Fiji has become the first nation in the Pacific to formally acknowledge “waste pickers” — who repurpose, resell, and recycle rubbish for a living — as the environmental champions that they are, and the positive environmental benefit of their work. The workers — who are typically women, children, and migrants, living in poverty — work in unsafe conditions where they breathe toxic waste and lack employee rights or social security benefits. Despite removing millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year by extracting matter from landfills, they lack rightful recognition as environmental warriors and are instead often subject to slurs and slander.
The acknowledgment was made at a recent council event in Lautoka, Fiji’s second-largest city. There, 30 women were officially registered, given access to bank accounts, and provided with protective clothing, footwear, masks, and gloves. The workers, in collaboration with the city council and Pacific Recycling Foundation, Waste Recyclers Fiji, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, also coined a new name to replace the informal “waste pickers”: Collection Pillars of Recycling.
The idea of adopting an official name first arose during a week-long workshop, held months prior. “The workshop was about human rights, gender, legal literacy, and financial literacy and one of the key findings in that workshop was the stigma attached to waste picking. One of the contributors to that stigma was the name ‘informal waste pickers’,” said Pacific Recycling Foundation Founder Amitesh Deo.