Waste Picking in the Age of COVID-19: An Environmental Justice Perspective

Abstract

All over the world, waste and the disposal of waste is becoming a more prominent issue, as landfills fill up and more evidence points to landfills and trash contributing to climate change and environmental degradation. In the developing world, waste pickers sort through solid waste and sell it to vendors, who will recycle the product into something consumable. The work they do is vital to climate change mitigation, as well as urban cleanliness. In a way, waste pickers, especially in India, are vehicles of environmental justice, but they are often discriminated against, subjected to inhumane working conditions, and can barely make a living. During this all, the pandemic hit, making waste pickers’ already precarious life even worse. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the academic literature by compiling a systemized literature review of the impacts of COVID-19 on waste-pickers’ lives using an environmental justice perspective. The review also uses a Feminist Political Ecology perspective to illuminate the double jeopardy that female waste pickers face in the era of COVID-19, which is often ignored in academia. Ultimately, this paper shows that COVID-19 exacerbated preexisting injustices that the waste picker community faced and created an immense burden on women. This paper will show that it is important to notice the differentiation between female and male waste picker challenges, especially at the crux of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper has important policy implications as well as research considerations for both environmental justice and feminist political ecology scholars.