management is not
labor-intensive enough to absorb all or even more than few of the people who
survive on trash scavenging. There are almost no jobs as cities move along this
path, partly because economies of scale and scope favor mechanized opera-
tions. The criteria for identifying and integrating wastepickers into the few
mostly technical jobs available are unknown. The greater sums of money
involved also attract international investors, which may distort decision mak-
ing about the best ways to move wastepickers into appropriate labor-intensive
industries.
When one considers the criminalization of wastepickers that predominated
in the late twentieth century, advocates of inclusion have made great strides in
securing the rights of wastepickers. To realize a vision of genuine social inclu-
sion, programs to support wastepickers must afford these workers opportuni-
ties in the broader economy by providing them basic literacy, job skills, and
social resources. Wastepicker inclusion is a poor substitute for training pro-
grams that might yield much higher levels of productivity in other sectors, such
as manufacturing or retail services. Along with most people at the bottom of
the economic pyramid, wastepickers seek and deserve dignity and recognition
of their rights, but wastepicking is not a dearly held avocation. As one observer
(Coy, 2014) noted, “You don’t rummage through piles of garbage looking for
recyclable items if you have other options in life.”
126   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Notes

  1. Magni and Günther (2014) point out that while some wastepickers are only recently unem-
ployed, others have been homeless for many years and suffer from health problems that preclude
self-organization or quasi-formal employment.
  2. The IADB estimates that there are 86,409 wastepickers in Brazil (IADB, 2011: 142), while the
MNCR estimates that there are 800,000 (Tirado-Soto and Zamberlan, 2013: 1005). The gap suggests
vastly different perceptions of the scale of programs necessary to serve this population.
  3. See Birkbeck (1978) for discussion of the linkages between this sector, which produces
goods much like any factory, and the formal industrial economy. A key distinction in the informal
economy is the absence of protection by the state.
  4. See Sternberg (2013) on the shifting motives, rhetoric, and policies regarding cartoneros in
Argentina in the context of neoliberal urban planning. From her perspective, much of this effort
is aimed at regularizing and controlling wastepicker activities.
  5. Tirado-Soto and Zamberlan (2013) lay out the difficulty of creating “an organizational
system with collective consciousness, solidarity, and entrepreneurship” and note that 72 percent
of Brazil’s wastepickers are unorganized.
  6. Municipal recycling is uncommon except in major cities. In Mexico, for example, 93 percent
of communities provided collection services in 2010, but of the 2,456 municipalities surveyed only
140 (5.7 percent) sent waste to a treatment facility for compaction or resale. Nearly all waste in
Mexico City receives some processing, while in the poorer South most waste is sent to dumps
without it (Sustenta, 2015).
  7. A job posting on discardstudies.org (2015) by the University of Manchester outlines four
transformative aspects of waste management modernization: its financialization, the rising use of
technology, its formalization, and the role of the middle class in governance, especially regarding
recycling. Each has potentially deleterious consequences for wastepicker empowerment.
  8. The release of methane from solid waste disposal sites is said to account for 2.4 percent of
total greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil and 8.1 percent in Mexico (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata,
2012).
  9. To quote a World Bank document (2015), “A crucial component of the success of integration
in Belo Horizonte and Pune is the organization of waste pickers into cooperatives, associations,
companies, unions, and micro-enterprises. While the battlegrounds and the gains differ widely
even within countries, in general, collective action improves social status and self-esteem, along
with incomes and working conditions. And waste picker organizations are able to make
demands—especially for representation in municipal solid waste management plans, from initial
discussions throughout implementation” (World Bank, 2015). Yet the challenge of self-organization
is evident in recent estimates that 88 percent of Peruvian wastepickers remained unorganized, as
were half of Buenos Aires wastepickers (Ecología Verde, 2012; Robinson, 2014).
10. In 2008 wastepickers from La Chureca, Managua, blocked access to the dump, complaining
that the city had adopted a policy of encouraging municipal employees to divert recyclables to
formal sector companies that pay taxes. This incident raises questions about competing policy
priorities. http://www.ipsnews.net/2008/03/nicaragua-fighting-over-societyrsquos-scraps/.
11. Saneamento Básico do Estado de São Paulo is an example of a publicly regulated utility that
handles water and solid waste in Brazil. Although it is profit-driven, it works closely with the
municipality to address public priorities.
12. See http://colabradio.mit.edu/snapshot-of-life-in-a-nicaraguan-dump-site/ and http://
gisres.org/empresas/cooperativa-de-auto-gesti%C3%B3n-luz-del-futuro-rl.
13. Some of the material from this case study was provided by Emilio Cano, president of
Ecobanca, an environmental consulting organization in Mexico City.
14. Much of the trash was destined for incineration at CEMEX cement factories—a controver-
sial arrangement not addressed here.
15. See Castillo Berthier (1978) on the Gutiérrez family’s control over workers in Mexico City’s
dumps and its influence over lawmakers through corruption and the delivery of wastepicker
votes.
16. Still, small gains are better than none, and a shortage of opportunity is not its absence. From
the perspective of activists, the inclusion process has secured key wastepicker rights and may
achieve substantially more progress.
 Marello and Helwege / SOCIAL INCLUSION OF WASTEPICKERS   127

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