Originally posted by the Voice of America.
Voice of America content is produced by the Voice of America,
a United States federal government-sponsored entity, and is in
the public domain.


South Africa's 'Reclaimers' Shoulder the Bulk of Nation's Recycling

Anita Powell

   JOHANNESBURG - It's 6 a.m on a chilly Johannesburg morning, and Luyanda
   Hlatshwayo is elbow-deep in a trash can, pulling out milk bottles, soda
   cans, the lid of a pot, a broken blender. His eyes light up as he hits
   pay dirt: a tranche of used white paper.

   Hlatshwayo, who is 35, has spent nine years sorting through
   Johannesburg's trash cans, making him a master of turning trash into
   treasure. He's one of the city's 9,000 "reclaimers" -- an informal
   network of workers who collect and sell recyclables.

   The mental math

   From the outside, his job looks simple. His tools are his hands and a
   homemade plastic dolly. But in his head, he keeps a complex agenda of
   which neighborhoods put out trash on which day; which roads to avoid if
   he doesn't want to get hit by a car in the pre-dawn darkness; and a
   stockbroker's mental ledger of what a recyclable item can sell for in
   the ever-fluctuating market. It suits his thought process, he says --
   he was studying banking at a local university before he ran out of
   money and had to drop out.

   Hlatshwayo's job has a big impact: Academics estimate that reclaimers
   collect and recycle up to 90% of South Africa's post-consumer packaging
   and paper. In doing so, they save municipalities up to 750 million rand
   in landfill space annually.

   As a result, South Africa has a recycling rate of just under 60%,
   according to industry studies -- a statistic that puts it on par with
   some European nations.

   "We are literally subsidizing the community and the municipalities,
   actually," he told VOA as he made his rounds this month. "Because an
   average reclaimer would collect about 200 kilograms of waste a day. You
   multiply that by 9,000 reclaimers, takes it to about 2 million tons or
   something. That's in a day. That's redirecting a lot of material out of
   the landfills."

   Melanie Samson, a researcher in human geography at the University of
   the Witwatersrand, has spent years studying this complex informal
   system, which is present, she says, in many developing nations.
   However, she says, reclamation is becoming a global trend.

   "We find reclaimers in just about every postcolonial city across the
   world," she said. "Reclamation exists in contexts of high income
   inequality, so that you have people who are wealthy enough that they're
   buying things and throwing them away when they still have value or can
   be reused. And you have people who are so poor that they are willing to
   go through other people's trash to extract these materials to make a
   living. So, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe -- we're
   starting to see a lot more reclaimers working in the global north."

   WATCH: Recycling in South Africa

.