Right refuge for refuse

Within solid waste management (SWM), formal and informal sectors can be distinguished. The formal sector consists of public service providers and private companies, while the informal sector consist of individuals or small unregistered 'firms' that are active as waste pickers, waste collectors, itinerant buyers and recyclers....

In this paper, we focus on a specific group of informal SWM actors, the informal collectors. Their position is different from that of, say, waste pickers and recyclers, in that these latter groups often grow parallel to the quantity of waste collected by the formal sector. Informal collectors, on the other hand, are typically in a zero-sum game with (formal) private sector waste collectors for their clientele.

While this is the case for competition between informal collectors and formal private collectors, this may not be true vis-a-vis formal public collectors. The reason is that public waste collectors are not faced with the need to go from door to door to collect money (and waste), but typically employ a technology that involves collecting waste at some distance from the household door. They use containers or depots to collect household waste, which is then brought to an official dumpsite or treated otherwise. This leaves room for informal collectors, who take the garbage from the household to the collection point. This choice leaves room for informal collectors, who are linked to a collective-container system.


From 'Informal Waste Collection and Its Co-existence With the Formal Waste Sector: The case of Kampala, Uganda', ScienceDirect