Waste Workers Occupational Health and Safety
World-wide an estimated 20 million people earn their living from recycling waste (ILO Green Jobs Report, 2013). Waste picking often involves the collection, sorting, and processing of materials with little or no health and safety protections. Waste pickers may work in the streets, open dumps, sanitary landfills, and sorting warehouses, where each workplace presents different degrees of risks and vulnerabilities to waste pickers. Workers are exposed to infectious diseases from medical waste, heavy metals, dusts and chemical vapors, heat and cold stress, falls and other injuries. These precarious work conditions, along with socio-economic and psychological stress, and exposure to different forms of violence, are also factors that impact workers’ health and overall well-being. Most of these workers are under informal employment without access to social protection where on average, earnings are low and risks are high. Thus, there is no organization to train and protect workers from injuries and disease.
Project Vision
That all workers may have a safe work place and return home healthy every day
Project Mission
- Design a sustainable model for Occupational Safety Heath Program for waste workers
- Construct a framework for analyzing, envisioning and developing present and futures scenarios of waste workers’ health
- Identify funding sources for OSH projects including grants
- Educate professionals on the issues and develop projects related to the protection and health promotion of this category of workers
Project Team
To learn about the people who are involved in the WWOSH group, please follow this link
WWOSH Project areas
We are seeking grants and volunteers for transnational research projects in the areas of:
Safety training for waste workers
Research projects targeting risk reduction for workers
Design/distribute eductional materials for workers (hygiene measures)
Pilot safety and health interventions
Design a sustainable model for OSH program for waste workers
Build a database of research
Some of the projects we've worked on
WWOSH Projects
Currently we are conducting the following projects:
- WWOSH Group Most Recent Projects (2023 – 2024)
- Survey on Entomofauna of Sanitary Importance in the Territory adjacent to the Open Dump of the Structural City, Brasilia, Brazil
- Metal Detection in Biospecimens from Children of Waste Pickers living in Brasilia, Brazil
- Cuidar Project – Waste Pickers’ Health Risk Mapping
- Minas Gerais: Waste Picker Health & Safety
- Recycling networks. Grassroots resilience tackling climate, environmental and poverty challenges (2017-2019)
- Rapid assessment of health and livelihood situations of waste pickers in Dhaka City, Bangladesh (2017-2018)
- Mapping waste governance (2017-2020)
- Five-session Training Course for Recyclable Workers of the Structural Dump, Brasilia, Brazil
- Report of the Action for Prevention and Care of Health Aggravates of Waste Pickers in the Federal District, Brazil
- Waste Pickers Acquisition and Distribution of Clay Water Filters (Click here for Video)
- CAPI Faculty Research Grant: Sanitation and Waste-borne Hazards and Issues (2018-2020)