Go for a walk in any city of Pakistan. You will hear birds’ chirping, street cricketers quarrelling with each other and … the sounds of waste collectors....
COVER STORY
Go for a walk in any city of Pakistan. You will hear birds’ chirping, street cricketers quarrelling with each other and … the sounds of waste collectors.
Waste collectors in Pakistan are typically poor children whose parents want them to earn money to support the family. However, these individuals range from children as young as five years of age to old men in their seventies.
Waste collection means the transfer of solid waste from the place of disposal to the place of treatment, and it is a part of the waste management process. Waste collectors perform this job. Often, the job of water collector is reserved for those on the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder. Most often, it is very poor young boys and girls who are employed to do this job.
By and large, waste collectors are immigrants from Afghanistan who first came to Pakistan during the Soviet War in the 1980s, leaving behind their homes, ancestral lands, and probably wealth. As a result, they were unemployed and had no homes. Then, someone had this brilliant idea to collect recyclable waste, sell it to different companies, and earn money, which benefited companies and waste collectors alike.
Waste collecting is just one part of a process that involves many sectors. In developed countries, individuals purchase a ton of things they don’t really need, and discard them superfluously without even using them, and sometimes after using them just slightly. The waste collectors there collect those things and reuse by selling them to agents (companies). These agents or companies then fix the goods thus collected and send them to underdeveloped countries where these items are bought and sent to shops around the entire country. Hence, waste collecting is a big industry and it is flourishing day by day.
Waste collectors in Pakistan generally live in tents which they can remove from one place and set on another. They have a proper system of living. Most waste collectors like to settle in the same place. Like tribal people, they erect tents. They have a strong community system, and cooperate with each other. There are scholars among them who teach Islam to their community members, and there are teachers who teach the native language, etc. The waste collectors’ kids play together and collect recyclable waste together. Indeed, the waste collectors are a close-knit community.
Waste collectors are one of the most deprived communities in Pakistan. For these people the terms hunger, poverty and unease go hand in hand. They make their living by collecting waste usually from garbage dumps.
Most kids that collect waste leave their homes every single day in early in the morning, and they work hard searching for suitable stuff, without any assurance whether they would get their share of income for the day or not.
For a waste collector, rummaging through dustbins is equivalent to finding hope. As the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Waste collectors in Pakistan play an important role. Without their endeavours, a lot of recyclable waste would have to be burned, releasing carbon dioxide. In addition, more resources would have been used to replace the goods that would have otherwise been returned to the companies by the waste collectors.
Although waste collectors in Pakistan are providing s very important service to the country, there are some serious issues for them, too. If you think about it, because waste collectors are collecting actual waste, they might catch some deadly disease from it or from a parasite in it. They might even spread this disease to other people. Furthermore, because they have little or no education at all, kids waste collectors get involved in illegal and violent acts like kidnapping, stealing and pickpocketing, etc.
Waste collectors usually roam around the streets in hope to collect garbage from the waste dumps, houses and just any place from where they can find something useful. They call out in their euphonious voice: “Is there any garbage, people of the community?” If somebody has garbage, they call the waste collectors and make an agreement for giving garbage for a specific price. They even look for some work and do it for a meagre amount of money. To be honest, they are quite economical. Basically, they look for ways to make money. They are usually seen wearing dirty, torn clothes, with slippers, probably scoured from the waste they have collected, so they are either big or small for them usually.
As one can imagine, waste collection is not a pleasant job to do, but the lack of facilities provided to them makes the matter worse. They do their work without any gloves or protective gear, which often poses a serious safety threat to their lives, but they’re left with no choice but to continue doing their job barehanded.
The only money these pickers receive comes from the value of the products they sell after processing and cleaning.
Moreover, female waste pickers are subjected to harassment, accidents and potential health risks. They are also targeted as thieves and drifters. They are often seen working in the scorching heat with their babies in their arms. Despite the low income it generates, waste collection provides one of the few ways in which women from lower class can earn an income and fulfill their household responsibilities.
A waste collector’s life is full of uncertainties. There is a high prevalence of diseases among waste pickers because of increased exposure to dangerous materials such as fecal matter, harmful chemicals, infected needles, glass splinters, etc. They don’t use gloves to protect their hands while segregating saleable items from the garbage, which makes their hands vulnerable to skin disorders. This is due to lack of availability of protective gear, and also due to lack of awareness.
Looking at little kids who work hard all day long for practically no money at all for them, is heartrending. The most unfortunate thing is that they don’t get the opportunity of going to school. In a nutshell, their responsibilities deprive them of many basic rights. The elder waste collectors also have similar hardships throughout their not-so-fruitful-life to support their families.
Elder waste collectors do not wish for their children to follow in their footsteps. But, due to lack of resources, and poor governance in the country, their children have no other option than to follow this line of work. Given that waste picking is not legally recognized as a job, they face all sorts of discrimination.
Recycling is among the most effective ways through which waste can be conserved by reusing materials and putting them back into productive use. In the process of recycling materials, it is only the waste collectors who actually are involved, while the term ‘recycle’ remains unknown to the citizens.
Waste collectors contribute to making the environment clean to some extent, although they have been seen to sift through the waste, negligently dumping the refuse on the ground, leaving it to fly every which way.
A peek into the lives of waste collectors makes one realize how immensely blessed we are; we have good, fresh and healthy food to eat, we study in proper educational institutions, live in houses and enjoy all necessities of life.
Despite being undervalued, unpaid and unprotected, these waste pickers continue to be an essential part of our society, contributing their share in keeping our cities clean. They also play a critical role on a global level by preventing plastic waste from entering our rivers and oceans.
The truth is no one wishes to engage themselves in a job that requires rummaging through refuse and the constant exposure to serious health risks, but someone must do the job. Despite the lack of facilities and the lack of respect associated with such jobs, waste pickers continue to their jobs with dedication to earn money to support their families.
Waste management in Pakistan is a risky job as those who actually do this job do it at the detriment of their health. About five million people do die every year as a result of diseases related to waste. Many large cities in Pakistan, be it Islamabad, Lahore or Peshawar, face a lot of challenges in waste management. The root factors for the deteriorating garbage problem in Pakistan are mainly due to lack of proper urban planning, obsolete infrastructure, little or no public awareness and endemic corruption.
What needs to be done now is to devise a welfare law that acknowledges waste picking as a legitimate occupation and ensures that the rights of waste pickers are accepted as legal obligations. Organizations need to be formed that guarantee health and labour protection for these people.
Even though waste management policies exist, governmental institutions lack resources and equipment to implement these policies in order to obtain adequate results. For improvements in municipal solid waste management, it is necessary for experts to become involved and assist in the environmental governance. Because of numerous factors of waste accumulation, the challenges have outweighed the powers of the municipalities. The greatly mismanaged municipal waste disposal system in Pakistan can’t be linked to the absence of an adequate technology for disposal but to the fact that the system has a lot of responsibility but no authority. Laws and enforcement need to be immensely revised and implemented.
The responsibility for future change is in the hands of both the government, and the citizens. Waste practices in Pakistan need to be improved. One way to do so is by educating the population about the environmental effects of what dumped and exposed waste may generate. Let’s hope that waste collectors are given facilities their counterparts have in other countries like Turkey and China, to name a couple.
