The New York Times ran a don’t forget about the trash pickers op-ed yesterday written by Bharati Chaturvedi, founder and director of the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group in New Delhi.
AMONG those suffering from the global recession are millions of workers who are not even included in the official statistics: urban recyclers — the trash pickers, sorters, traders and reprocessors who extricate paper, cardboard and plastics from garbage heaps and prepare them for reuse. Their work is both unrecorded and largely unrecognized, even though in some parts of the world they handle as much as 20 percent of all waste…
everydaytrash 