Countless communities around the world scavenge on open dumps – with terrible health consequences. As the UN convenes city leaders for a global summit , what can be done to improve the lives of the world’s waste pickers?

In the mid-2000s, the Stung Meanchey landfill in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, had the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s most famous rubbish dumps. It was, in the words of one resident, “hell on earth”.

Night and day, thousands of waste pickers – people who gather, sort, reuse and sell the materials others throw away – toiled on the 100-acre mound of festering rubbish. Families fashioned homes from rubbish, on top of rubbish. They ate rubbish, fought over it – and even died over it.

Children grew up there. Now in his early 30s, Suon Vy was 10 years old when he first saw someone fatally injured. He was helping his parents rummage on the precarious heap when a dump truck careened into a neighbour from a nearby village. The man’s leg was sliced off. “The older people took him to hospital but finally he died,” says Suon. “I saw many other accidents happen.”

There were numerous other hazards. Putrid smoke seeped from the pile and residents had to step over broken glass and medical waste – one woman even said she stumbled on aborted foetuses among the rubbish. Researchers who studied the dump found dangerous levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the soil and heavy metals in the metabolisms of children working there. People reported the afflictions common to dump life worldwide: diarrhoea, headaches, chest and stomach pain, typhoid and irritation of the skin, nose and eyes.

Ry Mom, an elderly woman with thick black hair, and whose eye has turned red, put it like this: “We lived in hell because we had no choice.”

Around the world, millions of people make a living by waste picking. Some work on the city streets, pushing their carts along the pavement, often at night when there are fewer cars on the roads. Others are drawn to open dumps, where there is an abundant, concentrated supply of sellable material.



“The first thing that drives people to work with waste, wherever it is, is destitution – it’s poverty,” explains Sonia Dias, a leading Brazilian waste expert. Another is bad governance. “If there are open dumps in a city, it is because the municipality has a lot of issues, including its ability to manage solid waste,” she adds.

In October, city leaders and development experts from around the world will convene in Quito, Ecuador, for Habitat III, a UN conference held every 20 years. The idea is for governments to share their insights into the challenges of urbanisation and sign up to a new urban agenda intended to guide policymaking over the next two decades.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Researchers found that children living in the Stung Meanchey dump had dangerous heavy metals in their metabolisms. Photograph: Poppy McPherson

People like Dias, who works with the global action network Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising, are hoping the conference will formally recognise the value of informal workers like waste pickers. “You need to have a framework that gives people access to waste,” says Dias. “So that they are not penalised for being outside the system.”

For many pickers, the labour is made worse by public scorn and punishment from the authorities who have failed to create a functioning recycling system. In Myanmar’s commercial capital, Yangon, a picker who goes by the nickname Ba Ley recently described how municipal workers sometimes confiscate his cart, demanding cash to return it.

We lived in hell​,​ because we had no choice Ry Mom

Instead, the support often comes from NGOs. Though in some cases, charitable intentions have had unintended consequences. By 2009, the dump at Stung Meanchey had mushroomed into a full-blown slum city. “Because dump sites are very sexy, very visual, the more people know about it the more they want to go and see,” explains Sebastien Marot, the founder of the not-for-profit Friends International. “You have TV and film crews who make a make big deal about it, then it’ll attract NGOs and visitors and then it becomes hyper dysfunctional.”

As more pickers showed up, along came do-gooders of all kinds – from missionaries to sightseers on “poorism” tours. “It was completely out of control,” recalls Amy Hanson, the founder of Small Steps Project, which supports children living on dumps worldwide. “It was infamous and that’s not what [the government] wanted to be famous for,” she adds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Stung Meanchey dump was closed several years ago, but many still live and work there. Photograph: Poppy McPherson

So, in 2009, the Cambodian government tried to close the dump, opening another on the other side of the city. Some of the pickers migrated there. But if the authorities were expecting the others to abandon Stung Meanchey, they were wrong. In fact, more people showed up.

The old dump is still a desperate place. Most people there continue to work as waste pickers. In the evenings, groups sit amid trampled clothes, shoes and children’s toys to smoke and drink.

Sok Phea’s three-by-four-foot shack is little more than a tent; its flimsy tarp roof is propped up with bamboo poles, open to the elements on three sides. Phea, a waste picker, is raising her family here, less than 20ft from the defunct dump. “The reason I came here was so that my son and daughter could study in school,” she says.

If no one worked like us then the​​re would be trash everywhere. We are doing a good thing for the government​. Nyo Tin

Her children go to a free school set up by an NGO called the Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF), founded by former Sony executive Scott Neeson. Neeson moved to Cambodia from Hollywood after visiting the dump more than a decade ago, and says he is trying to transform the community.

Amid makeshift shacks built from tin and wood next to or on top of the old, now moss-covered, dump, there are clusters of sturdy melded steel houses, built over the past couple of years and rented at a low cost by CCF to house some of the families.

Click “sponsor a child” on CCF’s website and you can choose between a host of smiling faces; or you can even sponsor a granny. “These grannies deserve to live in dignity,” the text reads. But sponsorship – once a lucrative source of funding – has mostly fallen out of fashion in development circles. One of the buzz words for NGOs now is “sustainability”: whatever aid you provide should enable the community to, eventually, take care of itself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former scavenger Suon Vu (left) and his wife Say Pheap, outside their steel house at Stung Meanchey. Photograph: Poppy McPherson

But in Stung Meanchey, “the more services – or freebies – are provided, the more people will come, and it’s extremely dysfunctional,” says Marot. “A lot of families have been there for a very long time, and it’s their area, I can understand. [But] it’s stabilising the population on a dump site that’s virtually closed and the question is: ‘what else is there for making a living?’”

