Inclusive Waste Recycling Consortium (iWrc)
Advancing health and well-being for waste-pickers while connecting them with companies in need of ethically sourced recycled material.
What is iWrc?
iWrc is a digitally enabled platform for buying and selling Social Fingerprinted® recycled material. It enables a people-first circular economy, connecting brands in need of recycled materials with socially responsible waste-picking cooperatives, and improving health, safety, and financial wellbeing of waste pickers in the process.
SAI has partnered with iWrc to create a social impact collaboration, the first of its kind, in the emerging market waste recycling sector.
Visit the iWrc Website
Background
Increasingly, major brands and companies recognize and work to reduce the enormous environmental impacts of their businesses, often in response to government regulations. But, as demand for recycled materials grows, the human side of the recycling industry is often ignored.
In much of the world, waste is sorted not by machinery, but by millions of individual waste pickers—a majority of them women—who collect recyclable trash from open dumps and sell their finds to a local aggregator at the going market rate.
Waste picking is often done by the most marginalized people in a society, and recycling cooperatives are among the least visible parts of the global supply chain. At iWrc, we put waste pickers and recycling cooperatives at the heart of everything we do.
About iWrc
Program Goals
- Improve health, safety, and financial wellbeing for waste pickers through targeted training, capacity building, and priority market access.
- Secure demand and create a marketplace for ethically collected recycled material.
- Advance the role of social performance in the circular economy conversation.
Program Activities
SAI visits waste-picking cooperatives and helps to measure and improve their Social Fingerprint, covering issues such as health and safety, wages and hours, and protections against child and forced labor. We then work with them to prioritize areas for improvement, develop an improvement plan, implement management systems, and deliver targeted training and capacity building.
What is Social Fingerprint?
Social Fingerprint is a program by SAI that helps organizations measure and improve their social performance (working conditions) and management systems (underlying processes).
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