Integrating Garbage Recycling Activities into a Solid Waste Management System

The sorting point is operated by a contractor who hires four to six persons to separate different items and to pack them in separate containers. From the sorting point the packed waste is taken to Sher Shah factories for primary recycling or to dealers who are also located in Sher Shah, for refined sorting. Alternatively, in a few cases, it is taken directly to factories in Korangi, New Karachi, Orangi and in Sher Shah itself for recycling or sent to recycling factories in the Punjab industrial cities. The journey from the sorting place to Sher Shah or other locations is by pick-ups and sometime by trucks. Since these vehicles are overloaded, they pay Rs 150 to 200 per trip as bhatta to the traffic police. In addition, Rs 10 to 15 are paid at every police chowki¹.

Paper and bone are the two main items that are collected from the dumps. Others, such as plastic, glass and metal are, as already mentioned, removed at home by housewives and sold to the kabaris. Paper is turned into cardboard and bones are boiled to remove grease from them. The grease is used for washing soap factories and also for soap making. The bones are ground and mixed with poultry feed. The grease-removing process is very polluting and since these Sher Shah factories are located in dense residential areas, there is constant conflict between the residents and the factory owners.

In addition to picking from dumps, pickers invade all the city markets, even in high income areas, after they close at around 7:30 pm. Here the contractors, and sometimes the pickers as well, pay the market administrators, caretakers and or shopkeepers for the waste they collect.

All waste is not recycled. KMC staff operating the garbage pick-up vans is paid upto Rs 200 per van to deposit the waste at locations where informal developers are reclaiming land. About 350 tons of solid waste and building material debris per day is used for this purpose. Another 400 tons of organic waste is used by pottery kilns as fuel or is burnt to extract metal from it. The kiln owners and metal extractors pay the KMC staff for this waste as well. In some cases the kiln operators have located their kilns near the land fill sites.

Waste from high income localities, where waste pickers are not allowed to operate, contains considerable recyclable material. This is not taken by the KMC van operators to the land fill sites but to scavengers’ colonies where the inorganic waste is removed and sent to the recycling factories. The KMC staff receives payment for performing this service as well.

The kabaris and the middle men who organise waste collection through pickers, sell it to middle dealers of which there are an estimated 800. There are also 1,000 main dealers who also perform secondary reprocessing through manual or mechanical means. These dealers then further sell to the recycling industry. Increasingly heroine addicts are being employed for waste picking purposes by the middle men. These addicts have invaded a number of localities in a big way.

The recycling industry transforms paper into paper board; glass into bottles and sheets; plastic into toys, utensils and electrical conduits; bones into ornaments and poultry feed; and all types of metals into various utensils, mild steel bars and machinery items. In addition, rags are turned into fluff for upholstery. There are over 435 recycling factories in Karachi and the vast majority of them are informal. They are located in densely inhabited inner city areas, Sher Shah, along the Lyari Corridor and in a number of katchi abadis. The residents of the areas consider them to be a nuisance. Many of the recycling factory owners also consider these locations inappropriate and have bad relations with the people of the neighbourhoods in which they are located.

The recycling industry plays a very important role in garbage collection and disposal and in the economy of Karachi. It provides employment to over 55,000 families and its annual turn over is over Rs 1.2 billion per year. In addition, its total production of recyclable material is 1,230,800 tons per year. Also, it is expanding every day and is becoming more sophisticated. It has strong links with industrial cities in the Punjab such as Gujranwala where most of Karachi’s plastic is recycled. The table below sums up the solid waste collection in Karachi.

Table – 1 Source: Arif Hasan: Understanding Karachi, City Press Karachi, 2000

From the above facts, it is obvious that a de facto financial and organisational inter-dependence exists between the various actors in the solid waste management of Karachi and the recycling industry. There is a need to recognise this inter-dependence and institutionalise it so that the system can function. To this end, the URC in 1996 made the following recommendations: One, the possibility of shifting the recycling industry to the proximity of the land fill sites should be studied. This shifting will shift the entire activity of waste picking to the land fill sites as well and it will then be in the interests of the KMC solid waste collection staff to take the solid waste to the land fill sites. It will also be economically and logistically more convenient for the waste pickers to operate from the land fill sites rather than from the kutchra kundis. Two, the recycling industry will require land, water, electricity and waste water disposal. In addition, it will require land for housing its workers. This should be provided to them at a cost. Three, middle men, who organise waste pickers should also be given land for storage of the picked material and for housing their labour on an yearly renewable lease basis. They should pay for picking recyclable material from the land fill site. The KMC/private operator should be responsible for spreading this material for picking. And four, technical support and credit should be provided to the recycling industry so as to improve its functioning. The development of the above URC proposal meant the creation of a garbage city. The URC felt that if this could be achieved, then Karachi’s solid waste problem would not only be solved but would become financially sustainable.