Street Roots • Aug. 17-23, 2018
Street Roots • Aug. 17-23, 2018
New s
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WASTE NOT
The politics of poverty and waste management
BY HELEN HILL
S T A F F W R IT E R
t was while working with the homeless
population in her hometown of Portland
that Taylor Cass Talbott started the
collaborative series, of art exhibits and
workshops called “Live
Debris,” using trash art
to highlight the value of
waste and the people
who survive from its
recovery.
The exhibits explore
“art committed to
understanding the
confluence of material
culture and social
exclusion,” said Cass
Talbott, who has
orgahized similar events
in Washington, Brazil,
India, Bhutan,
Myanmar, Thailand and
Japan.
Cass Talbott manages
the capacity
development of waste
picker organizations for
Women in Informal
Employment:
Globalizing and
Organizing, or WIEGO,
an international
advocacy group focused
PHOTO BY HELEN HILL
on poor working
women. Waste pickers are people who
collect household or commercial waste -
from bins, dumpsters, landfills, waterways,
streets or other areas. They may collect
items they need for personal use or that
they will resell or repurpose, or they might
work in a waste-management capacity,
according to WIEGO’s definition. What they
all have in common is that waste picking is
a means of survival that helps them support
themselves and their families.
Cass Talbott’s work on improving the
health and wellbeing of waste pickers in
Pune, India, earned her the Rotary
International Champion of Peace award in
2017. The program manager for the
Samdrup Joogkhar Initiative, she spent a
year working for the Indian waste
cooperative Solid Waste and Collection
Handling, or SWaCH. And her project
developing waste reduction systems in
Bhutan received a national award for
innovative approaches to solid waste
management
Closer to home, she organized and
painted murals to beautify and winterize the
tiny homes a t Dignity Village and has
I
“This practice we thought was
so ecological (paper recycling)
is exploiting cheap labor and
weak environmental regulations
in other countries. We have to fix
onr material culture so it isn't
dependent on exploitation at every
corner."
TAYLOR CASS TALBOTT
worked as a medical interpreter at Outside
In - she speaks Japanese, Portuguese,
Spanish, French and some Hindi in addition
to English.
Street Roots recently sat down with Cass
Talbott to discuss the connection between
throw-away materials and the people our
culture can also treat as expendable.
H elen Hill: What brings you back to
Portland after your extensive global work?
Taylor C ass Talbott: I’m networking
around the idea of developing a waste picker
cooperative here. What I mean by waste
picker is anyone who is collecting materials
to sell for recycling or consume for
themselves. We are talking survival-based
collections. It could be anyone who picks,
materials out of a dumpsite or garbage can
all the way to an organized cooperative of
informal waste pickers that are contracted
by a municipality to collect materials door to
door.
H.H.: What do you mean by informal?
T.C.T.: The informal economy essentially
means economies that are not regulated or
protected by the state, but this definition
changes with time, especially as countries
see a rise in informality. My employer,
WIEGO, does a lot of work with the
International Labor Organization to update
this definition and advance policies and
organizations that better protect these
workers. Sixty percent of the world’s
workers are informal, and that number is
growing. To understand degrees of
informality, it-helps to ask: Are you a temp
worker? Do you have health care? A
contract? A future doing what you are
doing? We call it a “gig economy” here in
the U.S.
H.H.: Like Street Roots vendors?
T.C.T.: Street Roots vendors are
absolutely an example of a gig economy.
H.H.: How would a waste picker cooperative
in the Global South compare to one here in
Portland?
T.C.T.: Waste picker cooperatives are
gaining attention worldwide, especially in
the Global South, where cities that are
growing really quickly are not able to collect
all the waste produced. At the same time,
you have people living in extreme poverty
situations who, as a form of living, are
collecting materials for recycling. If those
workers organize into cooperatives or
associations or unions, then they can be
contracted to fill the gaps in municipal
waste collection.
WASTE PICKER
GET INVOLVED
Waste picker, a less
derogatory term than
scavenger, was adopted
at the First World
Conference ot Waste
Pickers in Colombia in
Taylor Cass Talbott is organizing collaborative meetings with
all waste picking stakeholders in the Portland area.
2008.
To participate, ybu can contact her at
livedebris@gmail.com.
Visit the websites of these organizations for more information
on waste pickers:
WIEGO: www.wiego.org
SWaCH Pune: www.swachcoop.com
Obviously in Portland, we don’t have a lot
of gaps in municipal waste collection.
Probably the city would say we have 100
percent coverage, although I would say we
don’t have 100 percent coverage because we
have a lot of camps of folks without homes
w ho a re n o t receiv in g w a ste m a n a g em e n t
services.
In the Global South, you have these really
strong economies around collecting and
recovering waste materials. And because so
much of it exists in the informal sector, you
also have scrap dealers or facilities where
you can sell materials, whereas here we
have deposit depots like bottle drops, but
we don’t have accessible places where you
can go and sell other types of materials.
We also don’t have a strong domestic
recycling market here so a lot of our
materials don’t have any value and you can’t
get any money for them even if there were a
depot. Decades ago the U.S. completely
rewrote our recycling laws and privatized its
waste management and recycling systems so
that many materials are not legally available
or accessible to people the way they are in
other countries.
