From landfill to recycling co-op
After his father died when he was only a teenager, Yassine Mazzout started working nights at the landfill next to his home near Morocco’s capital, Rabat, salvaging items that could be recycled or sold from the mountain of filth.
“At 15, I should have spent my evenings playing with other kids,” Mazzout said. “But I spent all of my free time (at the landfill) to make money for my family.”
Mazzout is one of hundreds of residents of the small village of Accreche who relied on the landfill, one of Morocco’s largest, as a source of income. Residents would spend hours working in squalid conditions, often fighting one another over the most valuable materials.
But in 2010, the local municipality decided to shut it down and build a modern waste facility.
That was good news for the environment — landfills can be a big source of both water and air pollution — but not for the people who depended on the dump for their livelihoods.
But in an unusual twist on a story of misery common to as many as 15 million dump pickers around the world, this one has a happy ending. Instead of leaving the workers without any job, the local government decided to open a recycling centre at the new waste site, and to hire all the former trash pickers to run it. Not only do they still have jobs, they have vastly better jobs, including benefits such as health insurance, equal salaries, set hours and even free transportation to work.
“Before, I could work up to 13 hours a day in horrible conditions,” said Najat Rabat, who spent 10 years working at the landfill. “Now it’s only six hours and in much better conditions.”
And they’ve pivoted from the competitive, dog-eatdog culture of the landfill to working together in a new co-operative. It’s called “At-Tawafouk,” which loosely translates from Arabic as “Trust.” But getting to this point wasn’t easy. They worked at a landfill with no rules, said Mehdi Guedi, a consultant who helped oversee the transition. “So the state said to them, if you want to keep working, you need to have rules.”
In setting up the co-operative, the workers decided that everyone would make the same salary, work the same hours and have equal input on decisions by the co-op.
They also chose a president to represent them — Mazzout — who’s now 31 and has been the face of the co-operative since it was founded.
As president, it’s Mazzout’s job not just to organize his colleagues, but to stand up for the co-operative’s interests with management. Everyone credits the co-operative’s success to Mazzout’s calm, intelligent instincts and strength as a leader. Even managers admire him.
In 2016, the co-operative recycled more than 10,000 tonnes of trash. They hope to double that number this year with a new processing line. That’s only a small slice of Morocco’s waste, and the facility employs only a small number of its waste pickers, but it could be the start of something much bigger.
“Given the success story of At-Tawafouk, I think this is something that can definitely be replicated,” said Maria Sarraf, an environmental economist at the World Bank, which helped fund the co-operative.