Aljiya roams the streets of al-Kairouan in central Tunis searching for garbage. “Adel, my son, would never let me go out and collect garbage,” she said. ” But he passed away and so did his father and now I have to care for myself.” 

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Recycling middle-woman: waste collector Aljiya

Aljiya is famous in the al-Burji neighborhood in al-Kairouan, where collects plastic bottles and sells them to recyclers to earn a few dinars to survive. 

Aljiya roams the streets of al-Kairouan in central Tunis searching for garbage. “Adel, my son, would never let me go out and collect garbage,” she said. ” But he passed away and so did his father and now I have to care for myself.” 

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Recycling middle-woman: waste collector Aljiya

Aljiya is famous in the al-Burji neighborhood in al-Kairouan, where collects plastic bottles and sells them to recyclers to earn a few dinars to survive. 

“I don’t want anyone to give me charity money and I don’t want to live in a house with no water or electricity,” said Aljiya, explaining why she collects bottles from the streets.

Dangerous work for a few dinars

Aljiya stands with a small mound of discarded plastic. The recycling agent weighs the bags, calculates the amount and gives Aljiya a few dinars.  “All the time I know he is not paying me a fair price,” she says, walking away.

‘Guestimates’ suggest there are more than 8,000 people who work in the underbelly of Tunisia’s recycling industry – they are known as ‘Barabsha’.   They roam the streets and alleys searching for household waste containers, plastic bottles and cans, paper and cardboard as well as recyclable metal-made appliances.

Kairouan covers an area of 6.712 square km with a population of more than half a million people. The rate of urbanization is 30% and the percentage of school students in the age group of 6-12 years old is 92%. 

Underbelly of the recycling industry

But in Kairouan, many children forego school to collect waste. Besides the official and licensed national reycling agency, the Tunisian Agency for the Disposal of Waste, there are also a number of non-exclusive collection points and recycling brokers happy to deal with children.

The government agency, which comes under the jurisdiction of The Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, collects solid waste for recycling in the framework of an integrated national plan. The plan is designed to accommodate the environmental, social and economic aspects of waste.

The agency licenses the plastic collection points, where its brokers buy the collected waste in return for money. The price depends on the party buying the waste. The Ministry of Environment only contributes to the process through the waste disposal agency – but then buys the solid plastic waste and sells it to manufacturers to recycle.

The system is financed by a tax levied on water and milk factories – according to a legal rule which obliges the producer, who is categorised as ‘the polluter’, to pay taxes – instead of obliging manufacturers to collect the bottles. 

‘Eco Tax’

This whole process is called the ‘Eco Tax’ and it has allowed the state to gradually subcontract waste management. It has also encouraged investors to collect disposable recyclable plastic, creating an industry, to distribute it to specialized factories.

After being delivered to the agency, the plastic is put into molds and pressured to make it easy to transport and distribute.

Hundreds of companies work in the sector. Some factories crush the plastic and sell it to other factories, which in turn change it into pots and household utensils. There are also integrated factories that do the two jobs together and these factories provide Tunisians with key employment opportunities.

School children too

Collection points are dotted around Tunisian cities. “This collection point employs 5 workers and its task is to buy all kinds of plastic, especially bottles from the collectors,” Muhammad Khalil, a collection point manager, told Correspondents.  Khalil’s centre deals with more than 50 providers: the elderly, young people and school children who use the summer vacation to earn some money from the plastic collection business.   

“We have a categorized list according to the quality of the plastic waste. The best quality plastic is mineral water bottles,” said the director of the collection point.

Khalil says that the amounts of plastic collected range between 4-6 tons per month.  In high seasons, 10 tons can be collected in a single month.  “There are 10 other licensed collection points and many unlicensed ones.  Thus there are hundreds of tons collected by the poor every month,” he added.

In Kairouan, there are numerous recycling points, some licensed, some not. Unlicensed  manufacturers have an interest in remaining covert and anonymous, which makes an estimate of the total number hard to come by.

Hundreds of tons of waste collected every month

The environmental work remains a fragile economic sector, yet provides financial resources for hundreds of families – especially those living in popular neighborhoods such as “al-Borji”, “al-Manshiya,” “Zaytoun al-Hamami,” “Malajea Sahnoun” and other marginalized neighborhoods.

The profits made by the plastic collectors are determined by the licensed collection points who give better prices than agents.  “We buy 1 kilo for 3 dinars ($0.60) and we sell it for 5 dinars ($3) and this is the normal and declared price,” outlines collection manager Khalil.

This price enables pupils to make 10 dinars ($6) a day, if they work hard for 10 hours a day and if they are able to walk a distance of 20 km a day in the city center.  There is another challenge facing these collectors:  The number of collectors is rapidly increasing, saturating the market.

Unofficial collectors cheating on weight

Despite the large contingent of elderly residents involved in the business, collectors have wisened to a few tricks to rip them off. Unofficial collectors often cheat when they weigh the plastic. They use animal drawn carts and do not carry with them a weighing machine similar to those used by licensed collection points.

Hundreds of waste collectors also have no social insurance, even though they work in polluted waste environments with no protection, which may expose them to health risks.

Only a third of waste recycled

The Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development in Tunisia estimates the amounts of household waste produced annually in the country totals 2.5 million tons. One third of this amount is recycled, according to statistics produced before the 14 January Revolution – figures that are yet to be updated.

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Waste being weighed