The waste pickers who scour the world’s rubbish dumps and daily recycle thousands of tonnes of metal, paper and plastics are up in arms against the UN, which they claim is forcing them out of work and increasing climate change emissions.
Their complaint was heard on Wednesday in Bonn, where UN global climate change talks have resumed. The pickers say the clean development mechanism (CDM), an ambitious climate finance scheme designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries, has led to dozens of giant waste-to-energy incinerators being built to burn municipal rubbish, as well as hundreds of new landfill schemes designed to collect methane gas.
“Waste pickers, who are some of the poorest people on Earth, recover recyclable materials. They are invisible entrepreneurs on the frontline of climate change, earning a living from recovery and recycling, reducing demand for natural resources,” says Neil Tangri, director of the Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA), a grouping of 500 anti-incinerator groups in 80 countries.
“But they are being undermined by CDM projects, which deny them entry to dumps. This is leading to further stress and hardship for some of the poorest people in the world and is increasing emissions,” he said.
Waste pickers handle much of the growing mountains of rubbish in developing countries. Nearly 60 percent of all New Delhi’s waste, for example, is recycled by an army of tens of thousands of pickers who scavenge for recyclable materials on the city’s dumps.
“These workers are providing a public service — for free. Building incinerators robs the poorest of the poor,” said Bharati Chaturvedi, director of Indian NGO Chintan, which works with waste pickers and has been opposing a giant incinerator being built in New Delhi with CDM money.
GAIA on Wednesday called for the CDM to stop approving incinerator waste to energy projects and to start investing climate funds in the informal recycling sector. This, Tangri said, would increase employment and labor conditions while dramatically reducing emissions.
GAIA also argues that the UN’s methodology for assessing whether projects should be granted CDM credits does not take into account the emissions saved by recycling.
Recycling and composting, it says, are nearly 25 times more effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions than waste-to-energy incinerators.
However, a spokeswoman for the CDM said on Thursday that waste-to-energy incinerators saved emissions and provided new employment.
However, she said the CDM would welcome groups of waste pickers who wanted to apply for UN climate credits.
The CDM, set up in 2001, allows rich countries to offset their emissions by investing in projects that reduce emissions in poor countries. In nearly 10 years’ operation it claims to have reduced emissions significantly worldwide but has been accused of allowing fraud by unscrupulous industrialists who have found ways to register projects that would have been built anyway.
In other news from the Bonn meeting, British economist Nicholas Stern on Thursday that government regulation and public money also will be needed to create incentives for private investment in industries that emit fewer greenhouse gases. A new industrial revolution is needed to move the world away from fossil fuels to low carbon growth, he said.
“It will be extremely exciting, dynamic and productive,” said Stern, one of 18 experts in public finance on an advisory panel appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Potential revenue sources include auctioning the right to pollute, taxes on carbon production, an international travel tax and a tax on international financial transactions, as well as government grants and loans, Stern said.
Each could produce tens of billions of dollars a year, he said.
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