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Academic discourses are rife with knowledge production on the persistent differences in opportunities and life outcomes of men and women in diverse work fronts. Less attention has been channelled towards the intra-gender inequalities and polarization existing among certain minority groups, for example women within similar work enclave and working to actualize broad sustainable objectives such as plastic pollution management. Using the case study of Lagos women plastic waste collectors, this exploratory study provides insight to existential but often ignored inequalities resulting in different life outcomes for formal and informal women actors. Guided by the constructivist epistemology, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and non-participant observation methods, the study obtained a deeper understanding of the nature of roles being created and played by formal & informal sector women waste collectors, how they work, what brings them together, their differences and resulting consequences on their human capital outcomes.

 

Introduction

Plastic waste collection serves as both a profession and livelihood to a distinct group of urban migrants, one of which is women of various demographic variables and socio economic statuses. The categories of formal and informal largely determine the sectoral arena where women would work. The two sectors of waste collection are marked by distinct differences whereby the formal is characterized by privately built and sanitized recycling hubs, usually a secured land space that is partitioned into given spaces for various kinds of solid waste, such as plastics, cans, garden waste, bottles, and paper. Also, there is usually a baling machine, workers and a bunch of medium sized trucks for city round collection.

Several of my interlocutors offer insight into the formal sector arena:

“I am from Ondo state, born and raised in Lagos. I studied Law in the university. I am passionate about the environment, I love nature and that is basically what dragged me into the waste recycling enterprise.” (Woman CEO waste collector)

“I love doing the business. It is exciting if you have passion for it, if you don’t have passion for it, you won’t be able to deal with the Mallams (northern informal collectors), because we deal basically with the Mallams, sometimes we get insulted. So it is my passions for the job that makes me adapt.” (Woman CEO waste collector)

The formal system is efficiently run by a highly educated and privileged class of women who chose this profession of their own volition, and are equally governed under an umbrella association that helps them champion their interests, projects their relevance and brings them closer to the government.

The informal waste collection sector is domiciled in the dump and landfill sites. While both spaces are used for dumping waste, a dumpsite is usually smaller than a landfill which also often serves as the final burial destination of unwanted materials (Samson, 2008). It is typified by its unsanitary/unsafe nature which endangers the health and life of waste collectors (Gutberlet and Baeder, 2008; Ogwueleka, 2009). However, these place(s) has become the unparalleled place of material recovery and meeting point of formal and informal waste collectors, because this is where bulky volume of recyclable materials can be recovered.

The landfill can be envisioned like a mini city within the larger city that is governed by the state government waste management agency and other grass root associations that are run by retired and well off waste pickers. It houses a group of urban migrants with low socio-economic statuses whose daily needs are also met with materials that are recovered from the fields. Women usually travel from their homes to the landfills on daily basis for their routine picking and sales of materials.

Numerous waste collection trucks dump municipal waste on the landfills at given moments of the day. The trucks line in their numbers, emptying their waste unto the ground. After each round of picking by the collectors, the left over waste is pushed away by the caterpillar trucks, making space for newer waste. This is why men and women trooped to the land fields, in anticipation of useful materials they can sell and use. It ideally serves as their moment of joy.

In the narratives below, women share why they embraced the livelihood of informal waste picking:

I didn’t choose it, it is condition that brought me here, I didn’t choose it, I didn’t dream of it at all, its condition. (Woman landfill waste picker)

It is because I don’t have any other thing to do, I have a shop but the business isn’t doing well and my husband is late and I have to cater for my children. That is why I am doing this. (Woman landfill waste picker)

This bipolar categorizations discussed here does not summarize the entire group of women collectors. In the discussion section of the paper, I discuss further categorizations of informal women collectors whose experiences differ remarkably from those of landfill pickers. The section shall also discuss emerging themes that summarizes positions of inequalities of the entire women categories, their outcomes and policy implications.

This study aims to explore the concept of intra-feminine inequality, not as the classical term for domination and control by privileged against underprivileged class but as a tool for understanding how women, despite generally being a marginalized gender group, are also able to launch enterprises that brings relevance to sustainable development issues; e.g. plastic pollution, job creation and livelihood, executed in different levels of formal and informal collection.

Conceptual Framework and Methodology

This study adopts McCall’s (2005) concept of inter-categorical complexity, also known as the categorical approach to intersectionality, which studies how inequality is dynamically arranged along different and opposing areas of multiple social groups. The thrust of this intersectional approach is to recognize that already existing social groups are unequal, imperfect and dynamic and aims to use extant analytical categories to build knowledge which exposes the complexities of structural relationships that foster inequalities among women which becomes the centre of analysis. Although inter-categorical complexity by virtue of its focus on structural relationships and use of apriori categories tends to limit focus to contexts, this limitation will be overcome by considering and making explicit the various analytical levels to this intersectional study.

