Waste Picker Integration Guideline for South Africa

The visible impacts of poor waste management have taken hold in the imagination of the public in recent years, with images of illegal dumping and marine litter appearing frequently in the media. However, there is a social element of waste management that is also grabbing the attention of the South African public, and rightly so for the role that they play in South Africa’s waste economy – the informal waste sector. It is estimated that there are between sixty and ninety thousand informal waste pickers working at the heart of South Africa’s recycling economy, recovering mostly paper and packaging waste from the service chain and introducing these secondary resources into the country’s value chain. Government, industry and civil society recognize the important role of waste pickers in the diversion of valuable resources away from landfill towards reuse and recycling.

In an effort to improve the working conditions and livelihoods of the informal waste sector and to better integrate pickers into the country’s waste economy, the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF) and the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) developed this guideline document, with the support of the University of Witwatersrand. It fulfils the commitment made by the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF) in the 2011 National Waste Management Strategy (NWMS) to “provide guidance to municipalities and industry on measures to improve the working conditions of waste-pickers.”

This evidence-based guideline emanates from the first social science research grant project awarded under South Africa’s 10-year Waste Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Roadmap, managed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on behalf of national government. The development of the guideline highlights the importance of combining research with the active involvement of waste pickers (represented by the South African Waste Pickers Association and the African Reclaimers Organisation), industry, government and academia, in order to create policy change of benefit to all.