A Paradise Without Plastics
Meet the women living in an informal settlement in Fiji who manage their entire community’s waste
Every Friday, Kelera takes a walk around the Bykeitou informal settlement. But her walk is not for leisure — she is collecting recyclables and solid waste from her neighbors.
Bykeitou, a community on the outskirts of Suva, Fiji, does not have access to typical municipal services. Instead, Kelera leads four women in collecting, sorting, and transferring the entire community’s output of solid waste into a recycling hub to build a more livable community.
Pacific island countries contribute less than 2% of the world’s mismanaged plastics, but through ocean currents, they are on the receiving end of significant plastic pollution. In Fiji, tourism is the main revenue generator — a double edged sword, since tourists produce seven times more plastic waste per person per day than local households.
The impacts of plastic pollution are felt strongly in places like the Bykeitou informal settlement, where there are no formal services provided by the town council. Sometimes, when rainfall is heavy, sewage overflow ends up in the informal settlement and plastic waste clogs the waterways.
A resident of the settlement looking for a solution came in contact with the Pacific Recycling Foundation (PRF), a Fijian organization that works to raise awareness on recycling and provide support to individuals or groups involved in informal waste collection.
Through USAID’s Clean Cities, Blue Oceans program, PRF installed a recycling hub in the Bykeitou settlement to sort recyclables into three separate streams: cardboard and paper, plastic and PET bottles, and tin cans and other recyclables.
After the hub was installed, Kelera and the four other women were selected by the community to be trained and are now responsible for managing the waste in their settlement — with compensation by PRF for their services.
Informal waste collectors, referred to by PRF as Collection Pillars of Recycling, make up the backbone of the waste management infrastructure in the Pacific Islands and around the globe. PRF wants to spread the word that jobs around managing waste are dignified, honorable, and essential for cities to advance circular economies.
“Access to a clean environment should be a basic human right,” said Amitesh Deo, the CEO of PRF.
Ocean plastic pollution has reached crisis levels: every minute, an entire garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the world’s oceans — amounting to an alarming 11 million metric tons per year. These numbers would be even worse without the efforts of informal waste collectors like Kelera.
As many as 20 million people worldwide work in the informal waste sector and are responsible for over half of all plastic waste collected and recycled globally. Women make up the majority of them, and oftentimes face challenges, including discrimination, safety concerns, and limited access to basic necessities.
As part of the training for informal waste collectors, PRF has incorporated workshops on domestic violence, human rights, financial literacy, and health awareness with the assistance of expert partners. These services ensure waste pickers are empowered and treated with dignity, despite living in a settlement that is not formally recognized by the local government.
As more people move into the Bykeitou informal settlement, the need for effective waste management has grown. Through her training, Kelera learned how to pass on knowledge about waste management to the other advocates, her neighbors, and the next generation.
Donor-funded organizations like PRF are essential in the Pacific Islands, where local governments are often overwhelmed by the cost of managing environment-related challenges with sea levels rising and more frequent extreme weather events occurring due to climate change.
In parallel to its support to PRF, USAID’s Clean Cities, Blue Ocean program is also helping the cities of Suva and Lautoka in Fiji, Kolonia in Micronesia, and Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea to assess their operations, estimate waste management costs, identify gaps, and prioritize solutions.
Across the Pacific Islands region, USAID has prevented the equivalent of more than 118,000 plastic bottles from leaking into the environment through recovery efforts that diverted material from landfills and into the circular economy.
USAID is supporting PRF’s efforts to form a regional alliance among the recycling associations from six Pacific nations to give them a stronger voice in advocating for the changes needed to end plastic pollution and make progress toward the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.
USAID launched the Save Our Seas Initiative in June 2022 with the goal of ending the flow of plastic pollution into the ocean by 2040. To date, the initiative has prevented the equivalent of more than 127 billion plastic bottles from polluting our environment. Under this initiative, Clean Cities, Blue Ocean has been the Agency’s global flagship program to strengthen waste management systems and transition toward more circular economies, city by city.
Learn more about USAID’s work to end ocean plastic pollution in the Pacific Islands.
About the Author
Ali Syverson is a Communications and Knowledge Management Specialist in the Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security.