We don’t have a waste management
system where the workers themselves are
incentivized to actually reduce waste. We
also have a waste management industry in
the U.S. that is controlled primarily by big
wealthy businesses and generally white
men. I see this as very concerning because
in the West, we tend to push a lot of these
infrastructures and models onto so-called
developing countries, as though we have
figured it out and this is the way they
should be operating. Of course these
municipalities are happy to have somebody
come from another country and say, “Here
is our magic fix: Install this incineration
facility or mechanize your entire waste
collection process,” without taking into
account the labor and job opportunities that
will be lost when you formalize these
systems too quickly without integrating
informal workers.
I
H.H.: Is it hard to go from municipal waste
pickup to a waste picker-based informal
economy? Might people view that as going
backward? What are some of the points of
entry for a waste picker cooperative to start
organizing and sustaining itself in Portland?
Above: Scraps are collected for recycling in
Pune, India. Left: SWaCH waste pickers in
Pune ask that for safety, sanitary waste
(diapers and pads) be wrapped and marked
with a red dot, indicating hazardous waste.
T.C.T.: I d o n ’t n e c e s sa rily b e lieve in
breaking the system and restarting i t I
think that what you need to do is look at
where needs overlap. There are still a lot of
waste management needs in our city, such
as providing waste management services to
houseless communities and camps. That
could be a midrange goal.
Some of our more immediate entry points
involve improving segregation and waste
management in multifamily housing. That’s
a really big problem in Portland. Laura
Kutner of Trash for Peace does a lot of work
around this issue, and we are exploring how
a waste picker cooperative might be
possible in Portland. I could see it being
very much like waste pickers cooperatives
in Canada. There is one in Vancouver called
The Binners Project. They have contracts
where they provide waste segregation
services to multifamily-housing facilities.
Oftentimes those people who are providing
the segregation services actually live in
these affordable-housing facilities.
Another entry point would be providing
waste management and segregation services
at big events, potentially being
subcontracted by event managers to provide
those services and separate out cans and
bottles for deposit, and also be paid for their
services. And thinking beyond waste, I could
see a cooperative providing zero-waste
services like reusable dishware and
dishwashing services at events. We have to
move past disposables, and I think it’s poetic
that waste picker cooperatives are so often
1 the ones introducing zero-waste concepts to
! communities.
H.H.: We talk a lot about bottles and cans,
but Street Roots, as you know, is a weekly
newspaper, so I have to ask: What is the fate of
recycled newspapers?
often being sent to other countries like
Vietnam. They might recycle some portion,
but much ends up in open dumps.
Ultimately, we are poisoning poor people in
those countries. This practice we thought
was so ecological is exploiting cheap labor
and weak environmental regulations in other
countries. We have to fix our material
culture so it isn’t dependent on exploitation
at every comer.
M A R K IT
WiTHABSBOOr
T.C.T.: We are at an interesting time in
the United States right now because our
recycling systems have effectively collapsed.
With the shock from China not accepting
materials anymore, one of our biggest
problems is fiber, which includes newspaper
and mixed paper. Because we live near the
coast, we had such easy access to ports that
took these materials to China. So we closed
down a lot of our mills, and now we don’t
have a lot of local recycling options for these
materials. That is a major problem for waste
management right now, trying to find
markets for fibers and most plastics.
That is another strong motivation for
organizing a cooperative of workers from
low-income and no-income communities who
are invested in the subject of waste; there is
a lot of thinking that needs to be done, to
try to push more progressive policies.
Our waste materials need to be
monetized if we are actually going to reduce
them. Also, we need to have extended
producer responsibility for all single-use
materials, or better yet, we need to have no
single-use materials at all.
If you have the participation of the people
who rely on the sale and collection of these
materials, they will really push these issues
forward and will put a human face to the
issue of waste, which I feel we have lost
here in the U.S.
H.H.: We sent our paper and cardboard to
China? We don’t recycle paper here?
T.C.T.: At one point we processed it here,
but a lot of the mills in this area got closed
down, in part because of the dioxins going
into the river. Even now, so many of the
materials we think are being recycled are
H.H.: So where does our fiber go?
T.C.T.: A lot of it is being landfilled. Some
of it is being stored with the hope that
another outlet will appear. Now we see
China opening new paper recycling facilities
in Vietnam. People believe the paper market
will return in the next couple of years, but
it’s expensive and pollutive to run paper
mills, so I would be surprised to see that
market move domestic.
H.H.: Could you talk more about extended
producer responsibility (where original
producers are responsible for recovery and
recycling)?
T.C.T.: The bottle bill is a great example
of extended producer responsibility. In
Oregon, we have the only privately run
bottle-bill system in the country. What we’ve
been able to do in Oregon is actually invest
in changing the waste recovery system back
to what it used to be. Instead of crushing
the glass, we are starting an actual bottle
reuse system. So there are a lot of
opportunities for improving extended
producer responsibility and using that as a
model for other materials.
See WASTE, page 11