Long before municipal trucks begin their rounds in South Africa’s neighbourhoods, waste reclaimers are already at work. They move through household bins, kerbsides and public spaces, pulling out whatever can be recycled and returned to the economy. Their labour, largely unseen, keeps valuable materials out of landfill and feeds the country’s recycling value chain from its very first link.
That work is now the focus of Episode 2 of Stepping into the Circular Economy, a six-part documentary series produced by the Sustainability Communication Company (SUSCO) in partnership with the EPR Waste Association of South Africa (eWASA). While conversations about the circular economy often centre on sustainability targets, policies and recycling rates, the episode deliberately shifts attention to the people doing the work on the ground.
For the reclaimers themselves, the day begins at the point where most of the system has not yet started. They are often the first to recover recyclable materials from the waste stream, collecting items before these reach municipal disposal facilities or landfill. By recovering materials from household and commercial waste, they help ensure that items with recycling potential are not simply lost to disposal. In practice, that makes reclaimers an important part of the collection network supplying materials to the downstream recycling industry.
But picking up the material is only the beginning of what determines its worth. The value of what a reclaimer recovers depends on how effectively it is separated and sorted. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), aluminium cans and cardboard all need to be sorted by type to hold their value and satisfy the requirements of buyers and recyclers. This sorting process sits at the heart of the recycling value chain. When materials are correctly separated, they can be sold and processed as secondary raw materials rather than treated as waste with no further use. When they are not, the effort of recovery risks being undone.
Meanwhile, the episode looks beyond collection and sorting to a larger question: how reclaimers might be brought into the formal waste management system itself. Extended producer responsibility, or EPR, offers a framework for that. By extending producers’ responsibility for the products and packaging they place on the market, EPR can help fund and strengthen collection, recovery and recycling activities across the value chain.
For the people whose livelihoods depend on recovery, recognition within these systems matters. Reclaimers already perform a significant collection function, often without formal acknowledgement. Better integration could recognise that contribution while supporting the development of a more coordinated and effective recycling network. The alternative, the episode suggests, is a system that values the materials but overlooks the hands that recover them.
The broader point for South Africa, as the documentary frames it, is one of perspective. Building a circular economy means looking beyond the materials being recovered and recognising the people and enterprises that make recovery possible. The reclaimers who sort PET from HDPE, who separate cans from cardboard before dawn, are not peripheral to the recycling value chain. They are its foundation, and the sustainability goals the country pursues on paper rest, in practical terms, on the work they do every day.
Episode 2 places that reality at the centre of the story, asking viewers to see the recycling system not only as infrastructure and policy, but as people: those who collect, those who sort, and the communities whose waste becomes, through their effort, a resource rather than a burden. Whether formal recognition follows remains the open question the series leaves hanging.