MANILA – Plagued by discarded face masks, plastic bottles and other waste during the COVID-19 pandemic, a small riverside community in Manila has launched its own waste management service, giving its workers, mostly women, a chance to improve their livelihoods.
The Tagumpay 83Zero Waste Association’s network of street sweepers, drivers and creek keepers cleans waterways and collects recyclable waste from the community’s 5,700 residents, as well as from 24 nearby villages and five schools.
They also run a junk shop where they make money by selling collected waste, such as single-use plastic bottles and hard plastic, to recycling facilities.
“In addition to reducing plastic waste in our community, we are also helping our members earn additional income for their families,” Catherine Gabriel, president of the Association of Informal Waste Workers in Barangay 830 district, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The association is one of two community groups in Manila selected by the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) to receive training on waste management and financing to expand their activities.
Most communities struggle to collect and reuse waste in a country that does not devote sufficient resources to tackling the mountain of waste it produces annually.
The Philippines is among the largest waste producers in Southeast Asia, generating 18.05 million tons of waste in 2020 and projected to produce 23.61 million tons in 2025, according to the National Solid Waste Management Commission.
Local governments in villages and barangays, or neighborhoods, are tasked with cleaning up waste, but often lack the money, skilled labor and infrastructure to support such operations.
Community organizations often fill the gaps, but their workers earn low wages and lack job protection.
The Barangay 830 Waste Association started without funding but has since received millions of pesos from non-governmental organizations, as well as UN-Habitat, to purchase equipment and operate facilities.
“If we were solely dependent on the association’s income, we wouldn’t be able to buy vans or set up an office to maintain our system,” Gabriel said.
The Philippines celebrates Zero Waste Month in January to promote sustainable production and consumption practices, as part of its effort to keep industrial and post-consumer packaging waste out of nature by 2030.
A government poster for the campaign promotes the theme of ‘integrating sustainability and circularity into the informal waste sector’.
However, it remains unclear how informal waste workers, the backbone of the country’s current recycling efforts, will be part of the shift.
GAPS IN WASTE MANAGEMENT
The Philippines needs 42,000 barangays and villages to set up their own material recovery facility and door-to-door collection of segregated waste.
But according to the Audit Commission, only 39% of villages have such facilities.
The task of managing local waste is often delegated to more than 100,000 informal waste workers in the country. Some of them earn less than a dollar a day.
The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources has said it wants to do more to protect the rights of waste pickers and “convert collection and sorting facilities into formal operations and establishments.”
In Dumaguete, a city on Negros Island in the southern Philippines, Aloja Santos and other waste pickers were trained in 2018 by the Mother Earth Foundation, an NGO dedicated to reducing waste and pollution.
The idea was that after a year of NGO support, the local government would adopt the practices.
“But the barangay could not bear our costs. That is why we provide bags, gloves, boots and other materials ourselves. We only use bicycles to collect heavy waste from households,” Santos said.
Santos and other female waste workers formed a group that helps 400 households collect and sort biodegradable waste and plastic waste every day, often without adequate protective equipment.
The group charges each household 50 pesos, or less than a dollar, per month.
Because the activities are independent of local authorities, workers must pay the government 3 pesos per bag of waste. Philippine law prohibits the “unauthorized disposal of recyclable materials” intended for formal collection.
“We are part of the solution in reducing plastic waste in landfills, but we want good compensation. We literally do the dirty work for manufacturers and we want to be part of the conversations about how we can better manage our waste,” said Santos, an advocate for workers’ rights.
She said informal waste workers were excluded from discussions on the Philippine extended producer responsibility (EPR) rules. The government passed a law in 2022 that will hold plastic packaging manufacturers and brands financially responsible for the collection and recycling of their products.
“For example, we don’t know the true value of our collected waste that is sold to plastic credit markets,” she says.
EMPLOYEE RIGHTS
Enterprising informal waste workers are offering an affordable solution for communities in the Philippines struggling with basic waste segregation, research shows.
But they are exposed to health and safety risks.
In February, a coalition of twelve waste worker organizations, representing more than a thousand members, formed a national alliance to push for legal protections.
The Philippine National Waste Workers Alliance, led by Santos, calls for labor guarantees such as hazard pay, health insurance and job security, as well as training and participation in policymaking.
Last April, a senator introduced the Magna Carta Waste Workers Bill, which included demands from informal waste workers.
Environmentalists want a global treaty to reduce plastics and have called for informal workers to be included in the framework. But a UN-backed attempt to broker such an agreement late last year failed.
The delay in drawing up the treaty means waste workers are still unprotected, working in dangerous conditions and exposed to toxic fumes from burning plastic, said Marian Ledesma, zero waste campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
“Waste workers are often discriminated against and left behind by society,” says Ledesma.
“We must ensure that they… have a say in planning and implementation, and that they have access to decent work opportunities as we end the era of plastic.” – Thomson Reuters Foundation