In this paper, Waste pickers and collectors in Delhi, who constitute the bottom layer of waste recycling as well as an informal sector in the city, are primarily focused on. This paper explores two aspects of “waste pickers and collectors” with the authors’ field survey. One is socio-economic characteristic of pickers and collectors. As described later, socio-economic characteristics such as Origin, Level of living and the Way of operation are strikingly different between pickers and collectors. The paper investigates not only those characteristics themselves but also a background where the distinctions stemmed from. Later, the study attempts to measure their contribution on the society, which might characterize this paper from the previous studies.
As stated before, the targets of this study are grouped in two. One is “waste pickers” and the other is “waste collectors”. Both groups share similar characteristics in a way they operate their business as they sell collected waste to higher level traders (i.e., Dealers or Wholesellers) and yield their profit. However, they are different in a critical point. Pickers need no capital for picking up their waste, whereas collectors buy their waste in cash from households or other waste producers so that collectors essentially need some capital for their business operation.
The authors conducted three-round field surveys by means of a questionnaire covering pickers and collectors, waste producers and upper-level traders (including dealers, wholesalers and recycling plants), and supplemental survey, respectively. The number of observations is, as the authors admit, statistically small as summarized in Table 1. For example, number of respondents from both pickers and collectors is 35.
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... the paper, the number of observations might be too small to derive more general conclusions. Expanding the observations by choosing them from not a single city, but multiple cities might be able to solve this problem partly and improve an accuracy of estimation on the aggregation. Second, an inequality among each sector seems to be neglected. Considering the socio-economic characteristics of each sector, there can be a significant difference in an inequality, from which some policy implication can be derived. Third, expanding same kind of study to multiple informal sectors can be helpful to draw a more comprehensive picture of nationwide informal sectors.
Works Cited
Hayami, Yujiro, A. K. Dikshit, and S. N. Mishra. "Waste pickers and collectors in Delhi: poverty and environment in an urban informal sector." The Journal of Development Studies 42.1 (2006): 41-69.
Lora Jo Foo. “The Yale Law Journal”, Vol. 103, No. 8, Symposium: The Informal Economy
By material, the three largest areas of recycling in Canada are organics, newsprint, and cardboard (Statistics Canada, 2008, para. 13). Organics include food wastes, and are the items that go into green bins. It was only recently in Ontario that green bin collection began on a regular basis, and according to a recent study, the program may have grown faster than initially expected. In 2007, t...
Since the industrial revolution the United States has experienced tremendous change. This change has created a consumer culture that has resulted in the creation of mass amounts of waste. According to reports, in the year 2003 Americans produced almost 500 million pounds waste. Alone the U.S consumes 30% of the world’s resources and produces 30% of all waste (Conquest, 2). These numbers attest to a consumer culture that has created an undesirable waste problem that is yet to be resolved. However, not everyone is affected proportionately by waste, as predominantly low-income communities live in close proximity to waste related sites. In this paper I will discuss how low-income communities are disproportionately subjected to the detrimental health effects caused by waste, and I will argue that low-income communities have historically and are currently responding to counter the effects of waste to protect their communities.
Ever found something in the trash and taken it home? While many partake in dumpster diving leisurely, there are a special few who get everything they need from garbage: clothes, electronics, and even food. "Cultivate poverty... like a garden herb. Don't trouble yourself to get new things whether clothes or friends," (Thoreau, Generation 25). This brilliant quote relates very closely to the freeganism movement which fights wastefulness in our consumerist society.