I adopted the exploratory approach and the constructionist epistemology to understand the roles and positionalities of women in the plastic recycling sectors of Lagos state. Social constructionism helps us to know how women understand and interpret their experiences within their work enclaves, the formal and informal recycling settings (Young & Collin, 2004). This attempt supports the idea of studying the processes and institutional histories of intersectionality in a more contextual and comparative manner, thus abating the limitation of structural focus of inter-categorical complexity (Choo and Ferree, 2009).This further cements the intersectional goal of using constructionism to produce knowledge from various locations of exclusion and vocalizing the views of multiply oppressed groups (Choo and Ferree, 2009; Atewologun, 2018) such as widowed migrant landfill pickers.

I also incorporate the intersectional agenda of studying both marginalized and privileged classes of women without projecting only a group of women’s multiple dimensions of marginality and its implications for their agency (Nash, 2008; Dhamoon, 2011; Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012; Atewologun et al., 2015). Thus, I illuminate the cases of one class of women in the formal sector who comprise the founders & managers and two classes of women in the informal sector who I categorized as landfill and non-landfill collectors.

Data was collected through observation, in-depth interviews and focus group discussion. Two among 4 major landfill sites in Lagos were purposively selected and 13 women pickers were interviewed at each, leading to 26 landfill pickers. 11 women collectors in the formal sector were selected via the snowball technique given their obscure identity. A group of non-landfill women collectors were also observed during my pilot observation and 8 of them were likewise investigated. This brings the total population of women to 45. Data was analyzed thematically in tandem with proposed objectives.

Brief Discussions and Arguments

The following excerpt from a formal sector CEO invites us into some sustainable principles driving active creation of playing grounds in the Lagos plastic recycling sector:

“It was couple of different things. One, I saw a problem or need within my immediate environment. I was working actively at the time and being somebody who is sensitive to her environment I always noticed that whenever it rained there is either flooding so you hardly see where you are going, or my car tyres would get hooked at a particular route I used. This is still happening in some areas today. For me it was a personal pain, because whenever I am getting ready to go to work and it starts to rain my mood changes. And then, to make matters worse, at the end of the day, you then realize that when those waters recede, you see all of these things (plastics) just on the streets. The gym that I use is located opposite of that road so I often saw them sweeping and gathering all the plastics that the flood had washed out. Then, I started to research and ask questions. When I saw them gathering those things I would ask "Why, you know, why all of these things?" I continued to research because for me it was a problem; then I realized that this thing can be recycled rather than constituting a nuisance. I kept researching the process towards recycling them and who was already doing that.  At that time, it was very intriguing to find out that it was only Wecyclers and Recycle Point. It was funny to me that such a huge problem existed and not many people were doing anything about it. So, all of that got me more curious, and I'm generally a very curious person. So, I said, ahah! What's inside that thing? Let's look for it. The more I researched, I saw all the possibilities, the impact that could be made, all the lives that could be changed, the impact it had on the environment and how it even affects me. I love sea food. If I go to a Chinese restaurant now or I go anywhere and there's Seafood Okro, those are the things I would naturally want to go for. I like fish. I like those kinds of things. And I am thinking it will get to a point that I can be eating plastic. Olorun maje! God forbid! So, those are some of the things that got me more and more interested in recycling so I started. I started from the garage of my house and today we are looking into building facilities.” (38 year-old Woman CEO/Founder, waste collection/aggregation company)

These arguments also largely inform the principles driving other women in the formal sector who are creating a professional niche to combat plastic pollution in Lagos state. Beyond collection, women in this category also have developed further levels of enhancing collected plastics into pre-recycled state, semi-recycled or other finished products. 

 

Other women who are not able to articulate these visions have likewise created roles to fit into the economic demands trickling from mega plastic recycling companies at the top of the value chain. Their various levels of involvement have led me to categorizing these women in the informal sector in two ways: landfill and non-landfill based plastic collectors.

