Grievance Mechanisms: an opportunity to enforce social and environmental standards within circular economy

Recently large companies such as Auchan, Carrefour, Casino, Danone, Lactalis, Les Mousquetaires, Picard Surgelés, Nestlé France and McDonald's France were put on blast by a coalition of NGOs for "the insufficiency of their actions in reducing the risks linked to plastic pollution". One of these company is currently under prosecution. They were reminded of their “duty of vigilance”.

The French duty of vigilance is set in place by law No. 2017-399 of 27 March 2017 on the corporate duty of vigilance for parent and instructing companies. In effect, this law requires companies with more than 5000 employees in the country and more than 10000 worldwide to map the social and environmental risks that are linked to their supply chains and to pro-actively implement the means to remedy them. While the initial focus was on social issues, taking roots from such tragic accidents as the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse – where more than 1100 people have died and 2500 more were severely injured because of several engineering and administrative failures – nowadays the duty of vigilance is increasingly recognizing and stressing the importance of remedying the environmental risks linked to supply chains.

Several recent press articles have been drawing their readers’ attention to the environmental risks linked not only to the explosion in the use of plastic packaging, but also to the risks related to its recycling, while simultaneously highlighting the responsibility large corporations hold in the increase of mentioned negative impacts through, for example, perpetuating the myth of recycling’s supposedly virtuous nature. It is non-negotiable that the negative impact of packaging on the environment must be reduced through the embracement of such practices as eco-design, tax incentives, ban of single-use packaging, transparency vis-à-vis the consumer and the development of recycling techniques that pollute less as a result of deploying local industrial transformation solutions. However, we believe that social circumstances of workers in the recycling value chain pose a major risk that is yet to be sufficiently addressed by companies.

We are particularly thinking of the 18 million waste pickers (a.k.a collectors, ragpickers, Zabbaleen, Edjaïs, Pemulung, Pepenador, Cartonero, Catador) that collect and sort, in some developing countries, up to 20% of all waste material. The vast majority of the waste pickers work in the informal sector and live in poverty. There are also many cases of forced labor and child labor, where adults and children alike rummage the streets to collect and sort the waste; it is reported that “children employed in informal recycling activities are generally considered to be employed in a worst form of child labor” (VERITE, 2020). Furthermore, informal waste pickers are not renumerated fairly for their work: even though in 2021 the global recycling industry was reportedly “worth about 410 billion dollars” and “with profit margins ranging from 30% to 60%”, most of the value is captured not by the waste pickers but by the intermediaries and the processing industry (AcoRecycling, 2021). Thus, consumers may believe they are doing the right thing by buying a product with recycled plastic packaging and not even suspect that the plastic has been collected by a child or an adult in deplorable working conditions for a pay of less than 2 euros per day.

Yet there are solutions for ensuring the fairer distribution of the economic value across the recycling value chain as well as improving waste pickers’ working and living conditions. Many different actors are simultaneously trying to intervene and work on building and strengthening waste-pickers capacities to improve their access to decent employment (defined by ILO as “productive work for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity”) for the invisible heroes and heroines of the planet. These actors include such associations as Women in Informal Employment (WIEGO), development institutions like Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Agence française de développement (AFD), as well as private companies like Danone – with its Danone Ecosystem Fund – and some others.

The InclusEO team, which has been working since its inception on the development of best practices for collection and recycling of waste, including the waste pickers, has identified key elements of remediation that can contribute to the scaling up of a circular and inclusive economy.