Recycling Iranian style

The Guardian

In the evenings, as roaming roves of feral cats vie for food scraps in the side streets of Iran's large cities, 28-year-old Majid is hard at work. Shoulder-deep inside a rancid bin of unsorted garbage, he fills his bags with recyclable treasures, slouching under the weight of plastic and aluminum as he saunters from alley to alley. Most residents ignore Majid in his stained threadbare clothes, assuming he is a drug addict, but those in the local garbage collection fold consider him an outlaw and a dangerous competitor. Dodging police and city-contracted truckers attempting to steal his stash, he is the foot soldier of black-market recycling - a profitable venture that yields millions for those at the top of the food chain.

With a majority of Iranian households uninformed about their recycling options, municipal governments relegate these duties to public and private contractors. After collecting and sorting the public's refuse, Iranian companies export the broken-down materials to countries like China and Pakistan, which use recycled plastic and aluminum in their manufacturing industries. Only local governments and licensed contractors are legally permitted to handle the trash produced by Iran's 75 million inhabitants, but lax enforcement has given rise to an elaborate underground operation that experts say is "illegal from the ground up."

The "dirt gold mafia," as it is sometimes referred to by authorities, arose from a 2006 Iranian law adopting the international packaging designation PET, or polyethylene terephthalate. In local soft drink manufacturing, the use of this plastic quickly displaced glass with the rising popularity of family-sized bottles. Local entrepreneurs began recovering the used bottles, chopping them into flakes and shipping them off to China, where the PET was converted into fibers for use in computer manufacturing.

“It’s a very profitable business," says Behrouz, 40, a Tehran-based metallurgical engineer and an expert on local recycling practices. "It was rumored that the previous government created and ran a complex outside the city of Garmsar [near former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hometown] for that purpose. From what I know, all recovered PET was exported.”

Initially, some 200 privately owned recycling plants handled the collection and export of PET, incurring startup costs of 30 to 150 billion rials ($1-5 million) per unit, according to expert estimates. Nearly three-quarters of these plants have shut down in the past six years, driven out of business by a network of trash collectors whose illegal activities have been largely ignored by the government, according to critics.

Over the past year, Kamyar Filsoofi, vice president of the Iranian Association of Recycling Industries, has publicly faulted the national Department of Environment on numerous occasions for not exercising proper oversight of the field. In one statement, he declared that “the recycling industry has to purchase their material from scavengers and the ‘dirt gold mafia,’ which controls prices, raising them in the summer and lowering them in the winter. The pulse of the market is in the hands of the roaming scavengers.”

In earlier decades, the haven for freelance trash collectors like Majid were the sprawling landfills outside highly populated urban areas. "In the hours before daybreak, the piles of waste appeared to be buzzing, like a beehive," says Sohrab Mahdavi, a former employee of the Recycling Organization of the City of Tehran, recalling his regular visits to the Kahrizak Landfill, 25 kilometers south of the city. At the time, the municipality referred to these worker bees as the “recycling families,” who walked on the stretches of garbage for kilometers, even as bulldozers compacted the ground beneath their feet. The laborers were specialized, said Mahdavi, each gathering a specific type of waste. "Many were so poor as to not have proper shoes. But waste was their source of livelihood."

In more recent years, new safety regulations have pushed these so-called "scavengers" off the landfills and into the city streets, especially well-to-do neighborhoods where lucrative trash is more abundant. This exodus has played into the hands of profiteers, who buy out the contents of the workers' gunnysacks for a fraction of their own profit.

According to Behrouz, the dirt gold mafia is organized like a pyramid. The scavengers sell their items to the first illegal collector, who purchases packages in the ten-kilogram range. These collectors sell on to mid-level dealers who specialize in transactions in the hundreds of kilograms. At the top of the food chain, the big fish conduct transactions in metric tons, selling the spoils to legitimate recycling firms that prepare the material for export.

“When refuse is in the public space, on the streets, it belongs to the city," says Behrouz. "But as soon as it enters a private space, neither the municipality, nor the [national] government, nor their contractors may lay a claim on it. They can confiscate from the scavengers only before they have delivered their piles, but not after.”

Majid, who works in Mashhad, takes his salvaged cans and bottles to Toos Boulevard, where many stores that sell “damaged goods” buy items from scavengers. While prices fluctuate with supply, the going rate is around ten cents for a kilo of plastics, and 33 cents for aluminum, which is then resold for over 80 cents per kilo. "They’re thieves, wolves," Majid complains. "We do the heavy lifting, but then the money goes into these people’s pockets."

On an average workday, which extends from noon until well after midnight, workers like Majid collect around 35 kilos of trash and earn around 200,000 rials ($20). Sunburnt, famished, and slumping beneath their bundles of treasure, they have little choice but to sell the items at pitifully low prices, feeding the fruits of their labor into the mouths of a greedy and illegal industry. “The city doesn’t buy our stuff," says Majid, who has a family to feed. "Even if it does, they pay with salt and other such things that are useless to me. I need the money."