Waste picker hub off Hendrik Potgieter Road a socio-economic melting pot

Unappreciated opportunities are found among the rotten and discarded.

Garbage day routines start by dragging the bins to the street and depending on the time of the morning, one may greet any of the many men digging through household trash salvaging items of worth. Across Johannesburg, waste pickers are an informal industry that takes advantage of a niche left but a society that neither values nor pursues recycling in any direction.

Sitting on a mound that provides a panoramic view of Allen’s Nek and the surrounding areas, is the informal sorting site for the suburb’s waste pickers. The site features fenced sections that are dedicated to individual types of material, most notably canned food tins and plastic bottles separated by colour and thickness. Further into the bush, tree stumps acting as seating are dotted around fire areas. In the distance, away from the sorting site, are several makeshift dwellings.

The waste pickers are reluctant to open up about their experiences and are even less fond of the camera. Some men live there, others roam between multiple informal camps and some just use the site as a place to sort the waste. Khutsile Moloedi is one of the men that does not live at the site but moves from area to area based on garbage day collections. The 21-year-old claims to have gone to school in Bosmont and has been turning refuse into cash for roughly a year.

Pikitup has no programmes in Roodepoort to promote recycling at source nor educate residents about how best to sort their household waste efficiently. This leaves the private sector to provide a source of income generation. One company has two skips at the Hendrik Potgieter Road site which they collect on average every second week.

The company weighs the contents and pays the men accordingly but the company claims to still be considering the long-term viability of having the skips at the site.

Residents lament the site for being an eyesore while attracting undesirable activity and Honeydew Community Police Forum (CPF) has been monitoring the waste pickers for some time.

“Waste pickers do a good job when it comes to recycling, but unfortunately there are also bogus waste pickers who work in the area and are linked to crime. We have on multiple occasions found stolen property in the bags of these bogus waste pickers. This makes it difficult to identify real versus bogus waste pickers,” stated the CPF’s Michael Steyn.

Khutsile says finding work is difficult but lives off the roughly R100 per day earned by carting waste. Other waste pickers reveal they earn more than double that, dragging their haul to a recycling company in Newlands or Honeydew. The value of the waste pickers is negotiable and the associated drawbacks may leave society with a loss but those willing to get their hands dirty to sort through the mess could cash in on profitable potentials.