By Layli Foroudi
TUNIS, Aug 1 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – In the early hours of a Sunday morning, before the city of Tunis wakes up and the sun becomes unbearably hot, Raouf Hayetlili and his neighbour Noureddine Tayara are already pulling trailers of plastic up a hill.
Tayara, a 65-year-old waste picker, started working just after the dawn prayer, when he asked that the day bring him “his share” of goods. Hayetlili, 42, said they needed to get to the bins before the municipality workers started clearing them away.
Every day, the men gather up plastic bottles, as well as aluminium, bread, and broken plastic.
They live in Ettadhamen, a northern working-class district that has become the centre of Tunis’ recycling circuit, but prefer to work in the nearby neighbourhoods of El Menzah and Ennasr, where there are richer pickings.
“Nobody throws anything away in the poorer neighbourhoods,” explained Hayetlili, dressed in overalls given to him by a maintenance worker.
“Here, they throw a lot away and everything has value.”
The system of plastic recycling in Tunisian cities is largely reliant on an informal workforce of waste pickers, known as barbechas, meaning someone who searches, digs or investigates.
And like thousands of other Tunisians who work in the informal sector, barbechas lack an official status and lead a precarious life, carrying out their jobs without workers’ rights or health insurance, say human rights activists.
Many waste pickers live in poverty, selling the waste they find to middlemen recyclers who then sell it on for a marked-up price to the national waste collection system or, more often, a private recycling factory.
“There is no legal framework that regulates (this type of) recycling,” said Mehdi Barhoumi, Tunis-based project manager for the British non-profit International Alert.
This could change with a proposed law to establish a “social and solidarity economy” which would support collectives and self-governed businesses that both make a profit and have a social objective.
The idea is to create a halfway house between the informal sector and regular employment by giving workers the opportunity to self-organise and register their activity without setting up a company, Barhoumi explained.
He hopes the law will give Tunisia’s waste pickers better protection from health risks and exploitation by middlemen.
For now, the law, which was proposed by Tunisia’s UGTT union in 2016 and finalised a year ago, is still waiting to be debated by parliament.
But the need for it is only becoming more urgent, Barhoumi stressed.
“The number of barbechas has not stopped rising, because there is an unemployment problem (and) at the same time, there is a problem with waste management,” he said.
