By Christine Hegel
On the first of May of this year, plumbers, food vendors, teachers, and others marched throughout the city center of Buenos Aires in celebration of May Day, holding signs that called for solidarity, respect for the popular economy, and the rights of workers. Among them were Samuel Le Coeur and Regine Assoumou Atanga, representatives of Association des Marchés d’Economies Locales et Individuelles Organisés de la Récupération (AMELIOR), a Paris-based alliance of waste pickers, scrap dealers, and second-hand goods sellers. They marched with hundreds of waste pickers from around the world who were gathered in Buenos Aires for the First Elective Congress of the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, an historic event for a labor sector that has been incrementally building local, regional, and international solidarity for decades, thanks in part to the efforts of Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). I was invited to attend as a researcher and observer due to my involvement in the emerging movement for waste picker rights and recognition in North America.
One week later, back in Paris, Le Coeur was already fielding calls from AMELIOR workers who were encountering issues getting around the city to make regular pick-ups of discarded materials because of road closures due to the upcoming Olympics. “We can’t cross the bridges easily to get into the central neighborhoods,” Le Coeur said. “A pick-up that would normally take ten minutes is now taking over an hour.” The system of zoned restrictions in the city also means that many of their partners, mostly small businesses, decided to close and leave Paris during the Games. “The whole area is a kind of desert,” he added. This has reduced their access to discarded materials for resale and diminished earnings for members. In addition, the unauthorized markets that normally operate within these zones have disappeared due to increased police presence and limited road access.
Olympic host cities are well known for ‘clean-up’ efforts designed to make the areas where events are held, as well as where the athletes and spectators are housed, appear safe and sanitary. This was certainly true for the last summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Likewise, according to a recent LA Times piece, French officials have implemented a large-scale relocation plan to move people out of venue areas. The practice is being dubbed ‘social cleansing’ by local groups in Paris and has hit recent migrants hardest, as they comprise the largest unhoused population and have the fewest options for financial or social support when conditions shift that expose them to even greater precarity. According to Le Coeur, many AMELIOR members who live in the informal settlements near the Olympic torch route have been directly impacted.
Most of AMELIOR’s members are Roma and North African migrants, with a smaller percentage from China and South Asia, all of whom experience forms of exclusion from the so-called formal economy. Over 700 members in Paris rely on access to used goods markets for their daily survival. Moreover, their recycling and recuperation efforts have a positive impact on landfill diversion rates: AMELIOR members collect and sell more than twenty tons of clothing and other household items every month, and 70 percent of those items are collected directly from the trash.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has declared that this will be the first ‘carbon-neutral’ Olympics, issuing a multi-faceted Legacy and Sustainability Plan. The plan includes the stated aim to “Set up a circular economy for the Games.” Some of the circularity strategies they articulate include responsible purchasing, sustainable catering, and eco-design using recyclable and recycled materials. Meanwhile, hundreds of AMELIOR members are unable to do their work, stalling a quotidian and highly effective node of the circular economy in the city at large in lieu of new partnerships that make for good press.
All of this suggests that the circular economy of the 2024 Olympics is envisioned as confined strictly to Olympic venues and markets. As Jules Boykoff recently argued in Scientific American, the historical sustainability of the Paris Olympics is largely greenwashing, aided by corporate partners. It is also excluding those who have been playing a truly sustainable and vital role in circularity for decades. As Le Coeur points out, this is particularly lamentable given France’s historical commitment to and legal recognition of gleaning.
The Legacy and Sustainability plan purports to value the contributions and innovations of poor and marginalized populations, observing that “The Social and Solidarity Economy represents a considerable source of innovation, but major sporting events have thus far failed to take significant advantage of this sector.” The IOC plan to address this shortfall is to” inform and support very small, small and medium-sized businesses” to facilitate their ability to serve as vendors for the Olympics. This excludes informal economy workers like the members of AMELIOR. They don’t want contracts. They want their right to work, access to discarded materials that are part of the commons and that still have value, and to be seen as part of the sustainability plan. Instead, they are being ‘cleaned out’ of Paris.
Christine Hegel is a professor of anthropology at Western Connecticut State University, and Chair of the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section