Opinion: Wastepickers must be at the centre of circular transition

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Ahead of International Wastepickers’ Day on 1 March, which commemorates wastepickers’ contributions worldwide, Kamilla Heden Henningsen of the Danish Embassy in Kenya calls for a just circular transition that places informal waste workers at its centre. She stresses that reforms in waste management must strengthen, rather than undermine, their livelihoods and dignity.

• Ms Henningsen works at the intersection of sustainability, innovation and partnerships. She is currently serving as Sector Counsellor for Circular Economy at the Royal Danish Embassy in Kenya where she builds collaboration between governments, businesses, academia and civil society to advance green and inclusive growth.

• She recommends embedding social justice into circular economy reforms through vocational training, strengthening wastepicker organisations, ensuring inclusion in decision-making, recognising their expertise, and improving livelihoods and working conditions.

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By Kamilla Heden Henningsen

Each year, International Wastepickers’ Day offers an opportunity to recognise the millions of people worldwide who recover, sort, and recycle the materials that others discard. Their work plays an important role in modern economies and in realising the environmental ambitions many countries now champion. Yet, despite their critical contribution, wastepickers often remain among the most marginalised workers in global value chains.

A transition to a circular economy with a closed loop system where materials are reused, repaired, refurbished and recycled is essential for our environment and has economic benefits too. However, social fairness will not emerge by default in a circular economy. This is a difficult truth that we have had to confront as part of Denmark’s collaboration with Kenya on circular economy and waste management.

A just transition to a circular economy means managing the transition in a fair and inclusive manner leaving no one behind - for example when jobs in certain sectors disappear while new jobs emerge. This requires attention to how benefits and burdens are shared, who is involved in shaping decisions, and whose contributions are recognised. In practice, this means ensuring that vulnerable groups are not left worse off by new systems, that informal workers, like the wastepickers, have a voice in policies that affect their livelihoods, and that their knowledge and role in waste management are acknowledged and respected. These principles may sound straightforward, but putting them into practice requires deliberate effort and political commitment.

I see this first-hand in Kenya, where I live and work with a circular economy at the Royal Danish Embassy in Nairobi. Kenya’s ongoing reforms in waste management, which Denmark has supported, include the introduction of waste segregation at source and extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes. These represent important steps toward a greener and more circular economy. However, these measures also reduce the amount of valuable waste reaching dumpsites which - at least in the short term - negatively impact the wastepickers working at dumpsites.

The Dandora dumpsite in Nairobi, where 2,000 to 3,000 tons of new waste arrive each day, offers a stark example. Thousands of people rely on collecting, sorting, and selling recyclable materials from the site to survive. If you go there, you will see women and men picking their way across vast mounds of discarded trash, searching for materials such as PET, glass and metal. As they sift through the waste, their hands are exposed to acid burns and cuts from shards of glass while their lungs are filled with toxic fumes from spontaneous fires across the dumpsite. Still, they return day after day because there are few viable alternatives available.

To better understand how the transition to a circular economy is affecting wastepickers and how Denmark might support this vulnerable group, we conducted a socio-economic study of wastepickers working at the Dandora dumpsite in collaboration with a local community-based organisation and local data collectors. Our findings reveal the human realities behind the dumpsite. Many wastepickers are single parents supporting several children. Most have limited formal education and work long hours under hazardous conditions, often without protective equipment or access to healthcare. Income is unstable, and workers frequently struggle to meet basic needs such as food, rent, and school fees.

At the same time, the study also revealed resilience, skills, and aspirations. Countless wastepickers possess practical expertise in areas such as technical repair, driving, tailoring, and small-scale entrepreneurship. Many expressed a desire for vocational training, safer working conditions, or employment within the formal recycling sector. They ask for opportunity, recognition, and a chance to shape their own future.

If managed well, the circular transition holds significant promise. It can create new forms of employment, reduce environmental harm, and improve resource efficiency while strengthening social equity. But this outcome is not guaranteed. It depends on the choices we make today and on whether justice considerations are embedded from the outset or treated as an afterthought.

Denmark’s cooperation with Kenya seeks to contribute to such a just transition. Through partnerships with local stakeholders, including wastepicker organisations, we support vocational training of wastepickers to diversify their income streams to other areas than wastepicking and we support capacity building of wastepicker CBOs so that they can better advocate for themselves and support each other. We also facilitate multi-stakeholder dialogue through workshops on for example wastepickers’ health issues and inclusion of wastepickers in extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes. These efforts aim to strengthen livelihoods, improve working conditions, and ensure that wastepickers’ perspectives inform the implementation of new regulatory frameworks. The ambition is not only environmental progress, but also social inclusion and economic opportunity.

International Wastepickers’ Day reminds us that sustainability is not only about materials or technologies. It is about people. The individuals who recover and recycle our waste are not chokora (literally meaning “scavengers”) as they are sometimes dismissively called in Kiswahili. They are key partners in building more sustainable societies. Their knowledge, labour, and resilience already form the foundation on which circular systems depend.

As we pursue the promise of a circular economy, we must ask not only how efficiently materials circulate, but also how fairly opportunities, risks, and recognition are distributed. A circular future that leaves vulnerable communities behind cannot be called sustainable.

A just circular economy does not happen by itself. It must be intentionally designed - with wastepickers, not merely for them.