by Hannah Green
In India, there is a thriving market for trash. People make lives for themselves collecting it, sorting it, buying it, selling it: making it useful once again.
While the community of trash workers occasionally gets attention from the American media, the focus often revolves around the initial realization that people can earn a living from garbage piles, and what this says about poverty levels.
Katherine Boo’s recent book related to the subject, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, went deeper, exploring the mechanisms of entrepreneurship and exploitation in India. However, there is also a more positive side to this story that often goes uncommented on. An efficient recycling system has a long-term positive effect on society as a whole, and is also something that North America and Europe generally lack. That is a significant part of what the trash economy in India is- an informal recycling system.
Estimates suggest that between 56 and 70 percent of Indian recyclable material actually gets recycled, compared to 30 percent in Europe and the United States. This is because in India, the informal trash economy is highly efficient, and generates a surplus, whereas in rich countries dealings with trash can be seen as a market failure. While Indian government dealings with trash are highly inefficient, a significant portion of the informal workforce-about 90,000 people in Delhi alone — are eager to get their hands on the growing supply of trash so that they can sell it to recycling firms for profit.
The informal trash economy subsidizes the less efficient formal sector, thus benefiting taxpayers as well as the environment. While many of these workers live in very poor conditions, most of them still earn more than the minimum wage, some significantly so.
Many Indian companies buy recycled materials without self-consciously labeling themselves as eco-friendly institutions. Recycling is not necessarily associated with an environmentalist mindset in India, but instead is just another way to reduce the cost of living or doing business. In the west, on the other hand, if recycling gets done it is usually with some concept of environmentalism in mind. It is not thought of as a way to make money but something that people do if they are concerned about the environment — a chore. Environmentalism isn’t nearly as effective a motivating factor as money. Most people in rich countries can barely manage to separate paper from plastic, and then machines have to do the rest of the work. Just separating different kinds of plastic bottles from one another is an enormous process — one that requires investment in the development and production of expensive machines that need energy to run and that are still less precise than human labor.
Companies that use expensive recycled materials in their products will inevitably make sure that customers know about it, in order to get them to accept a higher price. Thus, consumers can find the same feeling of satisfaction from these consciously ecofriendly products they might have gotten from taking the time to separate recyclables. The feeling of having done something good for the environment is also commoditized, even if it’s not that big a seller.
In rich countries, the market hasn’t found a way to deal with excess trash in a way that is profitable in the short term. If India’s economic boom recovers, it may one day join these countries, and the population of people willing to deal with trash cheaply may decline. Right now, rich countries can afford to have an inefficient system for dealing with trash, although it is very expensive. But the longer we wait to find a system that works, the more each piece of trash ends up costing in the long term, both in terms of dollars and in damage to the environment.
A growing global economy and population only means more trash. Finding a way to deal with it profitably soon would be a very smart investment.
Hannah Green covers economic and foreign policy issues, especially in South Asia and the Middle East. She recently received her B.A. in history from Northwestern University, and is living Lucknow, India, where she studies Urdu and Hindi.
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This is not comment, it’s a news tip.
It’s published by IPS-news.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/12/at-the-edge-of-the-carbon-cliff/
Informal trash economy, like the one in India mentioned in this post, may be more effective and does benefit the environment. However, such economy exists because poverty, and poverty is definitely not the answer to greenness. Yes, business as usual will cost much more both economically and environmentally in the long run. We need to look for better solutions to address an increasing environmental problems, but I do not think poverty is one of them.
LA Times :
april 22 2012.
“New Delhi’s ‘trash mountain”
“Child labor is rife, as is gastrointestinal illness. Cancer, birth defects and asthma rates are high.
On “trash mountain,” families earn $1 to $2 a day slogging through waist-deep muck. But the residents also marry, have children on their dirt floors, pray and celebrate life’s other milestones.”
Not something I would praise.
It is not really true that the US and Europe don’t have a profitable trash sector. A vibrant auto recycling sector collects and recycles 95%+ of cars, reusing 70%+ of the materials in them. This was made possible by the spread of the automobile shredder in the 70s and 80s, and also enabled the steel minimill phenomenon.
In New York a few years back, guys in vans profitably picked up and recycled consumers’ cardboard and paper waste, until the city shut them down for “taking city property”. I never understood the legal or economic justification for that one.
And of course for precious metals and other items there are all kinds of means of recycling them. Heck, one can consider eBay one great big recycling company.
Finally, a lot of European cities and a few in the US burn their trash. Which is not the same as recycling. But it lowers landfill additions by as much as 90%, and can actually reduce short-term greenhouse impact by reducing methane emissions. In fact, emissions are even lower than garbage transfer stations, because the trucks enter the facility through an air curtain, and that air — including a lot of trash volatiles — is used for combustion. The resulting ash can be used as a construction aggregate (all of it in the US, only heavy ash in Japan where light ash is considered hazardous waste).
So yes, India does a better job through its extremely labor-intensive recycling industry. And yes, we can do a better job of recycling, mainly by deposits and other mechanisms of countering externalities. But our recycling industry does quite a bit that most people don’t know about, and keeps getting better at it.
India’s manual-labor-intensive reprocessing includes workers smelting down heavy metals in their own homes, without safety equipment.
Companies in India buy scrap from recyclers in the US. My plumber recited the entire route my old hot water heater would take through businesses in the US through to export to India.
Reduce – Reuse – Recycle; and obey OSHA regulations in the process.
This blog post is so far off the mark it should be taken down. I don’t have the time to go over every error in it so I’ll highlight the major ones.
1. The writer says” Estimates suggest that between 56 and 70 percent of Indian recyclable material actually gets recycled, compared to 30 percent in Europe and the United States”. First, she’s comparing apples to oranges by saying recyclable material that gets recycled. The US recycling rate is not calculated by what can and cannot be recycled. It is calculated by total amount recycled by total produced. Secondly, US recycling rate is more like 40%-50% depending on which study you use.
2. “In rich countries, the market hasn’t found a way to deal with excess trash in a way that is profitable in the short term.” Totally false. Recycling is a multi-billion dollar industry in the US alone. Not to mention, waste paper is the number one export in the US by weight.
3. “In the west, on the other hand, if recycling gets done it is usually with some concept of environmentalism in mind” While companies do take advantage of green marketing the real reason they recycle is because they get paid for the commodity rather than having to pay to landfill it.
Long story short, recycling in the US and Europe have made extraordinary advancements in the last 10 years. The writer should really do her homework.