124 ISA BAUD
a low of 17 percent women in Costa Rica to a high of 90 percent in Guatemala (Arroyo
Moreno et al., 1997/1999: 77). Such micro-enterprises offer the pickers and sorters
previously working individually, the possibility to organise themselves into large units
to demand better contracts and conditions. However, this generally requires the assist-
ance of NGOs to act as advocate of such groups in negotiations with municipalities.
Traders and recycling enterprises have generally not organised themselves into asso-
ciations. The Pune study found an interest to exist among retail traders to do so, but
very little interest among wholesalers, who feel powerful enough to maintain their
businesses individually.
In conclusion, this sector can be analysed as any other industrial sector, focusing on
types of enterprises, employment, turnover and incomes. The sector is organised into
a variety of commodity chains, with the enterprises using waste materials as inputs
determining the economic viability throughout the chain. The sector is particularly
vulnerable to changes in prices of alternative materials that can be used as inputs, or
changes in import controls. It needs to be included in analyses of SWM as a matter of
course, in order to understand shifts in material flows.
6.4. CHANGING CONTEXT FOR RECOVERY
AND RECYCLING OF SOLID WASTE MATERIALSThree important processes are changing the context of the ways in which waste is
recovered and recycled. They reflect the re-alignment of state, civil society, and the
private sector in the last two decades. They are privatisation of public sector services
(as described in chapter 2), decentralisation within government and changes in
autonomy of local authorities and funding flows, and the initiatives undertaken by
NGOs/CBOs to substitute for market and government, or to fill the gaps left by them.
Effects of privatisation
In many developing countries local authorities have recognised their lack of capacity
to provide environmental services directly to the entire population of large cities^14. In
order to increase the provision of services, many local authorities have begun to
contract out the delivery of services to private sector contractors The conditions spec-
ified for the quality of their service provision often include effective collection of
waste at the neighbourhood level. When collection is indeed effectively done on a
house-to-house basis, the amount of waste that is left in public spaces is reduced. It
implies the closing off of access to solid waste in public spaces for informal recovery
- They also explicitly exclude certain informal and illegal settlement areas of the city from such
services.