KKPKP, the trade union of waste pickers, itinerant waste buyers, waste collectors, and other informal recyclers in the Indian city of Pune, has helped these workers get integrated into municipal waste management systems.

After three years of discussions, debates, legal advice, and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures, the Spirit of Youth NGO representing Cairo's recycling communities has finally been given the green light to formally organize the capital's garbage collectors and recyclers in a syndicate.

Once again, the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers and Allies participated in the annual UN Climate Summit (COP17) and related events in Durban, South Africa, which gathered politicians, private sector investors, NGOs, and social movements from all over the world to discuss and agree on solutions to stop climate change.

Case studies of the CDM's landfill and incinerator projects, which increase greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution while displacing waste pickers' livelihoods.

The presence of UN climate change negotiations in Tianjin, China, in October 2010, provided a wonderful opportunity to bring together three budding streams of GAIA’s work: a growing network of Zero Waste organizations in China; connections with grassroots recyclers around the world; and efforts to rectify global climate policy and redirect subsidies from “waste-to-energy” towards Zero Waste.

Reducing, reusing, and recycling municipal waste is one of the easiest and most effective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It also provides gainful employment to millions of people in the developing world, mostly in the informal sector (“wastepickers”). Yet rather than supporting these efforts, climate funds such as the Clean Development Mechanism are subsidizing incinerators and landfill gas systems, which compete directly with recycling and increase emissions, unemployment, and public costs. A new, non-market, climate finance mechanism is needed to support the formalization and expansion of the informal recycling sector.

One of the two panel discussions at the Pune launch of the Indian edition of the State of the World 2009 was ‘The Urban Perspective: Resilience, Justice and Governance’.