Scavengers dump nightsoil to speak out on UN stage

They demand access to waste instead of its recycling through incinerators

But two decades later, in the global arena of climate negotiations, the little saree-clad Indian and other scavengers are making their voices heard, tilting with big corporate players in a tug-of-war over the world’s dumpsites.

The Goliaths they are taking on are companies building incinerators worldwide to burn waste from landfills, material generations of “waste pickers” have survived on. Many of the projects are supported by private funds raised under the UN climate treaty.

Bhadakwad had come 18,000 km to the annual UN climate conference in Cancun on behalf of 6,000 organised landfill recyclers in her native Pune, India, to demand access to the waste now trucked instead to a new incinerator. Without their dump, they are trying to survive by going door to door for trash in a community 20 km away.

“We have a right to the waste that can be recycled,” said Bhadakwad. “We want to continue making a living without interference from such big private companies.” Their environmentalist allies say some 50 million people worldwide depend on scavenging for a meagre livelihood. And these advocates and poor recyclers have an environmental argument to make.

Incinerators not only produce toxic pollution, but “by burning waste they increase carbon dioxide emissions,” the biggest global warming gas, said Mariel Vilella, a campaigner with the international group GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

By collecting and recycling plastic bags and bottles, glass, aluminum and other material, those 50 million scavengers “represent a huge opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Vilella told reporters, since what is destroyed must be replaced by items newly manufactured and transported in a process using up natural resources and producing more greenhouse gases.

“For decades we have been part of the solution for solid waste management on this planet,” said Exequiel Estay, head of a Chilean scavenger association. “We demand that our jobs become sustainable.”

Appeal

On Wednesday, a dozen garbage recyclers from Latin America, India and South Africa unfurled banners on the steps of a conference meeting hall, with slogans reading “Respect for waste pickers” and “Zero waste for climate justice.”

For Bhadakwad, making her way through the conference crowds in a brilliant saffron-and-violet sari, the air-conditioned UN stage was a long way from the refuse heaps of Pune, where she and her husband divided the jobs of collecting and separating recyclables to support their three sons.

“I started at age 13 because of the economic condition of my family. My father was an alcoholic, that is why,” she said.

Could she have imagined she was helping the planet?

“I wasn’t aware of these issues,” she said, smiling at the question. “I didn’t know we were helping the climate. But now I have come to know about it, about all the consequences of waste management.”