Somewhere between 500,000 and 4 million people scavenge through trash for a living in Latin America. Most are poor, socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised. Recently, however, waste pickers have organized collectively and pressed municipalities to respect their rights and to meet their basic needs. Where sorting through trash was once condemned and even illegal, it is now more commonly seen as useful in a green trend toward building sustainable cities. In fact, many cities have employed waste pickers to extend household collection and to promote recycling. Cooperation between waste pickers and municipalities offers the hope of achieving better waste management as well as the ‘social inclusion’ of these marginalized citizens.

In this paper we explore the opportunities and challenges inherent in the model of cooperation between municipal solid waste systems (MWSs) and waste picker cooperatives (WPCs). There is growing enthusiasm about waste picker inclusion, often as part of ‘integrated solid waste management.’ The World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank, for example, have both funded projects to support waste picker integration into formal sector recycling. Advocacy organizations such as WIEGO have called for an intensification of such efforts through access to credit and technology, as well as through partnerships to collect recyclables in underserved communities. These measures have given many waste pickers higher standards of living, economic security and a sense of inclusion in society.

Yet closer inspection reveals problems that emerge as cities move up an envisioned process of inclusion from supporting independent, informal wastepicking to subcontracting municipal services to competitive waste picker cooperatives. Among the poorest recyclers, a lack of waste picker skills limits what can be accomplished without a significant effort to address a broader set of poverty-related needs. In wealthier cities, where waste picker cooperatives have sophisticated business operations, inclusion becomes less ‘inclusive’ as mechanized processing generate too few jobs to accommodate the vast numbers of waste pickers. While integration of waste pickers into formal sector systems is hardly quixotic and in fact yields real benefits for many people, inclusion faces significant hurdles in providing most waste pickers with sustainable livelihoods. At its worst, ‘inclusion’ can be no more than tokenism in a process of dump closure and waste picker displacement. To truly address the needs of waste pickers, waste management modernization must be coupled with broader social policies.

Using three cases (Luz del Futuro in Bluefields, Nicaragua, the recycling cooperatives in the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, and the process of biofuel conversion at Mexico City’s Bordo Poniente dump), we identify opportunities and challenges presented by inclusion of waste pickers at each stage of development.