At stake in Johannesburg’s ‘recycling wars’: more than trash

IN ANOTHER lifetime, Louis Mahlangu was an electrician.

It was a good job, challenging and respectable, the kind of profession that could make his family proud.

There was just one problem. “There was no work,” he says. No matter how hard he looked, Mr Mahlangu was barely finding enough jobs to scrape by. Then his sister invited him to tag along to her job. The hours were good, she promised, and the pay – well, it was better than anything he was likely to earn replacing wiring in suburban houses. And so he put on a pair of rubber rain boots, hiked to the top of a squelching mountain of Johannesburg’s garbage, and began digging for plastic.

Twenty-two years later, he’s still there, along with thousands of others like him, collecting dinged Coke bottles and pulverized yogurt cartons discarded by the city’s residents and selling them on to private recycling companies. At his peak, Mahlangu says, he made up to $1000 each month, a respectable wage in a country where the newly proposed minimum wage is around $250 per month.

For years, informal recyclers like Mahlangu – there are some 60,000 to 90,000 of them countrywide, according to South Africa’s Department of Science and Technology – were Johannesburg’s only real system for sorting the salvageable from the sludge in its residents’ garbage.

Some worked the dumps, while others traversed the city on foot, plucking recyclables directly from household trash bins.-Yahoo News