The most pressing need for a lot of slum residents is a job. “Even though they have a house, their problem is income,” explains Lor Sren, from local housing rights NGO Sahmakum Teang Tnaut.

Though many lives at Stung Meanchey have changed for the better, some families are enduring desolate conditions just to enrol their kids in the programmes and have a chance of getting a house. Neeson admits the permanent NGO presence in the area has kept people tied to the defunct dump.

Sophal Ear, an academic who authored Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy, called the project a “whack a mole” exercise that entrenches dependence on NGOs, tackling the symptoms but not roots of slum poverty.

On dumps in other parts of Asia, NGO projects have been linked to a similar influx of poor families. In Manila, the gritty capital of the Philippines, the notorious Smokey Mountain rubbish dump became a magnet for poor families after an NGO established a school there, according to author Andy Mulligan.

He wrote his novel Trash based on his experiences there. “The slum around the dumpsite started to grow as the news spread: ‘move to Tondo – there’s free food and even a school’,” he wrote in an email.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children scavenge through rubbish in the notorious Smokey Mountain dump in Manila. Photograph: Joel Nito/AFP/Getty Images

“I often say that I don’t think it’s humane to have people working in an open dump,” says Dias. “It’s a violation of human rights. But, at the same time, you also have to consider that people have to earn a livelihood. You cannot adapt without providing some source of income for people.”

In the 1990s, Dias was working with local government in Belo Horizonte, her home city. Back then, about 72% of the country’s municipalities tipped their waste into open dumps – defined as places where rubbish is simply left to rot – as opposed to sanitary landfills, which are planned and by definition cannot house waste pickers.

My fear is that charity closes down intelligent thinking about injustice Andy Mulligan

By 2010, the percentage of municipalities tipping waste into open dumps had fallen to 50% following a mandatory closure order. For some of the waste pickers and recycling collectors, suddenly deprived of their sole source of income, life became harder. The government offered some compensation, but it was hardly a match for their jobs on the dump. Some migrated to smaller, less lucrative “mini-dumps” while others worked on the streets. The same year, the government passed a law ordering cities and private businesses to work with the recycling cooperatives.

Brazil’s recycling collectors, known as catadores, have a long history of organising. There are more than 1,500 cooperatives spread across the country, together forming a national movement with powerful political force. In São Paolo alone, catadores pick up an estimated 90% of recyclable material.

It started, in part, with work done by the Catholic church in the 1980s and 90s. “Usually cooperatives in Brazil – the initial ones, not now – were formed by the social work that NGOs from the Catholic church did with informal recyclers,” explains Dias. By 2001, the national movement was formed. As well as lobbying and securing contracts, the cooperatives attempted to help shed the stigma that surrounds their work, staging PR campaigns.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Catadores dig through waste at the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 before it was permanently closed. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images

Catadores were charged with the clean-up after this year’s Olympic Games in Rio. “Waste pickers here, they carried the Olympic torch,” says Dias. “This gives you an idea of how their profile is changing. Usually, it’s politicians and athletes.”

“I’m very proud of being a waste picker,” says Poliana Inacio, a Brazilian woman who endured a violent past and worked at varying stages of the recycling chain on a rubbish dump before becoming a catadore leader. “It’s the best job I’ve had in my life.”

But the movement can’t solve all Inacio’s problems. The cooperative she belonged to is family-run and recently they sided with an ex-partner who abuses her, she said. Forced to leave the cooperative, she now works independently on the street, bringing the recyclables to her home and sorting them there. She squats in a shared house with no electricity and no running water.

While the cooperative movement in Brazil has not completely spared waste pickers the hardship endured by their peers around the world, getting organised has granted the catadores a measure of something people in their line of work are often denied: dignity.

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Movements similar to Brazil’s have worked – to an extent – in other vastly different cultural contexts. Cairo’s zabaleen have gone door to door gathering waste and recyclables from households in the city for more than half a century. That long chapter might have come to an end after 2004 when the Mubarak government brought in multinational corporations to do the work. But following the revolution, they were able to form a union and successfully petitioned the authorities to bring them back into the official system in 2014.

And in Pune, India, a worker-owned cooperative called Solid Waste Collection and Handling, born from the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat trade union, was hired by the government in 2008.

In Lagos, Nigeria, the social enterprise Wecyclers works with low-income households to tackle the city’s widespread waste problems, collecting residents’ recyclable waste in exchange for incentives. Wecyclers has partnered with the Lagos Waste Management Authority to ramp up the city’s collection services.

But in cities such as Phnom Penh and Yangon, at least, there is little indication that informal recyclers will be integrated into the official systems that seem determined to shut them out. “If no one worked like us then there would be trash everywhere,” says Nyo Tin, who runs a recycling shop in Yangon, buying material from waste pickers. “So we are doing a good thing for the government. They should support us.”

Additional reporting by Vandy Muong in Phnom Penh and Cape Diamond in Yangon. Guardian Cities is a member of the Habitat III Journalism Project. Read more about the project here