For many people, what happens to donated clothes or bags of recycling waste is a mystery — out of sight, out of mind. But for millions, this waste is a livelihood. All over the world, waste pickers wake before dawn to collect discarded items, from water bottles to T-shirts, as they arrive at landfills or are discarded on streets. They play a vital role in recovering the industry’s enormous waste problem and driving circularity, but their labor is often invisible to brands and consumers alike.
According to the World Economic Forum, approximately 15 to 20 million people in developing countries are working as informal waste pickers, recovering local and imported plastic and textile waste, which is either sold in markets, on the streets, or to aggregators for recycling. These workers are a vital part of waste management systems around the world, collecting up to 60% of all plastics for recycling. But 80% of waste pickers operate within the informal economy, meaning their work is unregulated and unprotected, affording them few social safety nets like pensions, access to health care, unemployment benefits and free education. Workers are often vulnerable, undocumented immigrants, or people living on the fringes of society in informal housing.
At the same time, downstream textile waste supply chains remain complex and often lack traceability, obfuscating the people making it all happen. “It’s not a linear supply chain, it’s more like a supply web,” says Libby Annat, co-founder of consultancy Due Diligence Design. “[Clothes] move through collectors, sorters, agents, exporters, resorters, resellers and eventually down to pre-processes and recyclers, often across several countries. So that complexity alone makes the traceability and transparency incredibly difficult.”
To fix this, the fashion industry and its legislators must recognize informal waste pickers, and include them in circularity frameworks as they develop, not as an afterthought, says the International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP). That includes the anticipated extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations coming into force from 2028. Without this level of inclusion, experts say waste pickers will remain hidden and overlooked, undermining the industry’s circular ambitions from the start.
A business built on instability
Informal waste collection takes many different forms, from picking textiles out of landfills to resell in local marketplaces, to collecting plastics that can be sold by the kilogram to aggregators for recycling. As a result, each country and city has a different relationship to its waste pickers, and each language has its own colloquial terms for the role, but advocacy organizations have worked hard to find a neutral, universal term — waste pickers — which is neither derogatory nor stigmatized, while accurately reflecting the range of jobs. For example, some workers might be paid to pick up waste from households, while others operate in streets, alleyways and canals to collect and sell waste from carts throughout the day.
What connects waste pickers around the globe is an entrepreneurial attitude, says Vivien Luk, the executive director of Work, a non-profit operating in countries like Haiti, Vietnam and Kenya to improve waste picker livelihoods. “They’re all entrepreneurs to begin with,” she says. “They’ve all found a way to build a business for themselves that allows them to, at least in most scenarios, put food on the table.”
Waste collecting can also be hazardous, with workers exposed to fires in landfills, as well as microplastics from degrading clothing. There are 30 different diseases connected to uncollected waste, which attracts vermin and insects, but without formal systems in place, evidence of the health implications for waste pickers is largely anecdotal. “There are certain unmapped effects on the health of the waste pickers, which we don’t know,” says Devansh Peshin, regional program manager for Enviu, an organization that works with waste pickers through its Enviu Textiles initiative in Bangalore, India. “That’s an unexplored side of the effect of textile waste handling.”
The textile waste crisis in Alto Hospicio, northern Chile, has made headlines in recent years. First, for the striking images of an estimated 59,000 tons of imported clothes that filled the nearby El Paso de la Mula dump in the Atacama Desert. Then, for the fires that tore through and destroyed 11,000 tons of textiles in 2022. “I would say the problem is worse than before. Because nowadays, not only is there more discarding, but there’s also more rampant and constant incineration, which makes it difficult to rescue clothes,” says Bastian Barria, one of five co-founders of activist organization Desierto Vestido, which has been drawing international attention to the textile waste crisis in Chile, including hosting Atacama Fashion Week in 2024. “We’ve also run campaigns to rescue these garments, but we haven’t been able to do it completely lately because there’s so much incineration.” Barria says the fires are lit by locals, who are often paid by importers to destroy textiles, releasing toxic fumes that pollute the air and soil.
.jpg)
The instability extends far beyond fire and physical risks. Waste pickers selling plastic to aggregators are also subject to price fluctuations, which can dramatically impact their income from day to day. “A [plastic] bottle can go for INR 100 [83p], but sometimes it can go for just INR 30 or 40 [25p to 33p],” says Chinmayi Naik, executive director of Hasiru Dala, a social impact organization that also operates in Bangalore. It is part of a broader collective called Saamuhika Shakti, which was launched by and is supported by the H&M Foundation. “India is also importing waste, so that fluctuates the market prices a lot, and it also depends on how much the recycling industry can uptake.”
