Consolidated annual income of waste pickers : GBP 9.2m
Turnover of administrative wing : GBP 571,000
Highlights of their unique approach
Unlike conventional profit-centric solid waste management (SWM) agencies, SWaCH has a waste picker-centric model, where individual workers are co-owners. SWaCH is creating and sustaining livelihood opportunities for informal waste pickers, while solving the pressing environmental problem of waste.
Highlights of their unique design
SWaCH is the only worker-owned cooperative working in the waste management sector with a democratic governance model that puts waste pickers at the centre of decision making. Their distributive financial mechanism enables direct payments to waste pickers from households, eliminating corruption and transaction costs. The money saved by the city by eliminating these costs, is channelled towards social security and welfare support for waste pickers. Waste pickers contribute a small monthly amount from their earnings towards a livelihood fund which is used to support new livelihoods and as a financial buffer to support the organisation in difficult times.
Waste pickers participating in the governance of SWaCH
02 | Industry Context: Waste Management, Informal Economy & Cooperatives
India generates 62 million tonnes of waste annually. About 43 million tonnes (70%) is are collected, with 12 million tonnes treated and 31 million tonnes dumped in landfills (CSE 2019). The Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission has driven city governments to provide door-to-door waste collection and processing. Due to a lack of technical, financial, and administrative capacity, there has been a rapid move towards the privatization of waste management services. This shift has led to increased mechanization, a focus on visual cleanliness over sustainability, and the adoption of so-called technological interventions such as incineration and waste-to-energy.
However, this transition has systematically excluded the informal sector, particularly waste pickers. These individuals, a majority of whom are women, often from historically socially ostracized communities, rely on collecting recyclables from streets, landfills, and other waste accumulation sites for their livelihoods. An estimated 500,000 waste pickers in Maharashtra derive their household income from the collection and sale of recyclable materials. Their exclusion highlights a significant social and economic issue within the evolving waste management landscape.
India recycles 12% - 13% of its plastic waste, higher than the 4% - 5% in developed countries (where informal waste economy is negligible). This difference is largely due to the informal sector, which facilitates 60% - 80% of plastic recycling.
When integrated into formal systems, such as in Pune, where waste pickers help recycle up to 35% of dry waste, they save the local government substantial costs. Despite their contributions, waste pickers face harassment and lack formal recognition. The Solid Waste Management Rules 2016 and Plastic Waste Management Rules 2016 acknowledge their role, leading some cities to integrate them into waste management. However, this integration remains inconsistent, with many cities unaware of how to effectively involve waste pickers. Some have even designed systems that unintentionally reduce access of waste pickers to waste and sorting spaces. Although they are an integral part of the waste recycling economy, they operate on the fringes of formal municipal SWM systems.
The state of Maharashtra has been the hub of the cooperative movement in India. It has mature, well-developed structures and laws for establishing , operating, and managing cooperatives. However, to a great extent, this development has been restricted to primary produce (from agriculture) and finance and banking cooperatives. While labour cooperatives are prevalent, their credibility is often questionable. Yet, this relatively matured system has allowed a unique cooperative like SWaCH to be established and thrive in the waste management sector.
03 | Founding Story and Current Operations
SWaCH emerged out of a trade union called Kagad Kach Patra Kasthkari Panchayat (KKPKP) that was set up in 1993. KKPKP is actively involved in mobilizing the sector of informal waste pickers, advocating to resolve their problems, and working towards the larger struggle against injustice and exploitation prevalent against informal waste pickers. One of the many highlights of the trade union’s efforts was successfully seeking recognition from the state government for waste pickers as “workers" and waste collection as legitimate “work.” This led to the city of Pune to recognize , for the first time in the country, the contribution of informal waste pickers in urban waste management and formally authorizing them to collect waste from houses. They were issued ID cards, followed by other benefits such as medical insurance.
