Business Case: Plastics
Plastic waste management is a rapidly growing sector globally, and in emerging economies, it is both highly labor intensive and highly gendered. Almost 60% of plastic waste is processed by informal workers, with women overrepresented in the lowest paid roles. Within households, women are also often responsible for waste disposal. Understanding the role that women play in the sector can help improve the effectiveness and safety of the sector, create market value, and better focus capacity building and formalization efforts.
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Making the Plastics Sector Work for Women
This business case highlights how companies and investors, in partnership with local and national governments, NGOs, and other stakeholders, can capitalize on the benefits that gender equality brings by better supporting women in plastic waste management by addressing their needs as informal and formal workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers.
KEY FINDINGS
Women are often overlooked but important partners in the waste value chain
01
Understanding the role that women play is essential to the design of effective waste management services.
Understanding the routines and pain points of the system’s most frequent users can make the difference between whether plastic waste is properly disposed of or lumped together, which has downstream implications for processing.
02
Supporting workers at the bottom of the value chain—who are often women—is key to systemic improvements.
Understanding the gender dynamics of the informal waste management sector—and the unique vulnerabilities faced by this large component of the workforce—is important to targeting training, understanding worker priorities, and working effectively with the sector.
03
Increasing representation of women in the formal waste management workforce can improve the bottom line.
Women are often excluded from formal waste management roles, and especially from leadership positions. However, having a gender-diverse leadership team increases the odds of attracting other high potential women candidates, and the data show explicit benefits to having a gender diverse sector.
04
Women are often strategic partners in the waste management supply chain.
Recognizing the role that women play in the local economy and how existing local businesses can be integrated into the waste supply chain can be an opportunity to build on local structures.
05
Recognizing women’s voices and vulnerabilities is critical to local project support.
The presence of landfills and waste processing plants also has gendered impacts on the community—failure to recognize these can exacerbate tensions with the community and heighten reputational risk for the companies involved.
Strategies to address gender gaps
Municipalities, companies, NGOs, and other stakeholders who want to improve the role of women in the plastic waste management sector should consider the following:
Create municipal waste management strategies that work for men and women, including education on plastics recycling.
Consider initiatives to train and support women waste pickers.
Consider financial inclusion.
Support women’s engagement in innovative and entrepreneurial waste recycling activities.
Create municipal waste management strategies that work for men and women, including education on plastics recycling.
Consider initiatives to train and support women waste pickers.
Consider financial inclusion.
Support women’s engagement in innovative and entrepreneurial waste recycling activities.
Fast Facts
Working with Women as Participants and Leaders can improve Plastic Waste Management.
>90%
In the city of Pune, India, for instance, women make up 90% of the waste pickers, and nearly all come from the so-called ‘untouchable’ Dalit caste.
2 Billion
Around 2 billion people worldwide lack access to regular municipal solid waste (MSW) collection and/or controlled disposal services.
Source: Wilson and Velis, Waste Management-Still a Global Challenge in the 21st Century: An Evidence-Based Call for Action, Sage Publications, 2015.
>12%
In Ghana, women account for only 12% of the formal plastics sector (including production and manufacturing, as well as waste management). Men make up 89% of plastics manufacturing and 92% of waste management jobs.
Source: Elsie Odonkor and Katherine Gilchrist, Why Gender is at the Heart of Transforming the Plastics Value Chain, World Economic Forum, May 2021.
280,000
A USAID-supported NGO called Aling Tindera helps stores in Manila become collection points for cleaned plastic, and then facilitates selling plastic back into the market. It is estimated that this would remove 280,000 metric tons of GHGs from the environment – the equivalent of removing over 60,000 cars from the road for one year.
Source: Georgia Hartman and Melinda Donnelly, Women in the Waste Sector: Unlocking Global Climate Gains through Local Action, Climate Links, 2021.
>70%
Engaging women as waste pickers and community educators can generated dramatic improvements in waste sorting. In Hoi An, Vietnam, for example, this approach reduced the amount of waste going to landfills by over 70%.
Source: GEF, “Building a Socialized Model of Domestic Waste Management in Hoi An,” 2018.
EXAMPLES AND CASE STUDIES