A) Lars Eighner, in “On Dumpster Diving”, portrays the waste that is accumulated due to modern consumerism and materialism. He also demonstrates the issue of the wage gap. Consumers of the modern age spend too much and therefore waste too much. In the essay, Eighner describes life as an scavenger and demonstrates how people are able to live by the minimal resources. “Scavengers” are able to survive on the waste of the consumer. Eighner presents this scenario as a contrast to the life of a modern consumer, in order to portray it’s unnecessary wastefulness. Mainly, food seems to be taken lightly by society, as Eighner as a scavenger finds “a half jar of peanut butter”,
As I stated in the beginning, Muniz took pictures of the catadores and had them sculpt their portraits with the garbage that they have picked. He then travels to London, bringing along one of the catadores, to auction off one of the portraits that was created. Tiao dos Santos, one of the catadores that traveled to London with Muniz, sat amazed and emotional as the portrait of himself, made of garbage, gets auctioned off for $50,000. He cries on Muniz’s shoulders as he expresses how he appreciated what he have done for them. Isis, one of the catadores states: “This work brought me realization.” This experience has not only changed their lives, but Vik Muniz also become changed. It has impacted their creativity, insight, purpose, spirituality, and life in general. The pickers have come up with plans outside of Gramacho. With the money from the auction, they buy a truck, equipment, and build a learning center and a library. “With the help of Tiao, the president of the pickers’ cooperative ACAMJG (the Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gramacho), the city will pay out more than 1,700 pickers in a lump sum of about $7,500 each now that the landfill is closed. In addition, ACAMJG has picked up contracts to process recyclables at the World Cup 2014 and secured government contracts to work at new recycling plants opening in the city. In 2010, Brazil enacted its first federal waste management law that will fund recycling plants and legally recognize garbage pickers, including more than 8,000 members of the Movimento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Reciclaveis (National Movement of Collectors of Recyclable Materials), where Tiao has become one of the leaders. (pbs.org). These few life changing events are some of the benefits of combining art and social practice. Combining the two engage the world and create social
According to Gale opposing view points, “the cost of collecting, sorting, and proceeding recyclables can, for some materials, be higher than that of creating new raw materials” (Gale). This goes to show that even sometimes, recycling an item such as steel or paper or whatever, can cost more than actually make a new material from scratch, aka raw material. Not only that, but the places where the give mentioned provides a recyclable bin, they cost money also. A different type of trash machine comes to pick it up, more money there. The driver gets paid. The employees at raw recycling factor, which probably don’t do much, also get paid. All these unnecessary funds going to waste while the are people starving in the nation. While there are people around the world who don’t even have safe, clean water to drink; yet the government goes and spends on recycling
To implement a recycling program requires a collection process that includes the containers to gather the materials, the trucks to transport them to the processing site, and the manpower to manage the program. Unfortunately, recycling is more of a business than an attempt to save the environment. The value of the material being recycled overshadows the negative impact of dumping items into the landfill. At a point in time, the demand for recycled paper declined, so recyclers stored the material in hopes that values would increase. “The hope is that eventually the markets turn around and that the materials is sold, but I have heard of instances where it gets landfilled, because a community doesn’t have the demand or the space or the company to deal with it, “ says Gene Jones, the executive director of Southern Waste Information Exchange (Westervelt,
Humankind produces and consumes with little regard for waste. Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash focuses on consumption’s byproduct; trash and what humankind has done to dispose of their waste over the past decades. Strasser catalogues an often deemed unsophisticated part of our modern society as being “central to our lives yet generally silenced or ignore” (p.36), throughout her book elucidating on the premise that one’s own view and opinion of what is deemed as trash varies greatly from person to person. Strasser explicates to the reader the rise of mass markets across the world and the impacts that production and consumption have on the creation of trash. Strasser begins to follow the story of trash in the pre-colonial
Many Latin American countries suffer from extreme inequalities when it comes to wealth distribution. This inequality is exacerbated by other social and political factors such as; land reform, natural disasters, unemployment and violence ( street children). The majority of street children consider themselves workers and are involved in some form of informal economic activity. This ranges from picking garbage and “guarding” cars to selling small goods. The meager amount these children earn often goes towards supplementing their family’s income.
