Before any formal recycling company touches Harare's plastic, glass or scrap metal, someone has almost always already sorted it out of a dumpsite by hand. Informal waste pickers, working without contracts, protective gear or a safety net, are the first link in Zimbabwe's recycling chain, and new research is documenting just how dangerous that link can be.
A study published in the Journal of Responsible Production and Consumption interviewed 42 informal waste material pickers working at dumpsites across Harare. The researchers found the group evenly split between men and women, with 80 percent single, a mix of never-married, divorced and widowed pickers drawn largely from the city's most economically excluded households. Their findings, described starkly in the study's own language, catalogued "ritualistic sexual abuses, scary encounters, territorial fights" and dumpsites functioning as "sanctuaries for criminals," conditions the authors argue policymakers have left unaddressed even as the sector plays a documented role in sustaining Zimbabwe's circular economy.
That economic role is real, even if the country's recycling numbers remain low overall. Veritas Zimbabwe, citing EMA data, told journalists that Zimbabwe generates more than 300,000 tonnes of plastic waste every year, but recycles less than a tenth of it. Most of the rest, the organisation said, ends up in open dumpsites, rivers and burn pits. Harare alone is estimated to generate 850 to 1,000 tonnes of waste daily while collecting only about half, a gap that leaves the door open for informal recovery, wanted or not, to happen at the dumpsite rather than at source.
Gender is central to who does this work. Veritas Zimbabwe's statement, issued around World Environment Day 2025, cited UN-Habitat figures showing that women make up roughly 70 percent of waste pickers across sub-Saharan Africa, working in hazardous conditions with little protection or formal recognition despite forming, in the organisation's words, "the backbone of the informal recycling economy." The group called plastic pollution a social justice, gender equality and human rights issue as much as an environmental one, and pushed for decentralised, gender-responsive waste systems rather than top-down clean-up drives that bypass the people already doing the sorting.
Not every account from the dumpsites is uniformly bleak. Reporting by Dialogue Earth and the World Economic Forum has profiled women in Harare's Glen View suburb, working along Willowvale Road under the banner Zero Waste since 2021, who have moved from personally scavenging dumpsites at dawn to running a collection point where community members now bring plastic to them for resale to recycling companies. One of the group's members, Patience Mangove, told the World Economic Forum the work lets a team largely made up of widows, divorced and single mothers "eke out a living" while visibly reducing waste in their community, a model that suggests organisation and a fixed collection point can shift pickers out of the most dangerous dumpsite scavenging.
What the research is pushing policymakers toward
The Emerald-published study's central recommendation is straightforward: public policy should protect the welfare of informal waste pickers precisely because the circular economy depends on them, rather than treating the sector as invisible or illegal. That could mean formal recognition, safety equipment, or organised collection points modelled on Willowvale Road's cooperative approach, but the research is clear that leaving pickers unprotected does not stop the practice; it just leaves the people doing essential recovery work exposed to the risks documented in dumpsites across the city.
Sources
- Waste material recycling: the horrors of informal waste material picking in Zimbabwe, Journal of Responsible Production and Consumption / Emerald Publishing
- Zimbabwe's Recyclable Plastic Going To Waste, Pan African Visions
- Here's how female-led initiatives are tackling plastic waste in Zimbabwe and Malawi, World Economic Forum
- In Zimbabwe and Malawi, women mobilise to tackle plastic waste, Dialogue Earth
Written by Rufaro
Plain-language guides to getting rid of anything in Zimbabwe, properly.
