By Benard Ogembo || ogembobenard@gmail.com
Globally, some 15-20 million people work in the informal recycling economy – with another four million in the formal sector, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). However, waste collectors’ aka’ ‘ravagers’ digging into mountains of trash towering up to 20 feet high in places such as Nakuru’s Gioto Dumpsite, and Nairobi’s Dandora dump are the ones who fall ill and even die like it happened in 2018 during a Cholera outbreak.
As the Fifth season of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC5) concludes in Busan, South Korea, with no landmark treaty to curb plastic pollution in place, Civil Societies, Labour Unions and many environmentalists now want to see all waste workers, including waste pickers accorded decent working conditions, while ensuring that upstream workers are not left behind.
“We can’t continue like this. Poor working conditions in the guise of implementing the utopian vision of a circular economy, where 100 percent of plastic waste is recycled and companies can continue to produce,” warns Gisore Nyabuti, the Secretary-General, Kenya Waste Pickers Association.
A report published by GRID-Arendal, a non-profit Norwegian foundation that works with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to create environmental knowledge that leads to positive change, records that more than 61% of the global workforce operates in the informal economy.
Despite the favourable policies that have supported wastepickers co-operatives and member-based organizations in several countries, large structural differences between these groups still exist.
Rebbeca Muyuga, Nakuru Waste Pickers Association member said that going forward, the treaty negotiators would need to be conscious enough to know that majority of waste workers and those living proximity to the dumpsites are sometimes in such poor conditions without contracts, PPE [personal protective equipment], training or even basic social security.
“Many of us working here at Gioto Dumpsite want to keep our jobs and the plastic treaty agreement is our hope for recognition of our right to work under decent working conditions” posed Rebbeca.
According to the report, wastepickers supporting the informal recycling economy remain among the most vulnerable and exploited stakeholders. “They are often excluded from formal labour markets and marginalized due the stigma associated with waste and poverty, lacking formal recognition and labour rights.”
Women like Rebbeca, and children in the sector are the most affected where they face harsh conditions, exacerbating their vulnerability.
In 2022, states resolved to negotiate and append their signatures on a legally binding international instrument to govern the life cycle of plastics, including the prevention of marine pollution by the end of 2024. A fair and equitable agreement that safeguards human rights is essential for the treaty’s legitimacy and effectiveness.
During a stocktaking plenary session at the negotiation, Lisa Koperqualuk, submitting on behalf of the Indigenous Group emphasised the need for the treaty to actively promote indigenous people’s contribution by providing culturally safe platform for a full and active participation in decision making and implementation as a right holder but not as shareholders.
“We call upon the treaty to uphold the distinct rights of indigenous people as encompassed in the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the rights of indigenous people,” she remarked.
Five justice principles in particular will need to guide development and implementation of the agreement for the treaty to be implemented equitably and fairly. First, negotiators, policymakers, and implementers will need to strive for distributive justice, reflecting the strong evidence that plastic pollution is disproportionately harming vulnerable populations, especially in developing countries.
Lisa added, “We call upon the treaty to set the legally binding global targets to phase down plastics, prohibiting the construction of new fossil full extraction sites and petrochemical facilities. Also, eliminating harmful chemicals from supply chains, protects ecosystems and human health by holding polluters accountable.
Through the five INC negotiations, several groupings of stakeholders have organised and collaborated to both act as watchdogs for the negotiations but also provide critical expert input, representing independent science, frontline experience and policy expertise, amongst other things.
The treaty process has also seen other stakeholder groups likethe informal sector (for example waste pickers), dumpsite edge communities and indigenous peoples organise themselves in this space. This type of broad stakeholder engagement from impacted communities is vitally important to meet the goal of ‘meaningful participation’ in this negotiation and its implementation.
Currently, multinationals and plastic industry associations have now allied themselves with some waste pickers groups on occasion, in a trend that unions see as cynical and divisive.
Either, the treaty will need to commit to procedural justice, ensuring Indigenous peoples and marginalized communities have the opportunity to participate fully and meaningfully in plastics governance as well as aim for environmental justice at all levels of governance, avoiding rules, incentives, and market mechanisms that exacerbate social inequities or violate human rights.
