Climate change improves image of trash pickers

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – As the world scrambles to save dwindling resources and halt global warming, a long-scorned population is becoming the latest hope in the environmental battle.

The unsung heroes are the impoverished trash pickers who fill the streets of cities around the developing world, searching garbage for cardboard, plastic bags and other treasure that can be sold and recycled.

Every day, they rescue hundreds of thousands of tons of material from streets and trash dumps that get reprocessed into all kinds of products. That not only cuts back on the resources used by industries but also lightens the load on dumps that are quickly reaching capacity.

Despite their contributions, trash pickers have long suffered harassment from local governments and derision from neighbors, who often consider them vagrants or even criminals. Such attitudes, however, are changing, trash pickers said, and they’re increasingly being seen as foot soldiers in the global warming battle.

“We’re the only ones doing this work,” said Cristian Robles, a trash picker who scours the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires for recyclables. “If we didn’t do it, nobody else would.”

As in Buenos Aires, government-run recycling programs are rare in most of the developing world, meaning valuable materials that could be reused pile up at local dumps if trash pickers don’t get to them.

At an estimated 15 million people worldwide, trash pickers make up about 1 percent of the global urban population, and their impact is enormous, said Martin Medina, a U.S.-based waste management expert who wrote “The World’s Scavengers,” a book about the population.

Brazil, for example, claims the world’s highest aluminum recycling rate, at nearly 90 percent – not because of official initiatives, but thanks to the country’s estimated 500,000 trash pickers, Medina said. By comparison, only about half of the aluminum used in the United States is recycled, despite the proliferation of city-run recycling programs. In total, Brazilian trash pickers salvage about 33,000 tons of recyclables a day.

In Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, trash pickers recycle a third of all garbage, Medina said.

Trash pickers also reduce emissions of methane produced by rotting garbage in open-air dumps. That’s no small contribution, considering methane wreaks more than 20 times the global-warming damage that carbon dioxide does.

“Environmentally, they’re having a big effect,” Medina said. “But they’re not getting the support of governments. The entire system is based around economics, and people only turn to this when they have no other choice. Unemployment and layoffs are what’s pushing many people into doing it.”

To trash-picker advocates such as Jorge Pinheiro of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, conflicts could be avoided if governments stopped harassing trash pickers and instead helped them professionalize their operations.

That’s already happened in some countries, such as Brazil, where the federal government officially recognized trash picking as a legal profession five years ago and provided some labor protections. Most other countries, however, still prohibit the activity.