IFC’s Gender and Infrastructure Toolkit Business case: Plastics

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.
Scroll down

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.
Open the Business Case Build my Toolkit
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.
Learn more
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.
Learn more
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.
Learn more
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.
Learn more
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.
Learn more

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.
For more information and resources, see:

Open the Business Case Explore the Tool Suites
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
WeCyclers
In Nigeria, WeCyclers is a woman-founded social enterprise that incentivizes recycling for citizens in Lagos. Households sign up online and then receive instructions for waste separation. Waste is collected via cargo bike, and households receive points, based on weight, via an SMS platform. Points can be redeemed for household goods, electronics, and even cash, and then recyclable goods are sold onwards for recycling.1 WeCyclers recycled 525 tons of waste in its first two years of operation and won numerous awards.2

1 The Borgen Project, “How Recycling in Nigeria Can Help the Poor”, March 27, 2023.

2 Les Grands Moyens, “Small is Powerful—Nigeria”, May 14, 2015.

Women Waste Pickers of Pune: Creating their Own Way Forward
In the city of Pune, India, women make up 90% of the waste pickers, and nearly all come from the so-called ‘untouchable’ Dalit caste. The waste pickers of Pune have not only unionized, but they also formed India’s first wholly owned cooperative of self-employed waste pickers, which entered into a memorandum of understanding with the city of Pune in 2008. As a result, the women wear uniforms identifying them as waste pickers and have access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and improved gear such as motorized carts. As a result, they work less for more money. And with door-to-door collection, waste spends less time degrading in landfills, which improves waste quality.1 Remarkably, the Pune waste pickers cooperative is still operating in 2024, and it has expanded the services it offers its members, which include microcredit loans. The cooperative has also expanded into other areas of municipal service provision, such as composting, biogas plant management, and e-waste collection to augment members’ earnings.2 The anchor contract from the city of Pune has therefore had significant multiplier effects in addition to increasing the efficiency of waste collection.

1 Carlin Carr, “Untouchable to indispensable: the Dalit women revolutionising waste in India“, The Guardian, July 1, 2014.

2 Ardhara Nair, “How Pune Sanitation Workers Joined Hands to Improve Each Others’ Lives”, Times of India, May 1, 2023.

Rebricks
In Indonesia, Rebricks was founded by two women to process and transform plastic waste into bricks for paving and construction.1 Rebricks can currently recycle the waste from 88,000 plastic sachets per day—33 million sachets per year—into building materials.

1 Niki Bruce, “When Ovy met Novita: Two women remaking the construction industry with recycled plastic”, Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore, 2020.

CresaTech
In India, female founded CresaTech aims to transform the menstrual pad disposal space: approximately 12 billion menstrual pads are disposed of yearly in India. CresaTech’s pads are plastic-free and water-soluble, aiming to drastically reduce the number of pads that find their way into landfills or incinerators.1

1 For more information, visit CresaTech’s website.

RePurpose Global
RePurpose Global is a plastic credit platform created by Svanika Balasubramanian and her two cofounders as a result of their joint master’s thesis on one of the largest waste dumps in Mumbai, India. Like being carbon neutral, RePurpose enables individuals and businesses to become “plastic neutral” and take responsibility for their plastic footprint by funding recycling of the same amount of plastic waste they produce. RePurpose currently funds plastic recovery projects across six countries and is working with partners internationally to create a global plastic offset standard.1 Embedding gender equality into RePurpose from the start was a key goal of the founders.

1 For more information, visit rePurpose’s website.

EXPLORE OTHER BUSINESS CASES

Water

Mining

Energy

Transport