Note his makeshift equipment for roasting corn.

Friendly neighbourhood isteriwallah (or dhobi). Will collect your clothes, iron and fold, return the same day.

His makeshift set up within the compound of the apartment complex in New Delhi. Semi permanent location.

One of his two iron boxes.

Full of hot charcoal.

New Tech Lets An Army Of Informal Recyclers Collect Brazilian Waste

via Co.Exist by Michael J. Coren on 5/11/12

For decades, an informal recycling cooperative in Brazil has collected tons of recyclable material, which it sells back to heavy industry each day for reuse. The system, however, is plagued by inefficiencies: routes are haphazard, coordination is weak, and knowledge is easily lost when individuals leave the cooperatives.

Brazil is now trying to turn this army of informal recyclers into a crack recycling operation capable of collecting and selling a city’s recyclables without central coordination. Researchers at the University of São Paulo have teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to optimize recycling routes, schedule waste pickups, and transform an overlooked sector of the economy into the next investment opportunity. To do it, they are attaching tracking sensors to carts and trucks, analyzing the data, building dispatching and scheduling applications for the web, and then mapping it all to city grids.

The project, known as Forage Tracking, does not deploy revolutionary software, or sensors. It is just a clever application of existing technology to solve social challenges.

"We are using real-time technology to make waste management more participatory and effective," says Dietmar Offenhuber, a researcher at the MIT’s SENSEable City Lab in the Brazilian publication Institute Science Today. "The idea is to help the informal recycler cooperatives with cheap technologies to document their knowledge and improve their operations."

Ultimately, the program will enlist private corporations, government agencies, and thousands of informal workers in a single and (potentially) efficient waste collection system. In the future, Brazilians should be able to schedule waste pickups on their smartphones. Those pickups wouldn’t be made by the city, but by informal workers.

We are using real-time technology to make waste management more participatory and effective.

But it’s also looking like a sign of things to come. Economic growth in the developing world, if it will lead to more than just slightly less stratified inequality, needs to lift up the poor and middle class, as well as the rich. That requires more than corporations and the state, argues Robert Neuwirth in his new book Stealth of Nations. It demands cooperation between the formal sector and the innovative but informal economy of the street.

Brazil--by bringing recycling cooperatives into its solid waste system through Forage Tracker and new laws--is taking a small step in that direction.

A pair of 20-liter plastic water bottles have had holes cut in the bottom and speaker elements nested inside them. Connected to a CD player wired into a car battery, the containers  have been repurposed as a music broadcast system for this cart selling lottery tickets. 

These are sweatpants made for toddlers out of the sleeves cut from adult sweatshirts. They were for sale in Wote market in the Makueni district of Kenya.

Nokwanda Sotyantya sits among heaps of garbage and patiently sorts through it, separating cardboard, plastic, glass, paper and metal, piece by piece. The recycled piles of trash are then weighed and sold to packaging manufacturers in South Africa that reuse the materials to create new products.

Sotyantya belongs to the country’s first group of small business entrepreneurs who have benefited from the government’s move towards a green economy. It is a strategy aimed at creating environmental sustainability, social equity, and economic growth; the government wants to create 300,000 jobs within a decade in this sector.

For 48-year-old Sotyantya, who is a member of a local recycling cooperative and lives in Imizamo Yethu, a slum outside of Cape Town, the move towards a green economy has turned her life around. Previously unemployed and struggling to survive, she says she now earns an average of 250 dollars a month from her work – enough to care for herself and her four children.

"The more people become aware of the benefits of recycling, the more rubbish gets dropped off at the Hout Bay waste centre. For me, that translates into more money," Sotyantya explains.

The Hout Bay Recycling Co-op to which she belongs is based at the municipal waste drop-off site in Hout Bay. Here Sotyantya and other members of the cooperative sort and sell the recycled material.

Her cooperative of six formerly jobless, poverty-stricken men and women currently recycles 25 tonnes of waste each month. And this number is slowly increasing.

Read full article here

Having started in March this year, the market will run every Sunday until the end of the year from Chapultepec Park in the country’s capital. Residents can visit the location with glass (clear, amber, green and blue), paper/cardboard, aluminum beverage cans, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles and tetrapak cartons, handing them over in return for ‘green points’ that can be used to purchase local farmers’ goods at the market.

Market customers can exchange up to ten kilograms of waste and must separate and clean their rubbish. Organized by the Secretaría del Medio Ambiente (Ministry of Environment), the scheme aims to demonstrate how waste products can retain their value beyond initial use; the goods on sale are purchased with money received from the waste management companies receiving the recyclable goods.

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Link to the Mercado de Trueque