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“Patrolling the neighborhoods of central Fort Worth, sorting through trash piles, exploring dumpsters, scanning the streets and the gutters for items lost or discarded, I gathered the city's degraded bounty, then returned home to sort and catalogue the take.” —From the Introduction In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food. Richly illustrated throughout, Empire of Scrounge is both a personal journey and a larger tale about the changing values of American society. Perhaps nowhere else do the fault lines of inequality get reflected so clearly than at the curbside trash can, where one person's garbage often becomes another's bounty. Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption. With landfills overflowing, today’s highly disposable culture produces more trash than ever before—and yet the urge to consume seems limitless. In the end, while picking through the city's trash was often dirty and unpleasant work, unearthing other people's discards proved to be unquestionably illuminating. After all, what we throw away says more about us than what we keep.

Environmental policies may have a negative side effect on employment, often in a specific industry in the short run. Workers in regulated industries can be affected by losses in job-specific human capital. The informal sectors in developing countries are often associated with environmental pollution and thus targeted by such policies. Welfare loss due to this side effect can be problematic in developing countries, since they often lack safeguarding schemes, including unemployment insurance. Inducing workers in informal sectors to change their jobs can mitigate these negative side effects. This study examines efficient methods of inducing informal workers to change jobs. An alternative job is offered to informal workers at a dumpsite in the Philippines and whether changing the scheme of wage payment increases the acceptance of the offer is examined. The impacts of changing payment schemes are evaluated by using a randomized field experiment. The sampled 112 waste pickers each randomly receive one of four offers for an alternative job, and the number of those who accept the offer is observed to evaluate the impact of less frequent payment (i.e., once every three days instead of daily). Piece rates and fixed wages are also compared. Those offered less frequent payment are more likely to accept the job offer compared with those offered daily payment. This preferred payment scheme can mitigate the side effects of environmental policy and workers’ self-control problem related to savings, while minimizing moral hazard.

Racontant l'histoire d'une communauté d'éboueurs installée sur les flancs du Muqattam au Caire, ce livre raconte comment cet espace urbain marginal est devenu le coeur vibrant d'une nouvelle tendance charismatique au sein de l'Eglise copte. Telling the history of a community of garbage collectors living on the slopes of the Muqattam mountain in Cairo, the book recounts how this marginal urban space became the vibrant heart of a new charismatic trend within the Coptic church.

The essay examines the meanings of waste in the community formation of waste pickers in today’s Chinese megacities. We show that waste pickers in China echo to a certain extent the precarious and stigmatised labour conditions among those in the global south. But we have found that in China, financial reasons alone were not what pushed migrants to enter the trade. In fact, we have found that waste pickers in Beijing enter the waste business also to experiment with urban citizenship, freedom from the factory regime, entrepreneurship, and household making on the fringe of the nation’s capital. Their strategies of working with waste offer a prism for understanding the wider dimension of social and cultural life in the waste community in a major city of China – what we refer to as “living with waste.” “Living with waste” in this paper is intended as a framework to encompass the everyday effort to work with, experience, and live with waste matter on a daily basis. How do waste pickers talk about their job? Is it just about stigmatisation and suffering? Can it be about business and mobility? How do they feel about raising kids in a waste-collecting courtyard? If dirt is “matter of out of place” (Douglas 1966), how do they deal with impurity and contamination on a daily basis? What kind of efforts do they make to normalise or create boundaries in the undesirable working and living environment? Living with waste, then, is deeply bound with efforts not only to make a livelihood, but also to constantly negotiate one’s position with and draw boundaries from waste within the family and the community, in order to make the job bearable, and even meaningful.

Millions of poor people in the developing world still thrive on ragpicking. In the present study, we have examined whether ragpicking is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease. For this, we have enrolled 112 premenopausal female ragpickers (median age 30 years) and 98 age-matched housemaids as control from Kolkata, Eastern India. Venous blood was drawn for routine hematology; flow cytometry was used to measure generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by leukocytes, surface expression of CD62P (P-selectin) in platelets and CD11b in leukocytes. Collagen-induced platelet aggregation was evaluated by aggregometer, and erythrocytic superoxide dismutase (SOD) was measured by spectrophotometry. Soluble P-selectin (sP-sel) and CD40L (sCD40L), neutrophil-activating protein-2 (NAP-2), platelet and plasma serotonin, oxidized low-density lipoprotein (oxLDL), and anticardiolipin antibodies (aCL) in plasma were measured by ELISA. Compared with control, the ragpickers had significantly higher prevalence of hypertension and prehypertension, and hypertension was positively associated with ragpicking. The ragpickers also had higher levels of inflammation (elevated NAP-2), oxidative stress (elevated ROS generation with depleted SOD) with oxLDL, platelet activation and aggregability, soluble CD40 ligand, with altered serotonin level (rose in plasma but depleted in platelet). A greater percentage of ragpickers had elevated serum level of aCL of the IgG and IgM isotypes than the controls. The results suggest that the occupation of ragpicking increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases in premenopausal women of Eastern India via inflammation, oxidative stress, platelet hyperactivity, and hypertension.

Background: Ragpickers are informal workers who collect recyclable materials to earn a small wage on daily basis. They work in vulnerable conditions and awareness regarding occupational and environmental hazard is essential for them. Objective: To study the effectiveness of awareness program on various occupational health hazards among the ragpickers. Materials and Methods: This interventional study was conducted from May through October 2016 among the ragpickers living near field practice area of Department of Community Medicine and those living in slum areas around HAHC Hospital, New Delhi, India. The awareness regarding occupational and environmental health hazards was assessed using a pretested and predesigned pro forma. Snowball sampling technique was used to select the ragpickers from the various areas. Health awareness and education package was designed for the ragpickers. The package was delivered by medical officers and health workers. A posttest assessment was done 2 weeks after the awareness activity. Result: Among 150 ragpickers, there was significant improvement in knowledge immediate post training on knowledge of occupational hazard and hygiene. Conclusion: Efforts should be put to develop training materials on occupation and environmental health and injury issue relating to waste management.

Since plastic is considered as environmentally hazardous material, various programs aimed at educating the community on the impact of plastics pollution and consumption have been continuously conducted. Furthermore, the relationship between culture and community behavior regarding single-use plastic bottle consumption is important to be investigated for mitigating plastics pollution. The purpose of the current research was to investigate the quantity of single-use polyethylene terephthalate (PET)-based plastic bottles are used daily and how communities are managing them in the waste stream. The data was collected from the family members of 100 households of various educational, social, economic, age, and lifestyle backgrounds. About seven local companies that work in plastic waste collection were also important participants in the data collection regarding plastics consumption. The study showed that almost 80 % of households reported one to four single-use plastic bottles consumed each day while the remaining 20 % used more than four single-use plastics bottles daily. From 88 respondents, only 10 % separated plastic bottles in their trash disposal. The result also showed that the increasing use of single-use plastic bottles are highly influenced by the behavior of the local community in plastics consumption and waste management.