The case of waste pickers in Colombia, where cooperatives have linked waste pickers’ work to a legal framework that recognizes them as formal actors in the waste management chain, shows what decades of collective work for a common cause can achieve.
More than 15,000 waste pickers – from 45 cooperatives and other local organizations grouped into five regional structures within the country – belong to the National Association of Waste Pickers (Asociación Nacional de Recicladores, ANR).
In the face of public policies that favoured a privatized waste management model and criminalized waste pickers’ recovery and recycling activities, organized waste pickers defended their right to work and fought for their inclusion in the waste management system.
Starting in the early 1990s, the ANR led a legal and political strategy that resulted in more than seven Constitutional Court rulings recognizing waste pickers as providers of the public sanitation service in recycling, and ordering their formal inclusion and payment as service providers within the official waste management system.
Through this model, more than 32,000 waste pickers across 94 municipalities provide public services. Their organizations are the channel for their payments. In many municipalities, cooperatives and other SSE associations are now directly responsible for operating and managing routes and processes for recovering recyclable materials.
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