WATCH: The important job of waste pickers

Picture: Shivam Tyagi/Pexels

Picture: Shivam Tyagi/Pexels

Published Nov 23, 2021

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As the world begins to rapidly urbanise, in Africa, we are faced with many challenges including having ineffective waste management systems in place.

Waste pickers are present in almost every city on the continent, providing a service to municipalities by collecting and sorting recyclable material.

To celebrate World Cities Day, the GAIA team - an environmental organisation - in Africa put together a series of videos to highlight the benefits of waste picker organising in Global South cities.

In South Africa, the South African Waste Pickers Association (SAWPA) together with groundWork have been working towards advancing the rights of waste pickers for over a decade and calling for the integration into municipal systems.

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While South Africa has an organised waste picker structure like SAWPA, this does not exist in all countries across Africa therefore this video series is aimed to share stories and best practices to support local partners to work with waste pickers to organise themselves and create systems that enable their integration to advance zero-waste across the continent.

Watch Here

Part 1: The Need for Organising

GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives) is a member network striving for a world without waste.

Despite being touted as a “solution” to waste, incinerators actually create demand for waste, further entrenching the very system polluting our oceans with plastic and causing other waste crises around the world.

By developing and promoting alternatives to waste incineration, GAIA and its members seek to put an end to this harmful practice, facilitate a zero-waste movement throughout the world, and galvanise support for upstream solutions such as the elimination of single-use plastics. GAIA in Africa is coordinated out of groundWork, based in Durban.

* We will be posting the videos from this series during this year.

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environment