Deja Vu

Almost Clean

Tags:

cities,

conservation,

environment,

Latin America,

Mexico,

natural resources

“A Scrap of Decency,” by Bharati Chaturvedi, The New York Times, Aug. 5, 2009.

AMONG those suffering from the global recession are millions of workers who are not even included in the official statistics: urban recyclers — the trash pickers, sorters, traders and reprocessors who extricate paper, cardboard and plastics from garbage heaps and prepare them for reuse. Their work is both unrecorded and largely unrecognized, even though in some parts of the world they handle as much as 20 percent of all waste.

The world’s 15 million informal recyclers clean up cities, prevent some trash from ending in landfills, and even reduce climate change by saving energy on waste disposal techniques like incineration.

They also recycle waste much more cheaply and efficiently than governments or corporations can, and in many cities in the developing world, they provide the only recycling services.

“Garbage,” by Alma Guillermoprieto, 1990.
Ms. Guillermoprieto reports from Mexico City.

After a week of rain, the pickers were working ankle-deep in a thick slush; it was tinted blue or bright red in patches, and these exhaled a mist of choking chemical fumes. Oblivious of the smell, a cluster of children crouched in a blue puddle, poring over a small pile of plastic comic-book figures—the Joker, Superman, and the like. The children did not want to talk to a stranger (indeed, they avoided even looking at me), but after I made a couple of tries the tallest boy answered a question, saying that he and his friends wanted the toys not to play with but to sell. Nevertheless, as they salvaged the few dolls that had no arms or legs missing they deployed them in a brief, soundless mock battle before tossing them into a scavenging sack.

One of Celestino’s overseers waved each arriving truck to a spot on the edge of the clearing, where a family or a team of friends was waiting, each member equipped with only a long-handed pitchfork, and no boots, masks, or protective gear. The team began sifting through the waste even before the truck’s shower of refuse ended, expertly plucking out the salvageable bits with their bare hands. The fork was designed to help the pickers separate the mounds of trash on the ground, but an elderly man in faded blue overalls said that since the tractor had been brought in there was hardly any time for the garbage to pile up, so a lot of salable material was left unsalvaged. (The tractor was somebody’s idea of a landfill operation, but since the garbage wasn’t covered with anything after being flattened out it seemed to serve no practical purpose.)

The garbage pickers proved to be a closemouthed lot, especially when I asked their names or put questions about Celestino, but the man in overalls was willing to explain the various stages of trash-picking. “You have to know what to select,” he said, working with precision and delicacy as he talked. “For example, this pair of trousers is good, because the buttons and zipper can be removed and sold. If they were made of natural fiber, like cotton, you could sell the cloth as rag. There are a lot of tennis shoes in this pile, but they’re not good enough to sell to the secondhand-clothes dealers.” He was picking through a revolting pile of what seemed to be the refuse of a very large family, but by the time the things he had chosen to keep reached his sack they looked almost clean.

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