THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S NOTE
SAALINI LOKESH
Urban waste management is drawing increasing attention, as citizens observe that too much garbage is lying uncollected in the streets, causing inconvenience and environmental pollution, and being a risk for public health. Although government authorities apply all the means at their disposal, the piles of wastes only seem to grow from day to day. In an era of shrinking municipal budgets and a restriction of the scope of municipal government jurisdiction, the problem is likely to intensify unless alternate approaches can be developed. Finally, a gender-sensitive project approach and a clear commitment to gender equity and the empowerment of women are critical in the support of new initiatives in urban services and environmental protection; attention to gender can increase project effectiveness, avoid costly mistakes, and ensure equitable access to livelihoods, resources or benefits which the project makes available. the major part which I’m trying to convey in this magazine is ” How the job is to them and their experience “
– P SAALINI
BEHIND THE SCENES
Garbage collectors never know what hazardous materials and foraging animals they may come across in the course of their duty. There are countless ways to be injured on the job and all manner of toxic materials in the trash that garbage men or women carry and transport every day.
Garbage contains every type of hazardous material imaginable from battery acid to bleach, from pesticides to hypodermic needles. Even radioactive waste material has reportedly been found in normal residential trash from time to time. The potential for injury, infection, poisoning, burns or respiratory damage is high and unavoidable in many cases. Sanitation workers should wear long pants, long sleeves, work gloves and heavy boots in all weather to combat the danger and avoid injury.
Dangerous materials like broken glass and light bulbs are a common cause of injury for sanitation workers, according to the Chennai City Department of Sanitation.
The broken shards are typically placed into plastic garbage bags, which are then lifted and carried to the truck for removal. During lifting or moving, glass or metal blades can cut the hands or body of a garbage collector and result in serious injury.
Garbage collectors are one of the least happy careers At Career Explorer, we conduct an ongoing survey with millions of people and ask them how satisfied they are with their careers.
As it turns out, garbage collectors rate their career happiness 2.4 out of 5 stars which puts them in the bottom 3% of careers. Working as a garbage collector typically requires higher levels of intelligence when compared with the average career.
This means that garbage collectors are required to actively learn new things related to their discipline and solve complex problems.
When engaged as waste collection labourers, women are reliable workers. As income opportunities for illiterate women are scarce, they are prepared to overcome the barriers of distance (a 4 hours’ walk to and from work at the neighbourhood designated for waste collection) or of culture (work in the male world of the harbour) (UWEP).
In certain cases, women who see their general economic opportunities as being severely constrained may make a greater effort and a longer-term commitment to waste-related work, as compared to men, who will leave at the earliest opportunity to move to higher-status occupations (IPES).
Women as waste workers face a cultural bias in several ways. Both men and women waste workers face the disrespect and outright scorn of fellow-citizens, as handling untreated waste materials is considered demeaning. In addition, women who are cleaning public places, such as streets or bus stations, are often insulted or harassed.
Working in remote sites like waste dumps or factory sites, they may be assaulted. And if women who earn their own income with garbage collection transfer their new-found self-confidence and financial autonomy into an attempt to assert themselves within the family, e.g. by claiming the right to spend their money as they see fit, they may find themselves the victims of domestic abuse or the focus of social conflict.
Women may then have to learn (with the help of a supporting NGO) to become more “polite” in their assertiveness (UWEP).
Employment policies may have a negative effect on women. For example, in some cities women form the majority of workers in informal services to collect human excreta. At a certain point in the development of a city, it can come to be in the interest of overall urban waste management to integrate informal sector services into the formal sector through direct employment of waste labourers, or through sub- contracting to small enterprises.
But when a municipal department decides to place the excreta collection workers on the municipal payroll, somehow 70% of these employees turn out to be men. Similar mechanisms may be in operation when small enterprises obtain municipal sub-contracts in the waste sector. In that case, competition for employment in these enterprises may intensify, as they offer greater stability of income, forcing women out.
Irrespective of the status of women outside of the household, within the home women are widely accepted as the caregivers, food preparers, and maintainers of the domestic environment. In most societies, this
role carries over to an accepted role for women in community maintenance, often focusing there as well on cleanliness, health, and order.
Therefore, any attempt to improve community urban services must logically take special care to consult women, who are almost certainly the ones most affected by changes or “improvements Taking household garbage to street corner dust bins may be easy, but it is not so easy when the distance between house and dustbin
is too large. It is natural that children fall ill, the burden of caring for sick children who have been exposed to human fecal matter or vermin and disease in uncollected garbage falls disproportionately on the mothers, sisters, and grandmothers of those children.
The combination of her acknowledged role in community maintenance and her tendency to stay at home in the community while their men go out to work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, makes a woman the logical choice for community environmental monitoring and environmental and health education.
As the main socializer of her children, she is also a logical choice to serve as an agent of change in waste- related behaviour. Given the opportunity and resources, women are effective as resident monitors of environmental cleanliness. They can do this by walking regular rounds in the immediate neighbourhood to check whether the waste collection services have done their work well and properly.
Women, as immediate neighbours, may also encourage each other to maintain cleanliness around the house and in the street, or to pay for waste collection. They may begin to see this as a shared concern through participation in a program of dialogue- oriented environmental health education (UWEP).
Gender specific health risks of working with waste materials are not yet documented, but can be inferred. Data are available showing that people who have physical contact with human excreta or other raw waste materials contract diseases like hepatitis and diarrhoea and suffer eye and skin infections more frequently than people not so employed. The gender division of labour, therefore, will strongly influence men’s and women’s differential exposure to specific health risks, and how this affects the workers’ children.
Apart from gender, there are other factors too which cause particular groups of people to be in a disadvantaged position in society (Coady, n.d.). Such factors include age, membership in a specific social group, religion, profession, caste, or ethnic minority.
