MODES OF URBAN INORGANIC SOLID WASTE 121
ties. An equally important group are the itinerant buyers, who buy materials straight
from households and institutions, using small amounts of capital (Furedy, 1993;
Dhanalakshmi and Iyer, 1999; Chikarmane et al., n.d.). The waste materials collected
in this fashion are sold to (non-specialised) dealers, who further sort and clean the
materials, and sell them to large(r) wholesalers specialising in one type of material.
Small dealers employ family members, and provide informal insurance and credit
facilities to waste pickers working for them. Larger wholesalers mainly employ casual
workers to sort and clean the materials they sell (van Eerd, 1996; van Beukering,
1994). Small recycling enterprises transform waste materials into intermediate goods.
They employ a combination of permanent and daily wageworkers The end of the
commodity chain consists of large enterprises making end products, using waste mate-
rials as inputs.
A study from Pune, India indicates that there are 4600 waste pickers, and 370 scrap
traders known there. The number of enterprises using recycled materials is relatively
small and they operate regionally rather than city-wide (Chikarmane et al., n.d.). The
Pune study indicates that the majority of waste pickers are scheduled caste, and
women. Among the women, a quarter to one-third are divorced or abandoned. The
itinerant buyers tend to be men (60 percent), and to have some primary education.
Mean monthly per capita incomes in pickers’ households are Rs 650 (50 percent above
the local poverty line), although the distribution is uneven across the whole group.
Among waste traders in Pune, men predominate (women are only 20 percent of all
traders). The retail traders have a social background similar to the waste pickers,
although they are better off economically. In contrast, the wholesale traders come
from a Muslim or higher caste background.
Attention in research has been largely focused on actors at the beginning of the
commodity chain: the waste pickers A large number of studies has been done on their
contributions to diverting waste from municipal waste streams, and the difficult
circumstances under which they live and work (Huysman, 1994; Poerbo, 1991; Hunt,
1996; Furedy, 1992; Chikarmane et al., n.d.). Actors at the intermediate income levels
of the commodity chain (itinerant buyers, neighbourhood dealers, small and large
wholesalers) have received much less attention in research^13. Nevertheless, they are
crucial nodes between the pickers and itinerant buyers and the recycling enterprises
buying waste as raw materials, in both economic and spatial terms, organising the
transfer of small amounts of waste materials to the enterprises. Van Beukering (1994)
has indicated that small dealers do not only work with pickers, but also obtain mate-
rials from institutional sources and directly from households. Their numbers are large
in Bangalore, in contrast with the large wholesalers of whom there are only a few.
- Exceptions are the studies by Sinha and Amin, describing the complete commodity chain in Dhaka
(1995), and the compilation of studies in Bangalore (Baud and Schenk, 1994) and Chennai (Dhanalak-
shmi and Iyer, 1999). Furedy also carried a ....... on IB in Bangalore (...).