It’s a similar situation for textile waste, because many recyclers prefer pre-consumer over post-consumer waste, which is generally considered contaminated and lower quality. “In the last few years, the market has been very poor, and in some of the markets that we work in, the cost per kilogram has decreased by as much as 100%,” says Work’s Luk. “Until regulations are in place, to ensure that minimum commitments are being made and enforced, the market is going to continue to be pretty volatile for textile-to-textile [recycling].”
The push for legal protection
Enviu, Hasiru Dala, Work and other groups are operating directly with communities to establish stronger protections for waste pickers, including occupational identity cards that are registered with local municipal bodies, as well as legal recognition of their role in their waste management ecosystem. Hasiru Dala negotiated with 80 wards in Bangalore to allow waste pickers with ID cards to run waste collection centers, too. “We [are] working on the upward mobility of waste pickers,” says Naik. “Rather than saying waste pickers can only work at collection and sorting level, there is a huge opportunity for waste pickers to do upward mobility, which is not only good for the community, but also good for the whole supply chain, because they come up with nuanced knowledge of grassroots experience.”
At the legislative level, IAWP — a union representing waste pickers in 34 countries — has been advocating for the inclusion of waste pickers in EPR frameworks and the Global Plastics Treaty, which saw negotiations collapse for the sixth time in August. The IAWP began looking more closely at textiles after reuse and repair became a more prominent feature of treaty talks, explains advocacy coordinator Taylor Cass Talbott. But the rhetoric from different stakeholder groups about including waste pickers in emerging legislative systems rang hollow. “When you see some of the proposals of what those systems [should] look like, they were not systems that would remotely be able to incorporate waste pickers,” she says.
These policies create economic opportunities that can be snapped up by private companies and bad actors, Talbott says. “It’s the age-old issue of competition and privatization. EPR often incentivizes a consolidation of the market under a producer responsibility organization. And they don’t have the incentive to subcontract with a waste picker group that requires a certain kind of social capacity.” This opens up the potential for fake waste picker organizations to hire workers and take over the role of informal waste pickers. “There’s no real evidence that you’ve actually integrated a hard-to-integrate population,” says Talbott.
Among other demands, the IAWP says it is now focused on the implementation of EPR policies that protect the role of waste pickers. “If you want to design an EPR system that can actually accommodate waste pickers, you really need to involve them in the process of designing that system, and that’s hard,” Talbott says. Crucially, financial value has to be embedded into the collection of textiles from streets and landfills, she explains, so that waste pickers can earn a decent living. “It’s hard to find an EPR policy that’s actually financially incentivizing the collection of materials from the environment.”
Waste pickers in the Global South are far removed from brand design teams in the Global North, but decisions made at the design stage have a direct impact on waste pickers, whether it’s the choices of virgin materials (high-quality natural fibers fetch a higher recycling price in Bangalore, says Naik), or sourcing decisions for recycled materials. “The price brands are willing to pay today impacts the decisions of the recyclers and the aggregators,” says Luk.
This relationship is entirely transactional, focused on price, volume, material and timelines, Luk continues, leaving little room to establish responsible sourcing practices, or a stable price for the waste pickers. “If we can actually improve responsible sourcing standards, which includes things like business systems and resilient supply chains, aggregators, recyclers and businesses can all get better quality, better volume and a loyal base of suppliers,” says Luk. “All of that equals efficiency in the supply chain.”
.jpg)
One added benefit of transitioning aspects of textile waste collection from an informal to formal economy could be to ensure fewer clothes end up in landfill, but the industry is yet to reckon with the true cost of recapturing textile waste, says Enviu’s Peshin. “If you had formal systems for collection, sorting, aggregation and institutional linkages, you would realize more economic value from this waste. More economic value would mean more livelihood opportunities for waste workers,” he says. “We have seen the documentaries on the real cost of fashion, for example, but what is the true cost of recycling?”
Ultimately, waste pickers are part of fashion’s long and complex value chains, whether they’re visible or not. Unless waste pickers are recognized, fashion’s transition toward a circular economy will not be a just one, says Luk. “We’re perpetuating a broken system, and we’re continuing this inhumane treatment of people [in the process],” she says. “Everybody needs to be a part of a conversation on how we shift the system.”
