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Waste pickers, South Africa's unseen labour force, continue to fight for recognition and payment rights

Waste pickers, South Africa's unseen labour force, continue to fight for recognition and payment rights
Kago Molefe (left) and Shadrak Fillis collect recyclable material from an illegal dumpsite on the edge of Munsieville township in the Mogale City Municipality. (Photo: Steve Kretzmann)
Steve Kretzmann
By Steve Kretzmann
25 Oct 2024
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Waste pickers collect, sort and transport most of our recyclable waste, and regulations say they must be paid for their services.

Thousands of waste pickers, who are responsible for the bulk of recycling in South Africa, are not getting paid for their work, though regulations for their payment were gazetted more than three years ago.

Waste pickers, also called reclaimers, often seen going through household bins early in the morning before the garbage trucks arrive, or sorting through waste at municipal dump sites, collect 80% to 90% of all paper and packaging for recycling, according to a 2016 report by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. While waste pickers are paid by weight at buy-back centres for the material they collect, which is then sold on to recyclers, they are not paid for the services they provide. These include separation of waste outside households and businesses, transport of material to buy-back centres, and assistance to municipalities to reduce landfill use.

Their role was officially recognised in November 2020, when the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment published Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations that make paper and packaging producers responsible for managing the full lifecycle of their products.

Among other things, the regulations state that producers must join an Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme that manages the entire value chain, into which waste pickers must be integrated. The schemes are managed by non-profit Producer Responsibility Organisations, of which scores now exist. The producers pay a fee, calculated in tons of packaging they produce, to these organisations.

Following efforts by waste picker organisations, the regulations were amended in May 2021, ordering that waste pickers be paid for their services from November 2022.

‘Far too low’


The amount agreed upon within the industry – although waste picker organisations believe it is far too low and only agreed in order to start the process – was 15c/kg. This is supposed to be paid by the Producer Responsibility Organisations to registered waste pickers. This is payment for work they had been doing for decades, and unlike private companies, they have not been paid for it, notes University of Johannesburg sociology associate professor Melanie Samson, who led the piloting of the South African Waste Picker Registration System developed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

“They did this work for free, saving municipalities and industry hundreds of millions of rand in collection fees, transport costs and landfill airspace,” Samson has noted.

Waste pickers bring recyclable material to a buy-back centre in Krugersdorp, Gauteng. (Photo: Steve Kretzmann)



But the chairperson of the African Reclaimers Organisation, Elias Kodisang, said waste pickers were still not getting paid for the service they provide, three years after the regulations came into effect.

There are two main waste picker organisations: African Reclaimers Organisation, and the South African Waste Pickers Association. Kodisang said they had a combined membership of nearly 8,650 waste pickers who were registered on the system. He said that as far as he knew, the only Producer Responsibility Organisation that had made any payments had been the main plastics one, Petco.

“As far as we can see, only Petco is making payments, and that’s to fewer than 200 waste pickers, and even those payments stopped after a while,” he said.

This was echoed by South African Waste Pickers Association coordinator Lefa Mononga, who said registered waste pickers were not being paid the required service fee, despite the registration system “working smoothly”.

Petco, which responded through a public relations agency, said it was not able to pay waste pickers a service fee because it had not figured out a way to pay them electronically.

“Unfortunately, the ‘informality’ of collection and waste trading makes dealing with that part of the value chain very difficult. Currently most transactions are cash-based. Many are not formally recorded, and some businesses and most collectors do not have bank accounts,” stated Petco.

However, Petco stated that it had managed to pay the required service fee to some waste pickers during “pilot projects” in which “various approaches” to payments were tested.

Petco said it continued to support the registration of waste pickers “where we can”, and was piloting cashless payment systems together with the African Reclaimers Organisation and South African Waste Pickers Association.

But Petco said it paid “recycling support fees” to recyclers, based on the amount of recyclable material the recyclers bought. The support fee acted as an incentive for the recyclers to buy more recyclable material and pay a higher price for them from the buy-back centres, which in turn would pay higher prices to waste pickers who collected the material.

Petco didn’t say how, or whether, the recycling support fee had been paid by the buy-back centres to the waste pickers.

Petco did not provide an answer to the question of how much it had been paid in fees from its 24 member companies during the past two financial years, nor how many waste pickers had received any service fee payment since the amended regulations came into effect.

Producer Responsibility Organisations Alliance represents eight of the largest Producer Responsibility Organisations across the paper and packaging sector. Executive director Bhavesh Patel said the service fee wasn’t paid by the Producer Responsibility Organisations Alliance because the waste picker registration system did not have a payment system.

New, improved system


Patel said the alliance had voluntarily taken over management of the registration system from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and in discussion with the council and Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, was proposing a new, improved system to “address these challenges”.

He said re-establishing the waste picker stakeholder committee was “critical” to ensuring waste pickers were integrated and service fees paid.

But Samson said the stakeholder committee meetings involving Producer Responsibility Organisations, waste picker organisations, the South African Local Government Association, Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, and herself, had been unilaterally cancelled by the alliance in March this year.

Patel was asked about this, but did not provide a direct response to the question.

Additionally, Samson said the registration system (called the SA Waste Pickers Registration System, or South African Waste Pickers Association) was designed before extended producer responsibility existed, and was never intended to function as a payment system.

Kago Molefe (left) and Shadrak Fillis collect recyclable material from an illegal dumpsite on the edge of Munsieville township in the Mogale City Municipality. (Photo: Steve Kretzmann)



She said it was the responsibility of the Producer Responsibility Organisations to develop and deploy payment and tracking systems that linked to the registration system.

“Even the Producer Responsibility Organisations could not agree to implement just one tracking and payment system. They chose their own preferred systems and then did very little to deploy them. They did even less to link them to the South African Waste Picker Registration System, which is not a difficult thing to do.”

However, she said, some were finally showing a willingness to partner with waste picker organisations to fast-track payments, and “every Producer Responsibility Organisation needs to follow suit”.

Patel did not answer questions about how much Producer Responsibility Organisations Alliance members had paid in Extended Responsibility Producer regulations fees over the last three financial years, nor about its budget to develop and implement weight tracking and payment systems for registered waste pickers.

Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment communications chief director Peter Mbelengwa said some Producer Responsibility Organisations had indicated in their 2023 annual performance reports that they had started paying waste pickers, while others had not.

Delays in registration system


Mbelengwa said the reason given for non-payment was that there were delays in the finalisation of the registration system.

Regarding the cancellation of the fortnightly stakeholder meetings, he said the meetings were “put on hold to allow the alliance to focus on the urgency of facilitating the payment of waste picker service fees”.

He said the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment would enforce compliance with the service fee payments, and was facilitating discussions between all parties to “find immediate solutions”.

Once the issue of payments had been sorted out, the department “insists” the service fee be backdated, he said. DM 

This article was first published by GroundUp.

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