‘People of the stigma’

They’re dubbed “cartonero” in Spain. The Portuguese call them “catador de materiais recicláveis.” Until the First World Conference of Waste Pickers in 2008, they were called “recyclers,” “ragpickers,” or “scavengers.”

In Metro Manila’s garbage dump Payatas, names didn’t matter to Michael, recalled the late painter Joey A. Velasco. The 13-year-old boy foraged for his family’s food, alongside hundreds of pickers, from over 1,800 tons of trash unloaded daily.

With 11 other slum kids, Michael modeled for Velasco’s oil painting: Hapag ng Pagasa. “Table of Hope” depicts the 12, clustered around a squatter’s makeshift dinner table, with the Master from Galilee.

“Pagpag” is cooked from scrap recovered from rubbish, Michael explained. Discarded food bits are winnowed from dead cats, shards of glass, sometimes human cadaver parts. “It tastes sour… At least it fills our stomach. But it doesn’t last until evening.”

Stench drifts into Iloilo City from the dump in Barangay Calajunan, Mandurriao town. In Cebu’s “Smokey Mountain,” medical waste, dead dogs, sometimes aborted human embryos, are embedded in the refuse.

“We used crude rakes. And it’d take 20 minutes to sort out, from the rotting litter unloaded by a truck, ‘recyclables’—glass, metal, caps, etc.,” recalls Fr. Heinz Kuluke. Adults earned up to P150 for a day’s work—“barely enough for rice.”

The Society of Divine Word priest lived among 160 families in squalid huts, next to the stacked refuse. “Many of my companions were children as young as six. They’d get P30,” Kuluke says. A 15-year-old scavenger concedes that “there is no future.”

“The future depends on what you do today,” Mahatma Gandhi once said.

This June, the Japan Social Development Fund provided a $3-million grant to help 6,000 dump workers in five cities and towns.

Administered by the World Bank, the fund will go to equipment and training to improve the working conditions of  waste workers, including recycling cooperatives in Metro Manila. Health and safety will be given priority. The nonprofit Solid Waste Management Association of the Philippines is the implementing agency. The project “helps address the plight of one of the most marginalized groups in society—men, women and children earning a living from garbage,” noted World Bank country director Motoo Konishi.

Pressure for such initiatives is building up. Migrants fleeing rural penury flood into the slums of today’s 122 cities, plus 16 towns that flip-flopping Supreme Court decisions brand as “cities.” Blurred priorities sap limited budgets. Interior and Local Government Secretary Jesse Robredo wages battle to curb local officials who’d ladle honoraria to themselves first.

Mounting rubbish threatens to overwhelm obsolete systems. The Ecological Solid Waste Management Act (RA 9003), requires local governments to convert open, fly-infested cesspools into sanitary landfills and adopt solid waste management practices. Many local government units lag.

Waste picking is “the one industry that’s always hiring.” Pools of jobless, and inexperienced, workers cluster in urban slums. They have few options, especially in countries with patchy social welfare nets. Nonetheless, meager garbage dump income helps street children, orphans, and migrants. Recycling lengthens the life spans of city landfills. In poorer cities, they’re the only solid waste removal service. These are modest but real benefits. But in traditional economic tallies, they don’t appear.

How many waste pickers are there? The numbers are patchy, given the ebb and flow of workers in dispersed sites with few demarcations. The World Bank uses a 1-2 percent of population rule of thumb. The population here surged past 93.2 million in 2010. Would there be 1.2-1.8 million who sift through roach-infested muck for the next meal?

Most huddle in makeshift huts that abut dumpsites. Exposure to rotting matter and lack of water, toilets and medical care jack up infectious disease rates. They slash life expectancies. In Mexico City, the average life span of a dumpsite waste collector is 39 years, or 30 years shorter than the national average. In Port Said, Egypt, one out of three babies born to garbage dump families dies before reaching the age of one.

No similar Philippine study has been conducted. Yet, one glimpses stark disparities in life expectancy tables in economically deprived provinces. The life spans in Tawi-Tawi, Basilan or Maguindanao are two decades shorter than those in La Union or Cebu. Hunger and malnutrition relentlessly translate into premature graves for “people of the stigma.”

Garbage dumps trap thousands in unseen but all too real detention camps of chronic hunger, anemia, TB or blindness from lack of vitamins. Lack of schooling welds the escape hatches shut.

“Life is the threshold at which other hopes begin.” Abbreviated lives in refuse dumps are an obscene scandal. No nation worth its place under the sun will accept life sentences of perpetual insecurity for its people.

The kids who sift through the garbage today are shackled into waste-picker status like their parents before them. Soon, they will start families. Their children, too, will be locked in those cesspools—unless given a chance to break free.

Half a world away from Payatas, Smokey Mountain and Mandurriao, 130 heads of state are meeting in Brazil for the “Rio+20” summit. Some flay the draft statement as feeble—a “48-page suicide note” for  sustainable development.

Concentrate on the poorest, the rubbish brigade here would urge. “The poor are not another race of creatures bound on other journeys,” Charles Dickens wrote. “They are fellow passengers to the grave.”

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