Stop pretending waste pickers don’t exist
SOUTH Africa has high recycling rates thanks to waste reclaimers, but refuses to treat them as real workers. They collect up to 80% of recycled packaging, yet remain invisible to policy, unpaid, and unprotected.
Regenize doesn’t just recycle; its REACT solution digitalises and formalises reclaimers’ work, removing generations of exploitation with fair pay, provides Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and gives dignity to their role.
According to Chad Robertson, Regenize co-founder and CEO, there are an estimated 60 000 – 90 000 waste pickers in South Africa who collect as much as 80% of the country’s recycled paper and packaging. “Yet they operate in dangerous, unregulated conditions, sorting waste by hand, moving through landfill sites and city streets with no guarantee of income or social protection.”
Robertson stresses that municipal or private recycling systems rarely interact meaningfully with this workforce. “Without proper infrastructure, access to clean recyclables, transport, PPE, or formal recognition, they remain uncompensated essential workers in a broken supply chain.”
Each decentralised recycling hub created by REACT provides reclaimers with access to clean recyclables from at least 1 200 households, increases income by up to 300%, provides uniforms, PPE, tablets for tracking, and formal integration into the recycling process – turning them into formally employed partners and they can enjoy the basic labour rights we all enjoy in South Africa.
Households earn Remali points after each recycling collection. These points are credited instantly and can be converted into tangible resources either online or through our network of shops in our operational community.
Within the next 12 months, REACT will be setting up another 31 decentralised recycling hubs, taking them to 36 in total in the Cape Town region. These hubs will provide their free recycling collection service to 43 200 households, create 180 jobs for waste reclaimers, while diverting around 5500 tonnes annually.
“If South Africa wants credible recycling, it must honour – and compensate – its waste reclaimers. Regenize’s REACT rewrites the narrative: reclaimers are not charity cases – they are frontline agents of sustainability. And when recycling becomes fair, participation and impact follow,” he concludes.