Restricted access to education, or lack of ownership rights, are also factors potentially causing the exclusion of certain social groups from participation in development. Such groups are in a disadvantaged position, in the sense of being excluded from benefiting from development opportunities, or even becoming the victims of development when (unintended) side effects of projects force their groups into even deeper poverty.
Chances for social advancement through using new technology for waste recycling, for example, may selectively benefit only those people who are in a favourable position, for example, those belonging to the “right” social group, or living in the “good” part of town. Similar forces are at work to reinforce the disadvantaged position of women and other groups of people such as:
- the play of prevailing forces of competition and inequality
- being left outside the consultation and decision making process in the community
- having no access to the capital required for new technology
- having no access to information and training
- living in inaccessible places
Social groups may be caught in a vicious circle which can either be deepened or broken by outside intervention. Project strategies can affect this circle.
Although they may not occur to many as an obvious danger for garbage collectors, vehicle collisions are the most common cause of injury. Garbage collectors often hang suspended from the sides or rear of garbage trucks, walk in and out of traffic regularly, and ride outside the truck from stop to stop to cut down on the time required to climb into and out of the cab repeatedly.
According to CNN, the result is a rate of nearly 37 injuries per 100,000 workers each year (as of 2008) and The heavy equipment used in the course of garbage collection, including sanitation trucks, compactors and front-end loaders, are all inherently dangerous and can cause serious injury or death if used improperly.
Urban waste management is drawing increasing attention, as citizens observe that too much garbage is lying uncollected in the streets, causing inconvenience and environmental pollution, and being a risk for public health. Although government authorities apply all the means at their disposal, the piles of wastes only seem to grow from day to day. In an era of shrinking municipal budgets and a restriction of the scope of municipal government jurisdiction, the problem is likely to intensify unless alternate approaches can be developed.
The work is manual, whether driving the truck, operating the hydraulic system, or physically depositing trash into the truck if there is no hydraulic equipment. as they often need to lift heavy bags of garbage, green waste and compost, furniture, recyclable objects and materials, and other miscellaneous items.
Lifting heavy objects repeatedly can result in spinal damage, hernias or any number of physical injuries. Proper lifting techniques help to reduce the danger, as does the practice of asking a fellow trash collector for help when lifting a particularly heavy or awkward item.
Weather is often the cause of falls and the physical damage they inflict. Garbage collectors come across ice, rain and high winds often and must cope with the slick and hazardous conditions they can create.
In general a garbage collector is someone who works either for the municipal government or for a private waste management company. Garbage collectors usually work in pairs, picking up and removing waste, recyclable goods, or yard debris from residential neighbourhoods, commercial business centres, and public parks. Garbage collectors serve a vital role in our society by helping to manage waste, which if allowed to build up, could pose enormous health and environmental issues. In the case of recycling containers, the garbage collector will scan the contents and remove any items that are inappropriate.
Garbage collection can be a very dangerous and unpleasant occupation. Hazards include falling objects from overloaded containers, broken glass, syringes, caustic chemicals, asbestos; inhaling dust, smoke, and fumes; diseases from solid waste, dog attacks, poor weather conditions, traffic accidents, and odours so foul that they can make the garbage collector physically sick.
Some garbage trucks are able to pick up large dumpsters without the help of another person. The driver simply pulls up to the dumpster, drops the lift, and uses levers to pick up and dump the load.
New technology has an effect on the chain of waste management activities beyond the specific activity for which equipment is designed. Technology is also of social and economic importance to women, men, and their households.
Therefore, – Organisations and experts should take the assignment to design new equipment as the beginning of a process of consultation with the “community” (defined as women and men, and, when necessary, “consulted in single sex groupings), and owners/workers of small enterprises.
This should lead to flexible implementation. – Technical training may have to use a combination of approaches in order to reach both women and men.
The waste is dumped into the back of a garbage truck and then driven to the appropriate disposal location (a landfill, recycling plant, or compost station).
It has been stated above that women and men play different roles in society, and that each has a gender-specific combination of roles, shaped by a host of determinants (cultural, economic etc.). Consequently, decisions taken by an individual are the result of balancing the combination of roles and expectations.
The word “waste” refers to something that is “no longer serving a purpose”, something “without value” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary). Obviously, however, certain people in certain circumstances consider waste materials as a resource for their family, their livelihood, or their enterprise.
So- called waste materials may serve as a crucial resource within households. For example, oily milk packages may be used as fuel; leftover food may be fed to pigs and goats; discarded cardboard may serve as walls and roofs of houses. If that is the case, one can expect that men and women re-value waste materials differently and see their usefulness for different purposes, such as domestic utility, saving on household expenditures, earning money, or other purposes.
In short, there is a gendered definition of “waste” and of “resources”, which must be reflected during any discussion of priorities regarding waste management in the community consultation process.
The implications of “gender” in waste management are not well known. But going by the lessons from micro-enterprise development, environment and rural development, urban neighbourhood improvement, certain consequences can be expected. Therefore. The staff of support and development organizations should become aware of possible implications through training programs. This training should incorporate country-specific conditions.
– A gender perspective should be integrated in assessment studies, planning, implementation and monitoring of waste management projects. This should include a gender specific analysis of how available waste and resources are valued and used. Agencies aiming at waste management that contributes to the reduction of social inequalities and the improvement of environmental performance should
– Identify the different groups in the affected communities, and invite these groups to participate in a process to analyse the distinguishing factors that maintain their relatively disadvantaged position.
– In consultation with these groups, jointly develop approaches to address these basic factors to enable the disadvantaged social groups to benefit from new opportunities in waste management.
– Prepare project approaches that address these basic factors in combination with specific waste management requirements.
Saalini Lokesh 