For a long time, picking litter in Zimbabwe was survival work with almost no upside: collect what you can, sell it cheap, repeat. Mongabay's reporting on Masvingo's waste pickers shows how that calculus has started to change, as some pickers stop treating recyclables as a low-value commodity to offload and start treating them as raw material for products they can sell themselves.
The Masvingo Urban Recycling Club's story, as told to Mongabay, traces that shift directly. Members recall that in 2010, they heard a Harare-based company was buying litter, so they began collecting and baling plastic waste to sell to it. That single buyer relationship drew in more collectors as word spread and demand grew. Two years later, the group began making homemade aluminium pots from scrap metal instead of simply selling it on. Two years after that, they moved into interlocking bricks made from plastic waste mixed with sand, a product durable and attractive enough that the club, since formally registered as a cooperative, told Mongabay it is now "overwhelmed by demand."
That progression, from selling raw material to manufacturing finished goods, is precisely the shift that development economists point to when they talk about capturing more value locally rather than exporting it. It also solves a problem that has dogged Zimbabwean recycling for years: according to the Green Business Gazette's 2021 situational analysis of Harare's waste system, only about 10 percent of the city's collected waste gets recycled at all, a figure the report attributes to inadequate recycling infrastructure and poor segregation of waste at the point of collection, meaning contaminated, mixed waste is often unusable for recycling even when someone wants to process it.
Masvingo is not an isolated case. Dialogue Earth's reporting on Barbara Tiki and six other women working under the Zero Waste banner on Harare's Willowvale Road describes a similar arc: what began in 2021 as personal dawn collection runs to dumpsites has become, in the outlet's words, "a hive of activity" where community members now bring plastic directly to the group's roadside station for resale to recycling companies. Tiki and her colleagues, several of them widows, divorced or single mothers, have effectively formalised an informal trade into something closer to a small enterprise, without waiting for government programmes to do it for them.
The scale of the opportunity is significant given how far behind the region still is. Dialogue Earth cites a figure showing sub-Saharan Africa's overall recycling rate stood at just 4 percent as recently as 2012, a stark contrast to global averages and a sign of how much recoverable material is still ending up in dumpsites, rivers and burn pits across the region rather than in a processing chain.
The business case behind the environmental one
What both Masvingo and Willowvale Road demonstrate is that recycling in Zimbabwe grows fastest when it pays, not when it is treated purely as civic duty. Cooperatives that move up the value chain, from baling to manufacturing, capture margins that used to go to middlemen, while also pulling more material out of the waste stream than pure collection ever could. For a country recycling roughly a tenth of what its capital produces, that model, small, community-run, and increasingly formalised, may do more to shift the national recycling rate than large infrastructure alone.
Sources
- Zimbabwe sees recycling boom as waste picking becomes lucrative business, Mongabay
- In Zimbabwe and Malawi, women mobilise to tackle plastic waste, Dialogue Earth
- Here's how female-led initiatives are tackling plastic waste in Zimbabwe and Malawi, World Economic Forum
- Harare Waste Management - Situational Analysis, Green Business Gazette
Written by Rufaro
Plain-language guides to getting rid of anything in Zimbabwe, properly.
