Once a waste picker, Indumathi becomes community’s voice at Paris Plastic Treaty Premium

Inside the metal-roofed shed located in the corner of her Dry Waste Collection Centre (DWCC) in K.R. Puram, Indumathi is quite busy. Heavy winds last week brought down many of the segregation sheds, and now there’s garbage strewn all around the site.

Inside the metal-roofed shed located in the corner of her Dry Waste Collection Centre (DWCC) in K.R. Puram, Indumathi is quite busy. Heavy winds last week brought down many of the segregation sheds, and now there’s garbage strewn all around the site.

Ms. Indumathi, who runs the DWCC, oversees the clearing work while also going through the accounts and expenses for the month. New sheds need to be built. The workers should be paid by the 15th.

On one side of the site, the pile of low-value plastic (LVP) waste is starting to look like a small hillock. It is usually bought by cement factories or tar makers, but there have been no orders for the past three months. The BBMP payments are also delayed.

Things, clearly, have not been easy, but 44-year-old Indumathi seems unfazed. It must be the same resolve that led her all the way from being a child labourer to becoming the voice of waste pickers from all over Asia at the second session of the Plastics Treaty in Paris that went on from May 29 to June 2.

“We need ‘Just Transition’ for all waste pickers. That’s what I spoke for,” says Ms. Indumathi.

The term ‘Just Transition’ was coined by Tony Mazzochi, a labour and environmental activist from the US. There are growing calls from the international community to close landfills and outlaw plastics to achieve a sustainable future.

But there are about 20 million waste pickers across the world for whom plastic is a means of livelihood.  The waste pickers community, therefore, demands to be included in the climate change discourse and urges that decisions should be gradually implemented, giving them time and training for the transition.