Packaging companies flout rules on waste picker payments

Bongani Maqheyne sorts through bins in Cape Town to remove recyclable materials before the municipal garbage trucks arrive. Estimates of the number of waste pickers in South Africa range from 50,000 to more than 200,000. Photos: Steve Kretzmann.

• Regulations gazetted in 2020 require paper and packaging companies to take responsibility for the entire life of their product.
• Part of this responsibility is paying a service fee to the people who collect their material. These are predominantly waste pickers.
• Service fee payments to registered waste pickers were supposed to start in November 2022, but this is still not happening.
• Government says the companies, acting through Producer Responsibility Organisations, will have to backdate these payments.

Thousands of waste pickers, who are responsible for the bulk of recycling in South Africa, are not getting paid for their work, though regulations for their payment were gazetted more than three years ago.

Waste pickers, also called reclaimers, often seen going through household bins early in the morning before the garbage trucks arrive, or sorting through waste at municipal dump sites, collect 80% to 90% of all paper and packaging for recycling, according to a 2016 report by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). While waste pickers are paid by weight at buy-back centres for the material they collect, which is then sold on to recyclers, they are not paid for the services they provide. These include separation of waste outside households and businesses, transport of material to buy-back centres, and assistance to municipalities to reduce landfill use.

Their role was officially recognised in November 2020, when the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) published Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations which make paper and packaging producers responsible for managing the full lifecycle of their products.

Among other things, the regulations state that producers must join an Extended Producer Responsibility Scheme that manages the entire value chain, into which waste pickers must be integrated. The extended producer responsibility schemes are managed by non-profit Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs), of which scores now exist. The producers pay a fee, calculated in tonnes of packaging they produce, to these PROs.

Following efforts by waste picker organisations, the regulations were amended in May 2021, ordering waste pickers be paid for their services from November 2022.

The amount agreed upon within the industry – although waste picker organisations believe it is far too low and only agreed in order to start the process – was 15c/kg. This is supposed to be paid by the PROs to registered waste pickers. This is payment for work they had been doing for decades, and unlike private companies, they have not been paid for it, notes University of Johannesburg sociology associate professor Melanie Samson, who led the piloting of the South African Waste Picker Registration System (SAWPRS) developed by the CSIR.

“They did this work for free, saving municipalities and industry hundreds of millions of rand in collection fees, transport costs and landfill airspace,” Samson has noted.

But the chairperson of the African Reclaimers Organisation (ARO), Elias Kodisang, said waste pickers are still not getting paid for the service they provide, three years after the regulations came into effect.

There are two main waste picker organisations: ARO, and the South African Waste Pickers Association (SAWPA). Kodisang said they have a combined membership of nearly 8,650 waste pickers who are registered on the system. He said as far as he knew, the only PRO that has made any payments has been the main plastics one, Petco.

“As far as we can see, only Petco is making payments, and that’s to fewer than 200 waste pickers, and even those payments stopped after a while,” he said.

This was echoed by SAWPA co-ordinator Lefa Mononga, who said registered waste pickers were not being paid the required service fee, despite the registration system “working smoothly”.

Kago Molefe (left) and Shadrak Fillis collect recyclable material from an illegal dumpsite on the edge of Munsieville township in the Mogale City municipality.

Petco, which responded through a public relations agency, said it was not able to pay waste pickers a service fee because it had not figured out a way to pay them electronically.

“Unfortunately, the ‘informality’ of collection and waste trading makes dealing with that part of the value chain very difficult. Currently most transactions are cash-based. Many are not formally recorded, and some businesses and most collectors do not have bank accounts,” stated Petco.

However, Petco stated it had managed to pay the required service fee to some waste pickers during “pilot projects” in which “various approaches” to payments were tested.

Petco said it continued to support the registration of waste pickers “where we can”, and was piloting cashless payment systems together with ARO and SAWPA.

But Petco said it paid “recycling support fees” to recyclers, based on the amount of recyclable material the recyclers bought. The support fee acted as an incentive for the recyclers to buy more recyclable material and pay a higher price for them from the buy-back centres, which in turn would pay higher prices to waste pickers who collected the material.

Petco didn’t say how, or whether, the recycling support fee had been paid by the buy-back centres to the waste pickers.

Petco did not provide an answer to the question of how much it had been paid in fees from its 24 member companies during the last two financial years, nor how many waste pickers had received any service fee payment since the amended regulations came into effect.

PRO Alliance represents eight of the largest PRO organisations across the paper and packaging sector. Executive director Bhavesh Patel said the service fee wasn’t paid by the PRO Alliance because the waste picker registration system does not have a payment system.

Patel said the PRO Alliance has voluntarily taken over management of the registration system from the CSIR, and in discussion with the CSIR and DFFE, is proposing a new, improved system to “address these challenges”.

He said re-establishing the waste picker stakeholder committee was “critical” to ensuring waste pickers were integrated and service fees paid.

But Samson said the stakeholder committee meetings involving PROs, waste picker organisations, SALGA, DFFE, and herself, had been unilaterally cancelled by the PRO Alliance in March this year.

Patel was asked about this, but did not provide a direct response to the question.

Additionally, Samson said the registration system (called the SA Waste Pickers Registration System, or SAWPRA) was designed before extended producer responsibility existed, and was never intended to function as a payment system.

She said it was the responsibility of the PROs to develop and deploy payment and tracking systems that link to the registration system.

“Even the PROs in the PRO Alliance could not agree to implement just one tracking and payment system. They chose their own preferred systems and then did very little to deploy them. They did even less to link them to the SAWPRS, which is not a difficult thing to do.”

However, she said, some are finally showing willingness to partner with waste picker organisations to fast-track payments, and “every PRO needs to follow suit”.

Patel did not answer questions about how much PRO Alliance members had paid in EPR fees over the last three financial years, nor about its budget to develop and implement weight tracking and payment systems for registered waste pickers.

Waste pickers bring recyclable material to a buy-back centre in Krugersdorp, Gauteng.

DFFE communications chief director Peter Mbelengwa said some PROs had indicated in their 2023 annual performance reports that they had started paying waste pickers, while others had not.

Mbelengwa said the reason given for non-payment was that there were delays in the finalisation of the registration system.

Regarding the cancellation of the fortnightly stakeholder meetings, he said the meetings were “put on hold to allow the PRO Alliance to focus on the urgency of facilitating the payment of waste picker service fees”.

He said the DFFE would enforce compliance with the service fee payments, and was facilitating discussions between all parties to “find immediate solutions”.

Once the issue of payments had been sorted out, the DFFE “insists” the service fee be backdated, he said.

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