Without warning the bulldozer accelerates, cutting through mounds of waste at Al Huseyniyat landfill in northern Jordan. A lingering stench intensifies as the machine scoops up an armful of rubbish, discharging clouds of flies over a group of people rifling through bin bags nearby.
No one notices the disturbance. Their gazes are trained downwards as they sift through the morning’s waste. “We look for plastic, aluminium, metal, clothes – anything we can sell or keep, or sometimes eat,” says Mohammed Ali, an Egyptian who makes a living salvaging recyclables from the site.
Ali manages a team of 15 waste pickers – men, women and children – most Syrians from nearby Za’atari refugee camp. They earn around 10 Jordanian dinar (£10.90) a day. “It’s not a lot but I make enough to manage on,” says Nawras Sahasil, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee who supports his wife and two children on the 250 dinars a month he earns from the landfill.
Like most people here, Sahasil does not have a work permit. While the Jordanian government has gone some way towards easing restrictions on employment for Syrian refugees, the vast majority are still working illegally. Now, a number of organisations in Jordan are looking to formalise the work of waste pickers and harness their role as recyclers to address the country’s mounting rubbish crisis, while developing sustainable solutions for processing waste in the future.
For the waste pickers at Al Huseyniyat, and others working on streets around Jordan, this would mean stable employment and safer working conditions. At present, children, many of whom look younger than their stated age of 14, face the same dangers as adults in this toxic environment. A few wear cotton gloves found in the rubbish, but most go through the bags with bare hands, exposed to broken glass and needles hidden among the coloured cans, wrappers and rotting organic waste.
During the day, 80,000 tonnes of rubbish will be added to the mounds at Al Huseyniyat, which serves the surrounding Mafraq Governorate, including Za’atari. The swollen site, which has more than tripled in size since the start of the war in Syria, is a physical reminder of the challenges that confront Jordan as public services buckle under the strain of more than 655,000 registered Syrian refugees.
“Many municipalities were struggling with waste management before and then the population in some areas doubled and they didn’t have the resources to cope,” explains Olmo Forni, humanitarian waste specialist at non-profit Disaster Waste Recovery. “DWR is working with GIZ [a German company specialising in international development] and ACF [Action Contre La Faim] to formalise waste pickers into co-operatives that will allow them to have proper contracts with the municipality and become long-term service providers.”
Integrating informal waste pickers into the labour force, Forni says, will legitimise the important contribution they make, reducing the pressure on Jordan’s landfills while promoting recycling as a sustainable business model. For the scrap yards, waste brokers and manufacturers that make up Jordan’s grassroots recycling sector, professionalising the waste pickers promises “properly sorted” – and therefore better quality – materials, says Samer Almadanat, who owns a paper treatment company in the Jordanian city of Karak.
Almadanat purchases 75% of his stock from a sorting station employing local waste pickers. “They generate a lot more material this way,” he says, adding that his business has benefited from having a consistent supply.
The facility, which is managed independently by the municipality, sells plastic and paper recyclables to the private sector in bulk. It is the first of seven sorting stations being built by GIZ to generate employment in the recycling sector for vulnerable Jordanians, and soon, Syrian refugees. “This was a test run to see how well this model works in Jordan,” says GIZ project manager Patrick Poehlmann, who describes the Karak station as a “success story”.
In Za’atari, the financial potential of waste separation is being harnessed in an Oxfam recycling project that the NGO hopes will eventually be rolled out across Mafraq and nationwide. Rubbish is separated by households in the camp and sold to local companies that trade in reusable material. This helps create jobs for refugees while making a dent in the amount of solid waste send to landfill from the camp, currently around 750 meters cubed each week.
Ibrahim Ali Eid, who works for a large scrap yard in Mafraq, purchases between 30 and 45 tonnes of material a month from the project. “We don’t deal with individual waste pickers because they can’t provide the quantities we need,” he explains.
Less than 10% of municipal solid waste is recycled in Jordan, which generates more than 2m tonnes a year. A framework waste law under discussion is looking at ways to incorporate pickers into a modernised “waste management cycle that engages the private sector”, says Dr Mohammed Khashashneh, director of waste management at the Ministry of Environment, acknowledging the need to raise awareness about recycling and address the litter lining Jordan’s streets.
Meanwhile, local upcycling entrepreneurs, such as Alaa Ziadeh and eco-designer Hana Faouri, are finding ways to share their skills with informal rubbish workers as part of a growing grassroots movement to establish a culture of reuse and recycling in Jordan.
Faouri ran upcycling workshops in rural villages, then established a community centre in Amman so participants could sell their products to the wider market. Ziadeh, who produces professional upcycled furniture through his company, Ziadat for Recycling, has been approached by organisations including UNHCR and UNDP to teach refugees and vulnerable Jordanians how to generate an income by refashioning rubbish.
“With this approach towards recycling we can create a good level of living for a lot of people,” he says. “We’re also laying the foundations for an industry that can provide responsible and sustainable solutions to Jordan’s rubbish crisis.”