For India's garbage pickers, a miserable and dangerous job made worse by extreme heat
For India's garbage pickers, a miserable and dangerous job made worse by extreme heat
As many as 4 million people in India scratch out a living searching through landfills for anything they can sell.
The putrid smell of burning garbage wafts for miles from the landfill on the outskirts of Jammu in a potentially toxic miasma fed by the plastics, industrial, medical and other waste generated by a city of some 740,000 people. But a handful of waste pickers ignore both the fumes and suffocating heat to sort through the rubbish, seeking anything they can sell to earn at best the equivalent of $4 a day.
“If we don’t do this, we don’t get any food to eat,” said 65-year-old Usmaan Shekh. “We try to take a break for a few minutes when it gets too hot, but mostly we just continue till we can’t.”
Shekh and his family are among the estimated 1.5 to 4 million people who scratch out a living searching through India’s waste — and climate change is making a hazardous job more dangerous than ever. In Jammu, a northern Indian city in the Himalayan foothills, temperatures this summer have regularly topped 43 degrees Celsius (about 110 Fahrenheit).
At least one person who died in northern India’s recent heat wave was identified as a garbage picker.
The landfills themselves seethe internally as garbage decomposes, and the rising heat of summer speeds and intensifies the process. That increases emissions of gases such as methane and carbon dioxide that are dangerous to breathe. And almost all landfill fires come in summer, experts say, and can burn for days.
How depressing that we live in a world where people have to literally pick through human refuse to find things to sell in order to stay alive.
I live in India. I have 3 sorting bins. 1 composting organic waste bin, 1 non-recyclable plastics/glass bin, 1 recyclable plastics/metal/paper bin.
I spent 3000 INR buying the composting organic bin ( to support the local business selling it and reusables about 1000 INR per year )
I get back about 200 INR every 6months for going to local recyclers with roughly 2 to 5 kilos of metal + plastics.
About 2 kilos of waste not-recycled every month total ( 2 people ) .
GUESS HOW MANY PEOPLE WHO DO NOT DO THIS IN INDIA.
Im sad my fellow humans do not understand what responsibility is like.
But basically what you're saying (and this is not to condemn you for not being wasteful, you're doing the right thing) is that these garbage pickers wouldn't even have that as a livelihood if people were more personally responsible. As I said, that is the right thing to do when it comes to waste and the environment, but something must be done to help those people as well.