SA’s itinerant waste pickers feel the pinch as Covid-19 lockdown drags on

They perform one of South Africa’s most important services, collecting recyclables that would otherwise swell the country’s rubbish dumps and burden municipal trash collection, but the Covid-19 coronavirus lockdown has left thousands of waste pickers jobless.

The shutdown ordered by President Cyril Ramaphosa from March 26 and extended until April 30, is among the toughest in the world. It bans anyone apart from essential workers leaving their homes except to buy food or medicine.

Yet although municipal rubbish collectors were classified as essential workers, authorities excluded itinerant waste pickers who ply the streets of Johannesburg pulling heavy carts laden with more than three quarters of the city’s total recycling.

For the past decade, 55-year-old grandmother Abigail Kubheka has been rising at 3am every morning in her house in Soweto. She walks some 10km a day to scavenge for recyclable trash and load it onto her cart.

“If you leave much later, you’ll get nothing,” she told Reuters at a Soweto yard where other waste pickers with whom she works sorted plastic from glass bottles and aluminium cans.

Even when she goes to church on Sunday, she carries a waste bag to scoop up any promising items on the way back. Besides doing wonders for her fitness, her activities have enabled her to feed, clothe and educate three children – one is now at university – and support two grandchildren.

But with the lockdown, everything dried up.

“People think waste pickers are low down, but I find it good. I’m healthy and I’m free,” she said.

“Now I’m just sitting at home because we can’t work.”

A spokesperson for the department of environment affairs did not respond to a request for comment.

A 2016 report by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research estimated there were up to 90 000 waste pickers in South Africa, which is notorious for having the world’s worst extremes of wealth and poverty.

The same report said they collect 80% to 90% of the paper and packaging that South Africa recycles, saving municipal authorities R750 million a year.

Another report by South Africa’s plastic industry body put its recycling of plastics at 46% in 2018, compared with just 31% across Europe, thanks largely to the waste pickers’ efforts.

Waste picking also fills stomachs in a country with 30% unemployment and large families often depending on a single breadwinner.

Adelina Nkopane, who works with Kubheka, was pulling in R1 000 a week – a good wage in South Africa.

“Since the lockdown, I don’t have money to buy food or pay my rent. My husband is not working and I never manage to keep money for more than a few days. It’s a disaster,” she said, before stuffing a sack full of plastic drink bottles.

Instead, she has been queuing up for government food hand-outs.

“If they can just allow us to work and we respect the rules and they gave us masks, we could be very happy,” Nkopane said.

Waste pickers pull trolleys loaded with recyclable materials in Naturena, near Johannesburg. Picture: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

Get in touch  City Press

+27 11 713 9001 news@citypress.co.za Media Park, 69 Kingsway Road, Auckland Park

Rise above the clutter | Choose your news | City Press in your inbox

City Press is an agenda-setting South African news brand that publishes across platforms. Its flagship print edition is distributed on a Sunday.