REculture: A post consumption economy

In a backward slum on the outskirts of Kanpur, these muslim women receive design and product development training in making useful items out of scraps of leather. They come from a community that has historically worked in the leather industry and used to earn a pittance making riding whips from scraps for a rupee or two a piece. Now, they receive Rs 50 a day during training and a designer was brought in from New Delhi to help them develop better products for sale and export. Their husbands work in tanneries and they use this extra income to educate their daughters and invest in their families.

All photos taken by the author in September 2009.

       

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Scraps_into_gold.zip (3528 KB)

Two girls play with some granulated polystyrene that dropped accidentally--a moment of levity in an uncommon playground

Via LiveMint

With the aid of the NGO Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, Enrico Fabian, a German photographer, spent three months following the kabaris from the moment they pick up trash from New Delhi’s homes, through the mounds of trash at the Ghazipur landfill site, to the recycling plants on the outskirts of the city. Here’s a glimpse into one of the most arduous but unrewarding jobs in Delhi.

More pictures by Enrico Fabian

• Powerful machines compress most metal trash into cubes, which are then transported to a recycling plant and turned into appliances and construction beams.

• A waste pickerworking at a metal segregation complex in Seemapuri, in the city’s north-east, carries a tangle of wires on his head.

• An avalanche of wastepours from a dump truck. The waste pickers stand as close as possible to get the best of the lot first.

• A young ragpickerignores the risk of landslides as he goes about earning his daily bread on the slopes of a landfill.

Full article available here at IPSNews

More than 1,500 representatives of waste recyclers from 13 countries, and thousands of other visitors, including the host country Brazil's left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, met last week in São Paulo, demonstrating that they are no longer pariahs in our throw-away society.

"Today I feel proud of being a 'catadora' (garbage sorter), although there is still prejudice against this kind of work," Lilian Nascimento, a member of the Brazilian National Movement of Recyclable Materials Collectors and part of the team that organised the international event, titled "Reviravolta Expocatadores 2009", told IPS.

The Oct 28-30 event, bringing together the Latin American Recyclers' Network, was an opportunity for dialogue with governments, businesses and social organisations, and for exhibiting projects, technologies and private sector initiatives aimed at improving street collection of reusable waste.

The Portuguese term "reviravolta" means to overturn, or a swift and drastic transformation, and "catadores" is the local Brazilian term for garbage sorters. "Catar" is to collect, in the sense of selecting items one by one from the ground.

"'Catador' is a good name and should be kept as the general term in Latin America," but "recycler" has emerged as the common identifier as it is more formal and "is in harmony with current environmental issues and the climate crisis," said Marisol Álvarez, a member of the Chilean delegation who came in the company of two of her colleagues and two technical staff from non-governmental organisations.

Expocatadores 2009 is the first such meeting of its size, promoted by the Brazilian movement and the Latin American Network.

Lula announced that the state development bank would open a line of credit for recyclers' cooperatives to purchase electric vehicles, made by Itaipú, the company that runs the hydroelectric power station shared between Brazil and Paraguay. He said the "catadores" would be exempt from vehicle registration fees.

Cities Minister Marcio Fortes, who was with Lula's entourage, talked about the resources his ministry devotes to infrastructure for recyclers' cooperatives, especially warehouses for separating the materials they collect.

"The pride of the recyclers" in organising such a huge event, and their "capacity to autonomously engage the federal government, ministers, development banks, public and private companies and foundations, is the most powerful and important achievement of this event," said Valdemar de Oliveira, head of institutional relations for the Avina Foundation, which sponsored Expocatadores 2009.

via worldbike.org

Worldbike, in collaboration with UN-HABITAT and a local youth group, is using customised bicycles to explore rubbish-handling enterprises in some of Kenya's most impoverished neighbourhoods. Worldbike is a non-profit that designs, distributes and promotes bicycles as an alleviator of development challenges.

Andrew Hall, Worldbike's project manager in Kenya, describes their goals as 'income generation, livelihood creation and essential service provision, but usually in the model they go hand in hand'...

To accomplish this, they're developing sustainable solid waste management businesses for and in partnership with poor communities. 'People need solid waste management. That's an essential service,' Hall says. 'But we also want to do it in a way that creates livelihoods.'

In turn, the businesses act as incubators, live experiments in which Worldbike can use its expertise in non-motorized transport to customize everything from bicycles and handcarts to business models and community relationships.

'Worldbike wants to scale its impacts,' he says. 'If you want to have big impacts, then you need to come up with a model that is going to be reproducible to a level that impacts a lot of people's lives.' Piloting their work here at a small scale allows them to invest in a more holistic design phase, working closely with communities to assess their needs and develop solutions to problems as they arise.

Read more on The Ecologist and at Worldbike.

via sagarikasundaram.com

A former student of mine, Sagarika Sundaram, proposed this piece of modular furniture created from recycled newspapers sometime back.

"Embrace the economic life by taking a seat on CIRCULATE. Use this block of newspaper as a stool in your kitchen, garage or party. Join four of them together to make a bigger table. This stylish piece of furniture is modular, use it in units to create furniture that suits your need anytime, anywhere." 

Her original piece was made from 50 rupees worth of newspapers (50 Rupees = 1.25 USD/0.60 GBP/0.88 EUR). I'm thinking it would be interesting to see the various heights of stools created from 50 units of the national currency of various countries. And even more significant to consider  the relative costs/value of recycling that paper back into the circulation chain of paper goods in respective countries – via both formal and informal channels.

     

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Formal_Economy_Begins_to_Squee.zip (377 KB)

A few years ago on a research trip to China I was almost run down by a bike-based scrap merchant on his way across Beijing. At first I was staggered by this one man's ambition carrying such a large load, then I began to see more and more of these scrap collectors across the city, picking up bits of the hutongs Beijing's government were eliminating in advance of the Olympic Games, or gathering refuse, packing material or even not-yet-used bits from the many worksites spread across the megacity.

According to the People's Daily in a 2007 article, there were an estimated 10 million scrap collectors in the country, but that year a move was made to license them, which was seen by some as a way for formal companies to squeeze out the informal economy as China's recycling economy grew. As the country becomes more focused on resource management, in particular managing e-waste, this trend toward formalization/legalization of the recycle/reuse sector is likely to grow. This is likely to have a detrimental impact on China's emerging class of electronics recyclers, as well as traditional scrap merchants relying on money from extracted metals and other components.