At plastics treaty talks, waste pickers push for a ‘just transition'

Soledad Mella came to the first United Nations plastics treaty negotiations in late November with a clear message: Any agreement must help people like her, who do difficult work scouring city streets and landfills to collect and sell waste recyclables.

Mella, an official delegate to the talks from the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, was at the conference in Uruguay with diplomats from nearly 150 countries and representatives from industry and environmental groups.

She and others from the IAWP, in something of a first in United Nations negotiations, were on hand pushing countries to include a "just transition" for recycling workers in any agreement.

"There are more than 20 million waste pickers in the world, without any wages," she told hundreds of assembled diplomats at a Nov. 29 public forum. "We have not received any wages. We sell what we pick and that's what we live on. Most of us are poor. We often can't even keep up with our family's nutrition.

"But we know that the policies that are being implemented nowadays are going to make a difference, especially now with this treaty," said Mella, who spoke on a public panel with delegates from the American Chemistry Council and other groups. "We believe this is an important moment. We want a fair transition."

The idea has support among some countries and U.N. leaders.

IAWP and more than 20 countries announced a Just Transition Initiative Dec. 2, on the last day of the Uruguay talks, with Kenya and South Africa leading efforts to organize countries.

They said they would bring out more details ahead of the next negotiating session in Paris in May, but the countries said in a statement put out by IAWP that they would work to address waste picker concerns in the talks.

IAWP hailed the announcement and said it's the first time that countries have agreed to advocate for waste pickers in global negotiations.

"A plan for a just transition will provide and guarantee better and decent work, social protection, more training opportunities and greater job security for workers at all stages of the plastics value chain including workers in informal and cooperative settings, including waste pickers," the IAWP said in the Dec. 2 statement.

Mella told delegates at the talks, held in the seaside city of Punta del Este, that recyclers like her work in hazardous conditions. For example, just a 20-minute drive from the convention center where the negotiations were being held, a waste picker working at a landfill was fatally crushed by a reversing dump truck in August, according to an article on the treaty on phys.org, written in part by Patrick O'Hare, the author of the book Rubbish Belongs to the Poor.

"Our health is also affected because we live in the dump yards, we recycle in the dump yards," Mella told the negotiators. "The gas emissions, together with the plastics, are truly toxic. … You must be there to realize.

"It's making people sick with kidney disorders and many others," she said. "But we believe we can contribute. We are truly those who are taking the burden of it, way before global warming became heard of, and plastics pollution."

Inger Andersen, the head of the U.N. Environment Programme, urged countries in a speech at the talks to design the treaty to help waste pickers like Mella.

"It's essential that negotiators listen to a diverse set of voices and consider the many ways in which plastics impacts different segments of society, whether in the Global North or the Global South," Andersen said. "We need to ... ensure the integration of millions of workers in informal settings, such as waste pickers, into the new economy for plastics."

A report from another U.N. agency released a few weeks before the Uruguay meeting recommended that waste pickers be integrated into broader recycling systems.

The report from U.N.-Habitat, "Leaving No One Behind," said the treaty should call for financial support for waste pickers as part of municipal solid waste budgets, extended producer responsibility recycling programs and international funds set up to address plastic pollution.

The idea, it said, is that as the treaty changes how plastics are used over time, the waste pickers and others in the informal sector get assistance.

"A just transition means that transition to a sustainable production and consumption of plastic is designed in a manner that is fair, inclusive and equitable as possible to the informal sector," U.N.-Habitat said.

IAWP, in its formal submission to the Uruguay conference, said it wants the treaty to formally define both what a waste picker is and what constitutes a just transition.

It said the talks should establish a forum focused on waste picker transition, provide money for pickers to attend treaty meetings and commission a report on their contributions to recycling and reducing plastic pollution.

The U.N.-Habitat said pickers and other informal workers are vital to recycling systems, especially in places without government-funded collection programs.

"They currently help to recycle almost 60 percent of plastic waste worldwide and sometimes provide the only form of municipal solid waste services," the report said, noting that as many as 2 billion people globally have no regular waste collection service.

The U.N. report said that means that in some places, waste pickers and informal workers are responsible for up to 90 percent of materials that are recycled.

Specifically, 600 cooperatives organized by a national waste pickers movement in Brazil collect about 90 percent of what is recycled, and waste pickers in South Africa recover an estimated 80-90 percent of post-consumer packaging, according to a 2021 report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

It said pickers can be a key source of materials for industry, gathering 50-90 percent of recycled materials used by companies or exported in Latin America and the Caribbean, for example.

But they only receive about 5 percent of profits, meaning they effectively subsidize other parts of the supply chain, according to the GAIA report, "An Inclusive Recovery."

"The informal sector currently subsidizes the recycling industry, absorbing costs that in the wealthier countries are borne by the corporations who put recyclable materials on the market, or by governments," GAIA said.

IAWP said in its submission to the talks that governments are starting to recognize the role of pickers and integrate them into waste management systems.

"We are getting contracts from municipal authorities to engage in the domain of waste management," it said. "We are being viewed as popular environment educators and organizers in the fight for environmental justice and rights."

But IAWP also highlighted challenges. It said pickers often come from poor and marginalized groups and work in dangerous conditions that take a toll on their health.

"We are threatened at work by climate change," the group said. "We face other threats which contribute to our loss of livelihoods such as increasing privatization of waste management, waste to energy or incineration projects and exclusion through other public policy interventions in plastic waste management, including the omission of our work in the norms of extended producers responsibility."

Mella, who sat next to Stewart Harris from the American Chemistry Council on the panel, issued a call to the petrochemical industry.

"We make an appeal to all nations to help us out, especially the petrochemical industries, to be in charge and responsible for what they are doing, especially the plastics in our dump yards, in our rivers, in our lakes," she said.

A South African waste picker delegate to the Uruguay meeting, speaking from the floor in a Dec. 1 session, told the diplomats the treaty process should include technology transfer to informal workers, as well as financial help and training.

"We need a forum on providing resources to the most marginalized and vulnerable workers and waste pickers to upgrade their skills and occupation," said Madditlhare Koena, an IAWP representative.

She said waste picker organizations should receive financial aid to participate in negotiations — the U.N. plans four more meetings around the world in the next two years.

She said technology transfer provisions in the treaty should build stronger "south-to-south" links between countries where there are many pickers.

"The technology transfer should be appropriate to the existing labor force in the plastics value chain and enable efficient and more decent and safe work," she said.