At the same time, downstream textile waste supply chains remain complex and often lack traceability, obfuscating the people making it all happen. “It’s not a linear supply chain, it’s more like a supply web,” says Libby Annat, co-founder of consultancy Due Diligence Design. “[Clothes] move through collectors, sorters, agents, exporters, resorters, resellers and eventually down to pre-processes and recyclers, often across several countries. So that complexity alone makes the traceability and transparency incredibly difficult.”
To fix this, the fashion industry and its legislators must recognize informal waste pickers, and include them in circularity frameworks as they develop, not as an afterthought, says the International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP). That includes the anticipated extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations coming into force from 2028. Without this level of inclusion, experts say waste pickers will remain hidden and overlooked, undermining the industry’s circular ambitions from the start.
A business built on instability
Informal waste collection takes many different forms, from picking textiles out of landfills to resell in local marketplaces, to collecting plastics that can be sold by the kilogram to aggregators for recycling. As a result, each country and city has a different relationship to its waste pickers, and each language has its own colloquial terms for the role, but advocacy organizations have worked hard to find a neutral, universal term — waste pickers — which is neither derogatory nor stigmatized, while accurately reflecting the range of jobs. For example, some workers might be paid to pick up waste from households, while others operate in streets, alleyways and canals to collect and sell waste from carts throughout the day.
What connects waste pickers around the globe is an entrepreneurial attitude, says Vivien Luk, the executive director of Work, a non-profit operating in countries like Haiti, Vietnam and Kenya to improve waste picker livelihoods. “They’re all entrepreneurs to begin with,” she says. “They’ve all found a way to build a business for themselves that allows them to, at least in most scenarios, put food on the table.”
Waste collecting can also be hazardous, with workers exposed to fires in landfills, as well as microplastics from degrading clothing. There are 30 different diseases connected to uncollected waste, which attracts vermin and insects, but without formal systems in place, evidence of the health implications for waste pickers is largely anecdotal. “There are certain unmapped effects on the health of the waste pickers, which we don’t know,” says Devansh Peshin, regional program manager for Enviu, an organization that works with waste pickers through its Enviu Textiles initiative in Bangalore, India. “That’s an unexplored side of the effect of textile waste handling.”