
BOGOTA, Colombia– Loads of Colombian waste pickers flooded Bogota’s legendary Bolivar Square with around 15 lots of recyclable products Tuesday to object reducing earnings and harder problems for scavengers. They accumulate garbage from homes, manufacturing facilities and office complex and market it to neighborhood recycling plants.
The demo was arranged by 14 waste picker organizations in Bogota, a city where roughly 20,000 scavengers function lengthy hours collecting things like plastic containers, scrap steel and cardboard boxes. Regarding 100 waste pickers collected and some acted to swim in between the piles of garbage.
” We desire manufacturing facilities to pay us a reasonable rate for the products we accumulate” claimed Nohra Padilla, the head of state of Colombia’s National Organization of Waste Pickers. “Colombians and their federal government demand to understand that without our job land fills would certainly be filled.”
Many waste pickers in Colombia job individually, drawing hefty carts and collecting recyclable things that are not accumulated by neighborhood trash vehicles. The vehicles, which are run by service providers or metropolitan federal governments, concentrate on event natural and nonrecyclable garbage.
The earnings of these waste pickers depends mainly on the amount of kilos of plastic, cardboard or scrap steel they can market daily to stockrooms or neighborhood organizations, which after that market the product to reusing plants.
Jorge Ospina, the head of state of the ARAUS waste pickers organization, claimed that over the previous 2 months the rate his organization earns money by reusing plants for each kg of plastic dropped from regarding 75 united state cents to 50 cents. He claimed he can just manage to pay waste pickers regarding 25 cents per kilo of plastic they leave at the ARAUS stockroom in Bogota.
Ospina claimed imports of fresh plastic from nations consisting of China might be behind the sharp decrease in costs.
” We require a lot more federal government policy,” he claimed, advising that if costs drop additional waste pickers may no more be inspired to accumulate recyclable products, and land fills in Colombia would certainly “overflow.”
Colombia’s constitution shields waste pickers, that usually originate from poverty-stricken histories
These garbage collection agencies are focused on over huge service providers when it pertains to collecting recyclable products and in huge cities metropolitan federal governments are required to pay a month-to-month cost to squander pickers organizations that differs based on the amount of lots of garbage each organization accumulates.
Yet costs for recyclable garbage are unsteady and Colombian waste pickers additionally deal with raising competitors from Venezuelan travelers that are doing the exact same type of operate in cities like Bogota and Medellin.
Waste pickers in Colombia often tend to earn less than the nationwide base pay of $350 a month.
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