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6.6. LESSONS DRAWN FROM THE CASE STUDIES
The next two chapters describe in detail the recovery and recycling commodity chains
of inorganic domestic waste in Hyderabad, India and Nairobi, Kenya. Here, I will
draw out several lessons from these case studies on the basis of discussions held in
several workshops during the course of the research programme carried out.
Waste generators, both households and institutions, sell the most valuable and
unmixed inorganic materials to private sector traders in both locations, in contrast to
the situation in many industrialised countries where this process is less developed
except for the second-hand goods trade. Mixed waste is collected by socio-economi-
cally vulnerable groups of people at the lower end of the commodity trading chain.
The trading chain in Hyderabad (like elsewhere in India) is more complex than in
Nairobi, Kenya in terms of the number of actors involved. Nevertheless, both loca-
tions show similarities in trading chains, which grow in size of material flows (and
turnover) and specialisation of materials as these move up the commodity chain. In
both locations, the commodity chain is not limited to the city concerned, but is more
regional (Hyderabad) and even national for some materials (Kenya). The final link is
the production unit, using waste materials as raw materials.
The production units using recovered materials as input, do so on the basis of technical
and economic considerations. Technically, waste materials are almost always used in
combination with virgin materials for producing end products; therefore, such enter-
prises cannot be truly called ‘recycling enterprises’. This term has to be reserved for
those enterprises producing intermediate products solely from recovered materials for
the production units making end products (such as the plastic lump making units found
in Hyderabad). This distinction can become important when deciding what type of
recycling unit to support in its efforts to divert waste flows. The intermediate units
often operate on the border of informality in paying taxes, which support programmes
would have to recognize.
Secondly, trade and recycling activities are vulnerable to a number of external factors,
which can influence them quite negatively. The end production units switch from
recycled to virgin materials as and when the costs of virgin materials become similar
to the levels of recycled materials. In Kenya, where the prices of imported virgin
plastic went down sharply, the bottom dropped out of the market for locally recovered
plastic materials. This suggests that the competition from imported virgin materials
and imported waste of higher quality can remove the incentives to recover waste mate-
rials locally. This is not to say that the international trade in waste materials cannot
make a contribution to international levels of material recovery, as van Beukering has
recently suggested (2001). However, localised effects should be recognised and dealt
with accordingly.