2. Metodología
2.2. Contexto social
2.2.2. Nuevos patrones de comportamiento, hábitos de consumo inéditos:
The following section will only provide a brief overview of the South African situation, as more de-tail will follow in the following chapters.
As mentioned in the section on informality, today there are approximately 45,000 to 85,000 waste collectors in South Africa, who represent less than one percent of people in non-agricultural employ-ment.332 It has, however, not been assessed yet, how many of them are ‗specialised‘ waste pickers and how many opportunistic ‗scavengers‘ as there have been no (nationwide) statistical surveys.333 Apart from difficulties in sampling to determine numbers is the problem that occupational and industrial classification codes used by Statistics South Africa can only be used to identify waste collectors in general. Informal waste pickers or ‗scavengers‘ are not presented as a distinct category of worker.
Therefore, the only way to roughly distinguish waste pickers or ‗scavengers‘ from municipal waste collectors is to identify their formal/informal employment status.334 In any case, compared to India and Brazil the total number is much smaller (but the population size of these countries is also many times higher than South Africa‘s). And like in India and Brazil, it is argued in this study, waste-picking in South Africa is an important livelihood strategy in the context of high unemployment, and contributes to social and environmental sustainability. In South Africa, there are practically no barri-ers for (potential) reclaimbarri-ers to start waste collection, at least for street waste pickbarri-ers.
330 Medina, ‗Waste picker cooperatives in developing countries‘, p. 9f.
331 de Brito, ‗God is My Alarm Clock‘, p. 7
332 Wills, ‗South Africa‘s Informal Economy‘, p. 47
333 Ibid., p. 3
334 Ibid., p. 47
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Similar to Brazil and India, waste picking is no new phenomenon in South Africa. People collecting waste off the streets for survival has a long history. As explained in section 9.2, waste dump sites were often located close to townships and rural villages during apartheid, where the dumped waste posed a danger to the health of adjacent communities (Coastal Park is no exception in that matter).
The waste for the most part was generated and collected in white areas and dumped near the town-ships, where the unemployed and the poor scavenged for scraps of food to consume and bottles to sell. 335
According to Benson and Vanqa-Mgijima, since the adoption of neoliberal policies by various South African administrations the scale of private reclaiming has increased, as has the availability of poor people to be part of the reclaiming chain. They identify three main reasons for this development:
(1) Local authorities have reduced the quality of waste services as part of the cut-backs in the provision of public services, the need to obey tight fiscal restrictions and the worship of pri-vate businesses.
(2) Large companies have sought to cheapen input costs by recycling paper, wood and other recyclable materials. Companies have also responded to legislation requiring them to use higher percentages of recyclable materials.
(3) The sheer scale of job losses over the period has shifted many more people out of jobs and onto the street. [And what makes matters worse is the inability of creating enough new jobs for the growing population.] 336
The consequences of these changes have meant that the ―hidden‖, occasional, survivalist activity pur-sued by the poorest, unemployed and marginalised amongst the working class has become the more systemic private industry of reclaiming. The formal recycling industry is relying to a significant ex-tent on the growing group of this ‗bottom layer‘ of the poor ‗unemployed‘ working class. But where-as street wwhere-aste pickers in Cape Town have begun to organise themselves and seek ways to contest their oppression through different forms of collectives, the reclaimers on the landfills have yet to make this step.337
Something general ought to be said about landfill sites as well. Hallowes and Munnik explain the nature of dumpsites in Wasting the Nation: ―Dumps share characteristics, but each dump is individual with an individual history. They also form part of the web of local government politics, in which ar-rangements are made and opportunities created.‖338 As has been elucidated before, waste pickers are often excluded from decisions that affect their lives. This is confirmed by Hallowes and Munnik, who
