WORKING PAPERS
ECONOMICS
Giuseppe Danese
Católica Porto Business School – CEGE – Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Waste picking has a long history in Colombia, and this activity has attracted much academic
scrutiny (cf. Ruiz-Restrepo & Barnes, 2010; Medina 2007, Chapter 7, and references cited therein).
Waste collection and other public services find comprehensive treatment in Law 142 of 1994,
heavily amended over the years. This law at Article 15 lists the actors who can provide public
services, namely public service companies (art. 15.1)3
; other physical and legal persons that
provide public services (art. 15.2); the municipal authorities, when they take on public service
provision directly (art. 15.3); and “authorized organizations” in small towns, rural areas or specific
urban areas (art. 15.4). Article 17 dictates specific organizational forms for providers of public
services: “public service companies are stock corporations […].” The law makes an exception for
those “decentralized entities,” local or national, whose owners do not wish to form a stock
corporation. These entities can adopt the form of “industrial and commercial enterprise.” The law
also establishes at art. 40 so-called Exclusive Service Areas contracted out exclusively, and for a
given period, to private companies. The decisions regarding contracting out decisions are taken at
the city-level.
The waste pickers and their organizations are not mentioned in the law and are therefore
excluded from directly providing public services such as sanitation and recycling. This lack of
recognition is puzzling because at the time of the enactment of the law the waste pickers were
3 All the translations from Spanish are the author’s unless otherwise stated.
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already a familiar presence, especially in Bogotá. In the absence of any legal recognition, let alone
of any attribution of rights of access to waste, the access of waste pickers to waste was guaranteed
essentially by custom, and by the absence of any national strategy of recycling, which left the
recycling business in urban areas to the effort of the waste pickers. The waste pickers of Bogotá
formed in 1990 a membership-based organization, the Association of Recyclers of Bogotá (ARB),
with the support of a Catholic organization. The ARB has been the leading advocate of the waste
pickers’ rights in the judiciary of the country, with effects that extend well beyond its membership.
The ARB challenged in court the organizational requirements of law 142, losing the battle in
front of the Constitutional Court of Colombia (ruling number C-741 of 2003). Later laws continued
to ignore or antagonize the waste pickers. Law 1259 of 2008 established at art. 6 that sorting
through garbage after it has been placed for collection is an infraction, subject to sanctions. An
earlier Decree (number 1713 of 2002) had established that garbage, once deposited in containers,
becomes the property of the municipality, and denied the waste pickers access to sanitary landfills,
an early case of denial of access (or “dispossession,” cf. Samson, 2015, p. 13)4
. The ARB
challenged Law 1259. The Constitutional Court, in ruling C 793 of 2009, found that while the
motivations behind the law might have been praiseworthy (promoting “civic culture”), in practice
it affected the waste pickers negatively. The Court declared constitutional the law, with the
understanding that it “cannot impede the effective exercise of the activity of the informal waste
pickers.” This ruling was one of the first establishing the legitimacy of the waste picker’s work.
Later rulings of the Constitutional Court (e.g., rulings T-724 of 2003 and T-291 of 2009)
established that waste pickers enjoy the status of disadvantaged class, protected by article 13 of
the Colombian Constitution, legal victories that some of the participants in the IEMS focus group
still remember. In ruling T-724 of 2003, the Court found that the Bogotá public service company
(UAESP) did not put in place affirmative actions for the waste pickers in its call for bids. The
Court (section 3) asked the city of Bogotá to include the waste pickers in future calls for the
management of the city’s waste, “due to the fact that the activity that they [the waste pickers]
4 Such attempts at “dispossession” of waste might be taken as evidence of the efforts of municipal administrations to
fully privatize municipal waste management services (cf. the remarks above about the force of “neoliberalism” in the
regulation of this sector). Robinson (2016) discusses the history and political economy of Colombian institutions. He
points out that fraud in elections, vote buying and clientelism are some of the causes of the “extractive” nature of
Colombian political institutions. These peculiarities of the Colombian political process left some classes, according to
Robinson, disempowered. The waste pickers might be victims, therefore, of a more general inability of the Colombian
democracy, especially in the past, to represent and empower bottom-of-the-pyramid groups of individuals.
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pursue is linked to this service, with the aim of achieving real conditions of equality and complying
with the social duties of the State.”
In a call published in 2010, the UAESP required bidding companies to include waste pickers
as shareholders. Again, the ARB challenged the UAESP in front of the Constitutional Court (Auto
268 of 10), alleging that the mandate contained in ruling T-724 of 2003 had not been put in practice
in the new call. In Auto 275 of 2011 the Court established that the mere shareholding requirement,
be the shareholders the waste pickers or associations such as the ARB, is not an effective way to
recognize the role of waste pickers as “waste entrepreneurs”, a notion that goes back to another
earlier ruling about the rights of waste pickers in Colombia’s third largest city, Cali (ruling T-291
of 2009). The economic rights of waste pickers include the right to pursue their activity on a selfemployment basis, or through an association, rather than being simply employed by or
shareholders of public service companies. The Court reiterated in Auto 275 of 2011 that “the
material participation of the waste pickers in the activities of recovery and reuse of waste is
fundamental, not only as workers but as entrepreneurs of waste, in which they can employ the
knowledge they have acquired during the years and capitalize on the environmental benefits that
their activity represents for the city.”
In March 2013, the City introduced a payment system to the waste pickers for their collection
and recycling efforts. In 2017 this payment was $29 per ton collected of recyclables5
. Only a
minority of waste pickers have been so far eligible to receive this payment, which has encountered
difficulties discussed in a December 2016 interview with the ARB’s historical leader Nohra
Padilla.3 A recent legislative intervention (Decree 596 of 2016) imposes a mandatory census of
the waste picking populations, and the full formalization in a five-year time frame of the waste
pickers, within a new general framework for waste collection and recycling that local
administrations must develop. According to the press release of the competent Ministry (Housing,
Cities, and Territory), the decree has been debated with over 90 organizations of waste pickers
over a period of 9 months.4 The new model proposed by the ministry envisions the separation as
5 Cf. https://www.newsdeeply.com/womenandgirls/articles/2017/10/16/how-colombias-women-waste-pickersfought-for-the-right-to-recycle.
3 Cf. http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/bogota/situacion-de-los-recicladores-igual-de-hace-30-anos-noh-articulo671195 .
4 Cf. http://www.minvivienda.gov.co/sala-de-prensa/noticias/2016/abril/por-primera-vez-colombia-expidenormatividad-en-reconocimiento-a-la-labor-de-los-recicladores-dentro-del-servicio-publico-de-aseo-minvivienda.
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done by households, the waste pickers collecting at designated points, and receiving payments
from the city for collection plus the proceeds from the sale of recyclables.