Swati Singh Sambyal, Waste and Circular Economy Expert, GRID-Arendal exude confidence that article 10 of the text presented by the INC Chair, on just transition shows a strong alignment, particularly in ensuring equitable involvement of waste pickers and the indigenous communities in the plastic value chain.
With the countries now gearing up to INC 5.2 at a set date next year, the conversation has now shifted from waste management to addressing the entire lifecycle of plastics. Over 85 countries are now united in pushing for an ambitious treaty that addresses plastic production and toxic chemicals, increasing circularity, having proper financing mechanisms and delivering a just transition.
Marginalised communities in developing countries are often the most exposed and vulnerable to plastic pollution and its socio-environmental impacts. Waste management systems in developing countries often struggle to keep up with increasing waste generation rates of rapidly growing economies, urbanization and changing consumer habits.
For another, limited waste management capacities are often compounded by waste exports from affluent countries in the Global North. Alongside this, informal waste collection and recycling systems have developed to turn valuable types of waste into resources and livelihoods for millions of informal workers worldwide. These informal activities are often referred to as the informal waste sector (IWS).
These groups also call for implementation of a redistributive and simple financial mechanism that ensures funds are broad-based and directly equitably accessible to all impacted groups of the same sociocultural regions.
GRID-Arendal’S Principal Expert, Lars Sterdol, recommends the treaty will need to impose strong regulatory controls, including trade and investment restrictions, to enhance corporate transparency and accountability for plastic pollution and environmental injustices. Besides, it will need to provide technical and financial assistance to help transition marginalized populations to a non-polluting global plastics economy, avoiding further indebting low-income states while placing the economic burden on high polluters and high-capacity states.
The UNEA-5.2 mandate constituted an important catalyst toward recognizing the ongoing and historical contribution of the IWS to waste management and the socio-economic injustices prevailing therein. However, as underlined by Civil Society groups and Labour Unions, the due recognition of the IWS at national and local levels is yet to be achieved; there is a need to holistically recognize the contribution of all actors involved across the IWS, including waste pickers, collectors, transporters, cleaners, sorters, recycling shops, and processors.
According to Dorothy Atieno, Programs Manager, Centre for Environmental Justice and Development (CEJAD) “A just and inclusive transition in the plastic treaty text should be co-developed and be ambitious enough to benefit IWS workers, by protecting human rights, labor conditions, and health, rather than focusing solely on registration and taxation.”
Dorothy is optimistic that the agreement will introduce legally binding measures along all stages of the plastics lifecycle from the upstream production, processing and refining petrochemical sector to the downstream municipal waste collectors and waste pickers.
Rebecca, a waste picker, underscores the negotiators to implement the just transition in totality.
The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers expressed concern that the treaty might not address the issues of waste pickers. In their statement, they noted that despite majority of member states expressing a strong desire for a mandatory provision for the just transition of waste pickers, it has been replaced with a voluntary provision in the new text for the next round of negotiations.
Another key element of a just inclusion of IWS workers in practice is the widespread implementation of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mechanisms. EPR systems that are exclusive of the IWS may divert valuable materials and livelihood sources away from waste pickers and other IWS workers and disrupt well-functioning informal recycling supply chains.
Richard Kainika, Kenya Association of Waste Recyclers agrees that if developed with the active participation of IWS workers, EPR systems can support developing mechanisms that may ensure fairer prices for the sourcing and handling of recyclables, including costs of transportation, storage, and labor conditions.
The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers had already presented a declaration on EPR as a starting point for mitigating the risks of IWS exclusion and for promoting opportunities for increasingly inclusive EPR systems, the, including principles for just and inclusive EPR policies.
Policymakers will have to look at how other multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) have dealt with related concepts of informality, hazardous waste, and indigenous knowledge. For example, the Minamata Convention of Mercury specifically addresses informal artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) communities in the text of the convention.
Other relevant MEAs to consider include the Basel Convention, which offers technical guidance on how to address environmentally sound management of waste in the informal sector, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which recognizes traditional and indigenous knowledge providers as key actors, and which set up a dedicated working group to draw up guidelines for the same.
“This research article was supported by the GRID-Arendal Travel Grant. The author(s) would like to thank GRID-Arendal for their generous funding and support in facilitating this investigation.”
