Men tend to spend the money they earn from collecting recyclables on coffee and cigarettes. Women spend it on food for the family.
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This is partly why Resa Boenard says she is launching Indonesia’s first association for female waste pickers, known in Bahasa as Aliansi Pahlawan Sampah Perempuan, or Women’s Trash Heroes Alliance.
Women make up about 40 per cent of the 3,000 people who work Southeast Asia’s largest landfill in Bantar Gebang on the eastern fringe of Jakarta, where Boenard has spent much of her life. Few women waste pickers have any say over the money they earn – between IDR100,000 (US$6.20) and IDR150,000 (US$9.30) a day, depending on the weather – and how it is spent. Waste is a patriachal business, Boenard believes.
“If women have financial security, we have more bargaining power,” says the 38 year-old entrepreneur. Women living in Bantar Gebang tend to get married young, at 14 or 15, and lack financial independence. Many are forced to raise their children on their own or return to their parents, because their husbands walk out on them, and the cycle of poverty continues, Boenard says.
Life on the dump is difficult enough as it is. Most people live in precarious housing with poor sanitation, and are vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhoea and respiratory infections. The work is dangerous, with waste pickers at risk from landslides, toppling excavators and lightning strikes. The landfill caught fire last year, when methane plumes coming off the dump ignited, polluting the air for miles around with toxic gases.
Waste pickers working the Bantar Gebang landfill, which stretches across 110 hectares and is constantly growing – 7,000 tonnes of trash is added daily to the site of 40 million tonnes of garbage. Image: Aliansi Pahlawan Sampah Perempuan
Children from Bantar Gebang often drop out of school, because they get bullied – as Boenard was – for smelling of trash. “People who live at the landfill are always underestimated. We are considered to be the lowest class,” she says. Boenard, who was nicknamed “princess of the dump” when she was at school, runs a charity that helps childen called The Seeds of Bantar Gebang, or BGBJ. But her camp, where she ran a hostel and education centre inside the landfill, was bulldozed in 2022 to make way for a refuse-derived fuel (RDF) facility. According to her sources, the RDF facility has a habit of breaking down. “Maybe it’s karma,” she says.
Her latest venture, which she runs from a village six kilometres from Bantar Gebang, helps women waste pickers by enabling them to sell recyclables directly to buyers, rather than through middlemen “bosses”. Waste middlemen control most of the trade in valuable materials salvaged from the dump, paying waste pickers several times less for collected materials than the price they sell them for.
For instance, middlemen buy PET – the most commonly traded type of recycled plastic – from waste pickers for IDR700-1,500 (4-9 US cents) per kilogramme (/kg) and sell it on to recyclers for IDR6-9,000 (37-55 US cents)/kg. Low value plastics such as sachets can be purchased for IDR300-500 (1-3 US cents)/kg, and after processing into flakes, sold for around IDR3,000/kg (18 US cents). But the money waste pickers can make from low value plastic is so low that it is not usually collected.
Middlemen also monopolise important information such as plastic prices and changes in market demand, and do not share it with waste pickers, allowing them to dictate the terms of trade. “The limited access to market information and the inefficiencies in the system perpetuate a cycle where waste collectors remain underpaid and the full potential of recyclable materials is not realised,” says Alvaro Aguilar, founder of EkoLogis, a company that is working with Boenard to develop a mobile application for waste pickers to sell their wares directly to recyclers. The app will also give waste pickers access to the latest market information.
Boenard’s organisation also plans to give financial literacy training, helping women waste pickers to set up bank accounts and get access to micro loans. Many women in Bantar Gebang rely on loan sharks if they run into financial trouble, which further entrenches them into poverty. After a meeting to introduce the concept in Bantar Gebang last month, the female trash heroes alliance signed up 340 women as members.
Resa Boenard stands at the foot of a mound of trash at the Bantar Gebang landfill. Image: Aliansi Pahlawan Sampah Perempuan
Boenard is aware of the risk of bypassing the middlemen, who hold considerable clout on the landfill. There will inevitably be resistance to the idea from the more traditionally-minded among the waste community, which Aguilar likens to the initial backlash that ride-hailing apps got from cab drivers.
There were men, middlemen among them, who attended the alliance’s meeting and showed interest in the concept. In any case, Boenard is not the type of person to shy away from conflict. For two years, she fought the government over the eviction of her hostel on the landfill, which she claims was her parents’ land. “People know me. I am tough. I fight hard,” she says.
But Boenard has no intention of making enemies. She will start by encouraging women to continue selling their collections through middlemen as well as the app, which she hopes the middlemen would eventually use.
“Taxi drivers originally protested against Grab and Gojek, but eventually they became part of the system,” says Aguilar.
Companies that might buy materials through the platform are consumer goods companies such as Unilever, Coca-Cola and Danone, which have pledged to use more recycled plastic in their packaging. Currently brands pay recyclers for recycled plastic to fulfill Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) or “polluter pays” commitments, but these funds rarely trickle down to waste collectors, Aguilar says. He adds that one-off donations made by companies to places like Bantar Gebang are counterproductive, as they kill the recycling value chain.
“Companies might give US$10,000 to cover their sustainability commitments, but then carry on using virgin plastic [instead of recycled plastic] anyway. Their focus is on public relations and looking good, not taking care of the people who do the actual work of collecting waste,” he says.
Women waste pickers make up around 40 per cent of the workforce at the landfill. Image: Aliansi Pahlawan Sampah Perempuan
The middlemen of Bantar Gebang are rarely included in EPR schemes either, and are more likely to accept the legitimacy of the alliance once they recognise that they can get better access to big brand buyers through the platform, which – if it works – could be rolled out across other cities in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Boenard says the resistance from the middlemen will come from the suspicion that women waste pickers pose a threat to the status quo by taking their share of the circular economy. But once the scheme is up and running and starts to scale, it is likely to enlarge the market opportunity for all actors in the system. It could also help to boost recycling rates, as waste pickers can get access to incentives such as plastic credits or EPR funds that make collecting low value plastics worth their value.
“We are not taking money from anyone. We are creating value,” she says.
