Browsing by Author "Moyo, Thandazile"

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    The myth of livelihoods through urban mining: The case of e-waste pickers in Cape Town
    (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2022) Chitaka, Takunda Y.; Moyo, Thandazile; Gihring, Katharina
    Waste pickers are widely acknowledged as an integral part of the formal and informal economy, diverting waste into the secondary resource economy through urban mining. Urban mining in itself is considered to be a source of livelihoods. We investigated the livelihoods of e-waste pickers through 110 surveys in Cape Town, South Africa. Waste pickers often indicated that they were engaged in the sector not by choice but by necessity, expressing that earning money is the only enjoyable aspect of their job. The results from the study substantiate that it is unlikely that waste pickers could survive on e-waste picking alone as 83.3% of reported incomes were below minimum wage, with 22.9% below the food poverty line. Thus, the majority of waste pickers collected a wide array of recyclables. We also found that the waste pickers in Cape Town engage in multiple e-waste related activities, including collection, dismantling and processing to a lesser extent.
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    Urban mining versus Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM): An interrogation of their contribution to sustainable livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa
    (Elsevier, 2022) Moyo, Thandazile; Chitaka, Takunda Y.; Lotter, Aysha
    Electronic waste (e-waste) recycling and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) are activities that are increasingly finding uptake as a means of providing livelihoods in the face of high unemployment, especially in the developing world. Informal e-waste recycling is typically practiced by individuals or groups of people who collect end-of-use and end-of-life electronic and electrical equipment which they can repair or refurbish and resell as well as break down to sell valuable components. E-waste recycling is a form of urban mining; thus, the intention of the paper is to draw parallels between this form of mining and artisanal gold mining. Artisanal miners extract virgin minerals while ‘urban miners’ reclaim metals from various waste streams. Both sectors are characterized by high levels of informality and their activities are largely practiced as a means of livelihood. We used the sustainable livelihoods framework (SLF) as a tool to draw this comparison based on available literature on the two sectors, complemented by anecdotal field data. It was found that the livelihood capitals are similar between the two sectors and that there are strong similarities in the vulnerability contexts, with a notable dif- ference being that informal ASM, which has a more significant interaction with the natural environment, places higher demands on natural and physical capital such as land and water pollution and limited access to transport. Recommendations are made on how to strengthen the different capitals of sustainable livelihoods in the hope that these will inform policy decisions on informal sector activities.