Simply put the informal economy refers to those economic activities that are neither taxed nor monitored by a government and are therefore not included in that government's Gross National Product (GNP) However in literature this phenomenon is discussed using different concepts such as informal, unofficial, irregular, parallel second underground, underground, grey markets, subterranean, hidden, invisible, unrecorded, shadow, ghosting and moonlighting. Illegal or criminal activities such as drug dealing or prostitution have been excluded from this definition, as have exchanges of unpaid work. My paper is therefore prepared with this omission in mind.
Policy is needed to regulate which course of action should be taken and how it should be implemented. Because of this, many plans and policies revolving around the management of solid waste have been put in place. Sometimes however, a particular policy can have its shortfalls, potentially resulting in its negative aspects outweighing the positive ones. According to the Conference Board of Canada Report, “Canadians dispose of more municipal solid waste per capita than any other country” (2013). Solid waste management in particular, involves many aspects, ranging from packaging waste, food waste, etc. (White & Franke 1999), hence, the following analysis revolves around household and commercial waste – referred to as Municipal Solid Waste (White & Franke. 1999) – in the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Municipal waste is a major health and environmental concern as it contributes to numerous problems like habitat destruction, surface groundwater pollution, and other forms of air, soil, and water contamination. Waste disposal methods like incineration create toxic substances, and landfills emit methane, which contributes to global warming. According to the Zero Waste Objective Report, “The impact of climate change and the increasing awareness of the role of “waste” and “wasting” in the production of greenhouse gas emissions is a constant environmental pressure… (2009). This leads to an increasing limitation of government to prevent and control the volume and toxicity of products in the waste stream and a growing need to shift responsibility to the product manufacturer.
Traditional methods of waste disposal have proven to be ineffective and have caused harmful effects on the environment. The most popular and inexpensive way to get rid of garbage is burial, but burying your problems does not necessarily mean getting rid of them. Landfill sites pose as severe ecological threats as these mass garbage dump yards overflow with trash and frequently contaminate our air, soil and water with hazardous wastes. About 400 million tons of hazardous wastes are generated each year1. A large-scale release of these materials can cause thousands of deaths and may poison the environment for many years. For example many industrial companies around the world cannot afford to enforce the strict pollution regulations set by many developed countries. This usually forces these types of companies to move to developing countries where pollution regulations are very lenient. These developing countries knowingly accept environmentally hazardous companies usually because they are in desperate need of employment. The harmful effects of these companies were clearly illustrated in the 1960s and 1970s when residents living near Minamata Bay, Japan, developed nervous disorders, tremors, and paralysis in a mysterious epidemic. The root was later found to be a local industry that had released mercury, a highly toxic element, into Minamata Bay. The disaster had claimed the lives of 400 people1. Since 1970 you can bet that a lot more than 400 people have died as a result of waste disposal. If the type of waste disposal were cheaper and effective we wouldn’t have to deal with waste problems, which still plague mankind today.
Efficient waste managing approaches help with reducing and avoiding unpleasant impact on the environment and human health, while allowing financial development and progress in the quality of people’s life. People do not even imagine what is the size and capacity of their activities and the impact they produce on the environment. Garbage is an important ecological problem. It is seems amazing that approximately all of the citizens of the world identify rubbish as a major environmental problem and yet these people still litter. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (2008), an American produces 250 million tons of garbage per year (para.2). There are different circumstances that are based on the society, environmental conditions, occupation and size of each of the different family. As Richmond (2010) stated, if no administration organizations has the responsibility or resources to concentrate their efforts on the waste disposal, then the responsibility to do that is on ...
Recycling is such a fantastic way for us to reuse the waste we once throw. Yet, not everything is easy to be done in this world. There many difficulties that face recycling process economically and socially. Usually In order to recycle, waste paper needs to be sorted and treated from any Impurities. Which means that companies will loss finance because there must be someone or something that could sort or treat these papers. Another problem is that to start recycling, companies needs a lot of good recyclable supply to pick it up; after all, they need good economic benefits (Problems with Recycling, 2014). According to the Waste and Resources Action Program, there are some barriers p...