With an approximately 4.85 billion population, no wonder Asia is the largest producer of waste. The cities are transforming under consumption and infrastructure strain, yet everything seems to be business as usual. In reality, this happens only because some of the workforce is out of sight. Women in the informal recycling chain make Asian cities livable: they sort, recover, and move materials around to ensure people can consume without having to see the aftermath. As the region aims for circularity, it is imperative to address and engage women as key actors in waste management.

Across Asia, informal waste workers (IWWs) play a crucial role in the waste management sector. Their work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, prevented the entry of plastics and organics into drains and rivers, maintained access in the streets, and benefited  both public health and the environment. The numbers also speak of structural dependence. In India alone, the informal recycling chain involves about 4 million workers in total. Out of this number, 2.2 million are waste pickers, and this single group of workers saves the country an estimated 13,700 USD per day.

The Reality of Women in Waste Management 

Despite their importance, they are often overlooked, their contribution dismissed. The reality is even harder for women. Women make up the majority of informal waste workers, but gender pay gap persists. They also grapple with more severe food insecurity than men, and stigma and harassment become standard risks of the job. On top of it, women in waste work are still saddled with significant unpaid care work. 

Furthermore, there is unequal access to better-compensated work. While women are the biggest contributors to the manual sorting, the high-margin nodes, such as transport aggregation, procurement, and plant operations, are skewed in favour of men. Once the scrap market gets clogged, it clogs at the lowest point in the value chain, where women are concentrated.

At the structural level, there is a lack of labor rights and social protection. The women who keep the wheels turning are often forgotten upon negotiating policies, budgets, and concessions. The disjuncture is further exacerbated by an ongoing information vacuum: governments most often do not include the work of women in the waste management sector. And thus, they do not plan it out. There are largely no gender-safe sorting facilities, no nurseries adjacent to materials recovery plants, and no heat-receptive PPE (Personal Protective Equipment).

Even well performing cooperative systems encounter brittle politics. Time-limited MoUs, loss of subsidies, and every other push to privatize worker-run services are going to destroy years of institution-building. And the first to go, again, is women.

Progress Case Study: India

Still, there have been efforts to create a better ecosystem for women in the waste management sector. In Pune, India, there is the SWaCH cooperative (Solid Waste Collection and Handling Cooperative) formed by the KKPKP union (Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat). It provides a non-motorized, decentralized door-to-door collection service (reaching approximately four million households). With around 3,900 active members (around 70% of whom are women), it diverts approximately 80,000 tonnes of waste each year. This scheme costs the city nearly ₹900,000,000 less than contractor-driven models.

The transformation went beyond fiscal or environmental change; it is social. With SWaCH, the salary of workers increased approximately five times. The duration of work dropped to around six hours per day, six days per week from the previous 12 hoursseven-day. The city now offers PPE, insurance, and equipment. 

Most importantly, waste workers have become part of the policymaking process. SWaCH/KKPKP organizers were invited to the drafting table when the Solid Waste Management Rules 2016 and Plastic Waste Management Rules were devised. They stipulated registration of waste pickers and their incorporation into the city decision-making process.

Another example hails from Hasiru Dala in Bengaluru. The use of official identity documents, municipality-based dry-waste collectives, and service deals can help to increase the incomes and stabilize the livelihoods of thousands of informal waste workers, who are mostly women, in a decentralized community-based system. The women-managed Solid-Liquid Resource Management centers, constructed ward after ward, offer the proof that street cleaning via source segregation and decentralized processing not only keeps a small city clean almost completely but also provides hundreds of women green jobs with full cost recovery. 

Toward Gender-Responsive Circularity

If Asian countries’ governments want to prove their commitment to a just transition toward a circular economy, they must design policies with waste governance and gender equality in mind—not as an afterthought or a CSR initiative. 

It is neither a policy gamble nor an untested road to list and enrol the labor of IWWs and to have women organizations at the planning and procurement table. Moreover, it is essential to make climate finance directly tied to quantifiable organic diversion and non-motorized collection performed by women. This includes overhauling the market regulations. For instance, improved urban-scale EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) ensures that producers recycle low-value plastics, rather than leaving it to the urban-based MRFs (Material Recovery Facility) whose operational efforts often leave women with unsold materials.

Governments must also provide measures that ensure women’s safety against harassment and gendered violence at the workplace. They can  contract primary collection and materials recovery to cooperatives and women’s self‑help groups on pay‑for‑performance terms. They can also finance PPE and provide toilets with menstrual care products as operational infrastructures. 

Additionally, childcare (full-day and full-time) as provided by the community is not a social provision; it is the foundational condition for women’s participation in a circular economy. Over the decades in Ahmedabad, for example, SEWA Sangani (Self‑Employed Women’s Association’s Sangini Childcare Cooperative) has proved that creches patterned after hours of informal workers will increase the number of mothers’ paid workdays, increase household income, and improve child diet and education.

Judge Asia’s waste management not by counting the plants established, but by the number of people breathing and earning with dignity. We need no more playbook. It just takes us the courage to stand on what we already have. Recognize, decentralize, and integrate.

Editor: Nazalea Kusuma

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Gojesh Konsam

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Gojesh Konsam is a student at the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, India, and an emerging environmental professional working across environmental management and natural resource issues. He aspires to deepen his work through social perspectives and field‑based research to understand environmental change, community realities, and policy pathways that support sustainable development.

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