Inside the Waste Industry in Makhanda

On a normal day, there are over 200 waste pickers at the municipal landfill in Grahamstown. They come from the poorest households in the township. There are also a number of homeless people working and living at the landfill. Waste pickers also go through rubbish in the town. Sometimes the town and dumpsite pickers overlap.

The waste pickers work under distressing conditions and lack sanitation facilities or protection. Many rights are being violated on dump sites.

Most of the pickers are young men who dropped out of the schooling system. Some are without parents, others have single parents and all of them are from homes that battle low wages or unemployment. They are unemployed in a town where the unemployment is over 60 percent and among of the highest in the country.

Grahamstown is in the Eastern Cape - one of the poorest provinces in South Africa. The town’s economy centres on education and is run mainly by an elite university (Rhodes University) and prestigious private boarding schools.

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Unskilled workers are under pressure in South Africa for a number of reasons: falling through the gaping cracks in the education system; because more people are dependant on them; systemic social issues in communities and job instability.

Most of the waste pickers in Makhanda rely on social grants. Social grants play important role to keep many people alive in South Africa and Makana is no exception. There are no grants for unemployment. People access grants through families like pensions and child support grants. Some social grant beneficiaries use informal economic activities to supplement the grants. Others at the landfill rely solely on waste picking.

To supplement this, the waste pickers either use the materials they find or sell it. Some materials are sold directly to individuals in the township. The Makana pickers sell their bounty to four main recycling places. There are two near the landfill and two on the eastern outskirts of town near the township.

The waste pickers refer to the owners only by their first names, Chris (Grahamstown Recycling), Bush (one near the landfill and another in town) and Leonard. Some waste pickers take materials directly to the recycling places or scrapyards to weigh and sell their bounty which is usually The bounty is paper and cardboard, plastics; metal, glass and bricks.

There are five main dealers including Simphiwe who goes to the landfill every day in a truck to buy directly from the waste pickers and then re-sell the material either to Leonard in town or Chris near the landfill. There is consensus among the pickers that Simphiwe pays the worst of all the dealers. This is described visually in the graphic below.

The price the waste pickers are paid for the recyclables they collect depends mainly on the dealers. The dealers are at an advantage because they have transport to regularly load recyclable materials at the dump and to give the waste pickers lifts to and from the landfill to the scrapyards to do the work.

When there are multiple dealers operating, the prices of materials tends to change in order to attract waste pickers. When there is no competition the prices are the lowest. Bush has been buying bricks at 0.40c since 2009 and the price is still the same eight years later - he is the only one buying them. Leonard is also the only one buying glass at 0.20c per kg - the lowest price. Where there is competition, the amount is so limited that it does not make much difference in the waste pickers’ lives. They are then forced to eat from the refuse at the landfill because the money they make is too little to survive on.

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Chris

Grahamstown Recycling

Chris started his recycling business in 2005. He has a small truck that fetches cardboard, paper and plastic from three sources - Pick 'n Pay, Checkers and the municipal landfill. He also has five people working for him.

The five employees sort the waste at the scrapyard and then put it in a pressing machine to make bales. One bale of cardboard weighs 700kg and it is slightly more for paper. A plastic bale weighs around 400kg. When all five workers are present, they can make up to five bales of paper a day or ten bales of cardboard a day. Cardboard is quicker than paper because the paper needs to be more sorted. Paper and cardboard takes an hour and 30 minutes to press respectively.

The paper and cardboard bales are sold to the Mondi plant in Durban and the plastic is taken to Port Elizabeth. The cardboard and paper bales are taken every two weeks and sells faster than plastic. The truck takes 72 bales at a time, 18 paper and 48+ of cardboard. Paper has less bales because it is more heavy than cardboard.

Assuming each bale weighs 700kg:

700 x 72 = 50.4 tons every fortnight

50.4 tons x 2 = 100. 8 tons per month

100. 8 tons x 12 months = 1209.6 tons per year

This figure contribute to the R15 billion financial value estimated in the South African waste sector. Evidently, the waste pickers are the first step in the recycling process and are the base of the hierarchy of waste management.

Behind Grahamstown Recycling are rows and rows of cardboard, paper and plastic bales - hundreds and hundreds of them. It is the same inside the warehouse - there are mountains of loose cardboard, paper, magazines, newspapers and plastic. One worker said when the plastic is suddenly in demand it moves so fast that this space becomes empty.

The workers are hired as sorters. They used to earn R36 for a bale, which they shared among themselves in 2013 when they started working for Chris full-time. He started paying them R40 per day and has since added R10 each year. They now earn R80 a day, which is R400 a week or R1600.00 per month.

The relationship between Chris and the pickers

Chris does not employ the waste pickers. They sell to him and are paid per weight of items. His driver and manager Leroy says:

“It depends how much they get. The highest was two guys, they made R600 but it was only once. On average a person can make from R100 to R300 a day.”

The lowest was about R10 on a bad day this year, which happened about three times. The average prices are about R90, R70, R60, to R56, he said. Leroy says he gets about 1 ton, 5 tons, 20 tons and 240 tons of recyclable material from the waste pickers at the landfill every day, week, month and year respectively. He does not buy on rainy days because the materials get very heavy when they are wet. This means that the Grahamstown Recycling employees and the waste pickers is nearly the same except the employees' income is more steady. Taking into consideration that Grahamstown has many rainy days, there are many days when nothing is sold and the amount that pickers can earn varies from day to day.

Leroy said there are about six to twelve people selling to Grahamstown Recycling, attributing it to the fact that they do not only sell to them. His truck makes many trips taking the waste pickers and their bounty to Grahamstown Recycling. Weighing occurs at 13h00 and 15h30. Bush’s manager says that on a busy day he gets about 60 people selling material.

The pickers' perspectives

Cardboard, paper and plastic bottles are accessible daily, unlike copper, brass and aluminium. They also sell for mostly R1 per kg and below at the scrapyards. Consequently, the waste pickers make between R40 to R60 or R100 on average per day. On average, a picker collects up to 100kg of recyclable material a day from Monday to Friday.

Waste picker Lukhanyo Nabo, 29, says:

"Wednesdays and Thursdays, I find bottles from … waste. Township waste is collected on Wednesdays and town is Thursdays. That is a good waste, according to us. Then is Rhodes University supporting plastic with cold-drinks bottles, big tins of baked beans, Coke cans and Windhoek empty (dumpies) beer bottles. You have to collect for more than one to make reasonable amount. On a day’s work, you may make R50 or less. The problem is weighing - sometime you collect enough for R45 but Bush may decide to give you R15. You can see the scale from the window outside but if you ask Bush. he will tell you he has his own calculations."

Abel Lebowa, 17, from Xakane Station says:

"I sell mostly plastic and white paper and aluminium cans to Leonard. It depends how hard I work and I can collect about 110kg of recyclable material per day. Today, I budgeted for about R100. I have been recycling for five years. The landfill has expanded- it use to be small (and low) and now is high."

Based on the figures from Leroy at Grahamstown Recycling and assuming the figures are similar at the other scrap yards, the waste pickers sell 240 tons worth of recyclable waste material a year. There are five dealers which equals 1200 tons worth of recyclable waste sourced directly from the waste pickers.