PASSAGE 18 (Questions 1-5)

Among those suffering from the global recession are millions of workers, who are not even included in the official statistics urban recyclers the trash pickers, sorters, traders and reprocessors who extricate paper, cardboard and plastics from garbage heaps and prepare them for reuse. Their work is both unrecorded and largely unrecognised, even though in some parts of the world they handle as much as 20% of all waste. The world's 15 million informal recyclers clean up cities, prevent some trash from ending in landfills and thus reduce climate change by saving energy on waste disposal techniques like incineration. In the developed countries they are the preferred ones since they recycle waste much more cheaply and efficiently than government or private corporations can. In the developing world on the other hand, they provide the only recycling services except for a few big cities. But as recession hits the markets worldwide, the price of scrap metal, paper and plastic has also fallen. Recyclers throughout the world are experiencing a sharp drop in income. Trash pickers and scrap dealers saw a decline of as much as 80% in the price of scrap from October 2007 to October 2009. In some countries scrap dealers have shuttered so quickly that researchers at the Solid Waste Management Association didn't have a chance to record their losses.In Delhi, some 80% of families in the informal recycling business surveyed by an organisation said they had cut back on 'luxury foods,' which they defined as fruits, milk and meat. About 41% had stopped buying milk for their children. By this summer, most of these children, already malnourished, hadn't had a glass of milk in 9 months.

Many of these children have also cut down on hours spent in school to work alongside their parents. Families have liquidated their most valuable assets primarily copper from electrical wires and have stopped sending remittances back to their rural villages. Many have also sold their emergency stores of grain. Their misery is not as familiar as that of the laid-off workers of big-name, but imploding, service sector corporations, but it is often more tragic. Few countries have adopted emergency measures to help trash pickers. Brazil, for one, is providing 'recyclers', or 'catadores,' with cheaper food, both through arrangements with local farmers and by offering food subsidies. Other countries, with the support of non-governmental organisations and donor agencies are following Brazil's example. Unfortunately, most trash pickers operate outside official notice and end up falling through the cracks of programmes like these. In the long-run, though, these invisible workers will remain especially vulnerable to economic slowdowns unless they are integrated into the formal business sector, where they can have insurance and reliable wages.

This is not hard to accomplish. Informal junk shops should have to apply for licenses and governments should create or expand doorstep waste collection programmes to employ trash pickers. Instead of sorting through haphazard trash heaps and landfills, the pickers would have access to the cleaner scrap that comes from households. The need of the hour, however, is a more immediate solution. An efficient but temporary solution would be for governments where they'd have to pay a small subsidy to waste dealers so they could purchase scrap from trash pickers at about 20% above the current price. This increase, if well advertised and broadly utilised, would bring recyclers a higher price and eventually bring them back from the brink. Trash pickers make our cities healthier and more liveable. We all stand to gain by making sure that the work of recycling remains sustainable for years to come.  

[New India Assurance (AO), 2009]

Which of the following is not true in the context of the passage?