335 Benson and Vanqa-Mgijima, ‗Organizing on the Streets: A Study of Reclaimers in the Streets of Cape Town‘, p. 2
336 Ibid.
337 Ibid.
338 Hallowes and Munnik, Wasting the Nation, p. 137
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refer to a number of studies which taken together reveal the pattern that the process of formalising waste management comes with the progressive exclusion of waste pickers from dumps and their mar-ginalisation or subordination within the economy of recycling. They point out, however, that this pro-cess is highly uneven, with some examples indicating that managers of the sites do have some free-dom of choice to make decisions that include rather than exclude the waste pickers. Furthermore, the studies show that the reclaimers themselves are far from being passive, but have vehemently resisted their marginalisation and – sometimes more successful than other times – developed strategies re-sponding to the formalisation process.339
As in Brazil and India, South African waste pickers have begun to organise. They are, however, lag-ging behind these two countries when it comes to the degree of organisation and the support of (na-tional and local) governments and acknowledgement in public policy. In July 2009 the environmental justice NGO groundWork, which has a long history of working with communities affected by haz-ardous and toxic waste organised South Africa‘s First National Waste Picker Meeting. 100 waste pickers from 26 landfills in seven of South Africa‘s nine provinces came together to discuss issues the main challenges faced by waste pickers and how these could be overcome. One of the waste picker representatives, Simon Mbata, emphasised that the meeting was ―making history‖ as it was ―the first time we see waste pickers in South Africa together deciding our future.‖340
One of the challenges discussed was the negative impacts of the 2008 Waste Act, because it does not recognise the role of waste pickers in municipal waste management (see the following chapter for more detail). At the time, groundWork waste campaigner Musa Chamane pointed out the problem of the new law: ―The Act actually recognises salvaging of waste but the minimum requirements for landfills criminalises the picking of waste by waste pickers for recycling purposes, which is the live-lihood of waste pickers‖.341
According to groundWork, the majority of reclaimers on municipal landfills do not look for old food, but are there for the collection of recyclables, such as plastics, paper and metal, which in turn are sold to recycling companies, or middlemen (as they are referred to by the waste pickers). This is also the general pattern at the Coastal Park landfill, just that the skarrelaars do not directly sell to recycling companies, but local scrap yards. Furthermore, CPL is no exception in groundWork‘s observation
339 Ibid.
340 Melanie Samson, ‗South Africa‘s First National Waste Picker Meeting‘, in: Samson, Melanie (ed.), Refusing to be Cast Aside: Waste Pickers Organising Around the World (WIEGO: Cambridge, MA, 2009), p. 35
341 Kelly Farthing, ‗Waste pickers not recognised in new Waste Act‘, Engineering News (21.08.2009).
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/waste-picking-still-not-considered-legitimate-profession-2009-08-21 Accessed: 21.03.2013
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that waste pickers are faced with brutality by municipal security guards on a daily basis. In the words of Chamane: ―Municipalities are, in most cases, the licence holders of these sites and they spend mil-lions of rands trying to keep the waste pickers off the sites‖.342 In contrast, as mentioned above, coun-tries like India, Egypt and Brazil acknowledge waste picking as a legitimate profession.
Apart from the violence and the (potential) exploitation by middlemen, reclaimers in South Africa face numerous other challenges which include the potential burning of resources through municipal waste incineration, the dumping of hazardous waste on landfill sites and the privatisation of waste reclaiming. Privatisation is a major problem, because it often means that the workers are being ex-cluded from landfill sites, resulting in their livelihoods being taken away.343
From the previous sections it has become clear that there is an increasing motivation amongst waste pickers to organise as they realise the benefits. They understand that they can only achieve recogni-tion and a place within formal solid waste management systems when they speak with one voice.
Thus, despite their reputation of valuing independence and individualism, they are forming coopera-tives, associations, companies, unions, micro-enterprises, or even ―women only‖ organisations.344 Through organising reclaimers have the chance to raise their social status and self-esteem, to improve their incomes and quality of life (partly by circumventing middlemen), as well as to better their work-ing conditions and health, and to prevent or minimise harassment and violence.345
342 Ibid.
343 Ibid.
344 Inclusive Cities, ‗Organizing: Waste Picking‘.
URL: http://www.inclusivecities.org/organizing/waste-picking/
Accessed: 28.03.2013
345 Ibid.
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