 

The first group is comprised of women usually of lower socio-economic statuses who converge at various landfills to pick and sort plastics and other recyclables to be sold to waste aggregators, including women formal collectors. The women created this role out of survivalist need as depicted in the quote from one of my interviewees:

 

“I am here to pick nylon and sack. We pick them just to sustain ourselves and family. It’s not a work that a human being should do, because of the odour, stress and the pain. It is because we have no option that’s why most of us are adapting to what we are passing through.” (50 year-old woman landfill waste picker)

 

On the other hand, non-landfill based plastic collectors consist of women who created roles as street pickers, aggregators and middle women. This group of informal collectors form a higher echelon in the informal sector collection. Unlike the landfill pickers, street pickers are women who source plastics in the broader society rather than landfill sites. The gender biases that are faced by women formal collectors have also increased the number of women who are employed as street plastic pickers by the women CEOs. Like their landfill counterpart, this is also a means of survival; however, they earn and endure better working conditions:

 

“My business is plastic. I have been in this business for over 15years. Before, I sell these plastics in dozens, I usually collect them from households; neat plastics are being kept aside for me. I do carry them to Alaba-Suru market to sell them in dozens to people selling groundnut oil and palm oil, and they are very neat plastics o. Later I heard about some Chinese company, I have forgotten what their name is, the company uses plastics to make ceiling. I have done this for over 15 years to train my children. I have a child in the polytechnic and one that is about to graduate from secondary school. I pay my children school fees from this business, I thank God for this business, and I can’t regret doing this business.” (50 year-old woman street picker)

 

Aggregators (similar to some formal sector CEOs) are women who source plastics and other recyclable waste through various means, store them up in large quantity and are in turn patronized by other value chain actors including recycling companies and middle-women who in turn supply to companies in demand of them, in some cases after  slight treatments. Some aggregators own land spaces at dumpsites and are usually women who inherited this occupation from their late husbands. The middle women work mainly like traders, buying and supplying bulky volume sometimes with personally acquired trucks. The various roles which are occupied by women in the formal and informal recycling sectors are largely determined by their socio-economic statuses and demographic profiles, e.g. educational attainment, income status, and environmental factors.

 

The Divergence of Women Plastic Collectors and Structures of Inequality

 

Following feminism’s intersectional goal of studying both marginalized and privileged positionalities of women (Nash, 2008; Dhamoon, 2011; Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012; Atewologun et al., 2015), I briefly highlight in this section the sources of structural inequality between formal and informal sector women plastic collectors by highlighting the structural dynamics shaping how their roles are executed and their economic outcomes and agency impacts.

 

Firstly, the divergence of women on the basis of role performance reflects structural inequalities in the collection niche of the waste recycling sector. Role performance as found in this study is uniquely distinct from the traditional concept of role division. This is expressed in the unique experiences of a diverse group of women collectors who perform the same role in different styles given their socio-economic opportunities and experiences. Typically, formal sector CEOs and informal middle-women, aggregators, landfill and street pickers all collect plastics and other wastes using different modes of operation.

 

Secondly, sources of inequality emerge from their sectors of operation which are structured differently to serve different classes of individuals. The superimposing factor determining the variation in how similar roles are performed among the women is the structural organization of the sectors which have unique structures and features. This is especially noticeable in their organizational skill/level, sources of information and opportunity for upward mobility. For example, formal sector collectors are highly organized within recognized associations from which they draw information and promote their works, share and exchange ideas through conferences which also attract government and non-government agencies, and position themselves for local and international collaborations and support.

These qualities no doubt better position formal sector collectors for upward social mobility and is hugely enabled by their skills, class privileges and well developed human capital, given that the majority of them are schooled in advanced tertiary education. Although a marginal group of informal women collectors are tertiary educated, they have not translated their skills into higher operational mode that goes beyond working for a living. Hence, women in this category are generally unaware of the numerous potentialities that lie in their field and how to tap into them.

Formal women collectors on the other hand are able to draw the attention and support of government and non-government agencies into collaborations that make lasting impact on communities. This is possible given their access to useful information, ability to organize to acceptable standards and other privileges that come from their high class positions such as the capacity to organize forums where sector issues and solutions are discussed, also in collaboration with other environmental agencies, earning them a high level of recognition in policy drafts and execution. Below, is a quick illustration of some basic structural issues underpinning inequality between both sector women:

Structures of Inequality between Women Formal and Informal Collectors

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These variations shape the agencies and outcomes of both women groups. Admittedly, while the life of both sector women goes beyond their occupational enclaves such that they can exercise agencies in their personal lives and families, this may not be generally admitted in their occupational arenas. There is a limitation to the occupational growth of informal collectors whereby the aspiration does not rise above collection for income. Collection in this sense is equally not actualized for many landfill based category of informal collectors who are more prone to competitions with men and are unable to have as much. Also, due to other statutory challenges, they are not recognized as useful agents of environmental pollution control. Their agency is doubly diminished in that they are denied the basic essence of waste picking:

“The only barrier is that we don’t have the privilege to do what we want. There is no such privilege for women.” (44 year-old woman landfill waste picker)

 

Intra-feminine inequality as observed in the case of formal and informal women is thus chiefly driven by these two structural factors: their role performance and sectoral structures.

 

References

 

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