The Informal Sector – An Essential but often Unrecognised Component of Solid Waste Management

Raunaq Chawla^1, and Avinash Kumar¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Cite this paper:
Raunaq Chawla and Avinash Kumar. The Informal Sector – An Essential but often Unrecognised Component of Solid Waste Management. Applied Ecology and Environmental Sciences. 2022; 10(3):154-164. doi: 10.12691/aees-10-3-11

Abstract

Today, the provision of good solid waste management is a tremendous challenge. This challenge is going to aggravate in the developing countries because of future population growth and increasing urbanisation. About 90 per cent of the future growth in world population will occur in Africa, and 83 per cent of the world population will be concentrated in the developing countries in Asia and Africa. The developing countries have also been witnessing rapid urbanisation, which adds to their waste management challenges because urban populations generate more waste than rural populations. Research on the current waste management practices shows the crucial dependence of the municipal authorities on the informal sector waste-pickers, who earn their livelihood by extracting recyclables from the waste stream. Waste-pickers help the municipal authorities effect savings on the collection/transportation of waste, landfill space, and landfill management costs. By making available recyclable materials made from natural resources, waste-pickers also help local and national economies draw benefits by the substitution of primary raw materials. However, the attitude of municipal authorities towards waste-pickers varies from hostility or indifference, to treating them as a useful segment of the waste management system. The results show that informal sector waste-pickers in Delhi find it hard to work in tandem with the formal system, they report various problems such as downside of new work mode, complain of unfair price for collected waste, extortion from goons and contractors, experience of health hazard, and joblessness in COVID-19. While there have been attempts to include informal sector workers alongside formal sector, the informal waste pickers continue to show distrust towards civic authorities and private companies and NGOs and prefer to work alone. Finally, the paper discusses the successful solid waste management systems that exist in various states of India and how Delhi can take inspiration from these systems.

Keywords:
informal sector waste-picker solid waste management

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