In 2008, SWaCH was registered as a worker cooperative , and was commissioned to work on the city’s waste management system. Today, it has 3,761 self-reliant worker owners that provide daily front end doorstep waste collection service to over 4 million citizens of Pune. 70% of the workforce is women and over 93% belong to economically and socially excluded sections of society (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes). SWaCH waste pickers recycle 200+ tonnes of waste every day, or 70,000+ tonnes per annum, saving the local government 20 Cr in waste management fees.
Governance Model
The 3,761 waste pickers that own and work at SWaCH are divided into internal informal groups based on the city’s geographic divisions. Each of these groups, called Kothis , constitute around 30 waste pickers and each Kothi has 1-2 elected leaders. There are around 155 such Kothis and 200+ elected representatives leading them. This is essentially the cooperative’s parliament – it meets every month, and takes legislative decisions on important issues like operational norms and rules for waste pickers, service fees and organising for protests. However , this body is not directly involved in administrative matters, audits, statutory compliance etc.
14 of the 200 representatives are further elected to become members of the board of directors – which is essentially the cooperative’s cabinet of ministers. These are voting members who meet 1-2 times every month, and make important decisions, relevant not only to the individual waste pickers, but the organisation’s administration, financial audits, hiring policies, statutory compliances, etc. Every decision that the board makes has to be endorsed by the council of 200 waste pickers. This ensures that decision-making powers are distributed horizontally across the organisation, rather than hierarchical top-down decision-making.
In addition to the 14 voting members, the board also consists of 3non-voting members : 2 representatives from the city corporation and 1 member of the workers union. The administrative head of the cooperative acts as the Convenor of the board, but is not a member. Although this group of people don’t have voting rights, they have access to the board meetings, and documents and act as a check to ensure smooth operations, provide suggestions, and avoid breakdowns.
04 | Regenerative and Distributive Strategies & Actions
The organisation believes that to whatever extent possible, money should flow directly to individual waste pickers, through service fees paid by households, government schemes and others . This ensures transparency, reduces transaction costs and also enables a direct one-to-one connection between the household (customer) and the waste picker (service provider). The annual administrative costs are borne by the local government, through a service contract. Waste pickers collect a monthly service fee from households they collect waste from, and have the right to sell recyclables - this acts as a second stream of regular income (between 20 - 30% of total income)
The city corporation also supports waste pickers by paying an incentive to those who work in slums, to enable the daily collection of waste from slum areas. This compensates for low user fee collections from such areas and ensures regular services to the slum residents, at par with other areas of the city covered by SWaCH. Typical SWM companies ignore such areas as they know user fee collection will be difficult and recovery of recyclables will also be minimal.
All waste pickers pay a monthly membership fee of rupees 200 to the Cooperative, which consolidates them into a Livelihood Fund called the “Upajeevika Nidhi” . The expenditure of this fund is governed by the council and board and the money is used to further enhance the livelihoods of waste pickers.
The fund enables insurance-like services to be available to elderly members of the coop, who usually get left out from government schemes and private health insurance. It also enables SWaCH to support waste pickers in newer areas for initial few months until user fee recovery is stabilised, thereby generating new livelihoods.
Through the empowerment and ownership arising out of distributed decision making, waste pickers coalesce in times of need and face external threats together. In doing so, they are able to engage with the political class of the city, independently strengthening their own work and holding the city elected representatives accountable to them.
A typical waste management company would seek to maximize efficiency through introduction of mechanisation and strict centralized labour management policies. However, through the decentralized decision making system of SWaCH , the maximum benefits for the maximum number of workers is ensured and entrenched. For instance, waste pickers ensure that the system remains non-motorized to a great extent as they are answerable to their peers in ensuring equity in distribution of work. This also enables the operations to be less carbon-intensive, as in most wards, manual push-carts are used for waste collection.
Door-to-door waste collection at a slum community. Motorized collection systems cannot serve such areas and topographies
Cooperative Stores
The waste pickers are able to increase their own decentralised income through mechanisms like cooperative scrap stores. They can decide locally to start their own scrap shop, define its terms of engagement, hire their own staff, decide the price list of recyclables, and decide the annual bonus for regular members. This leads to increased incomes for individual waste pickers without any intervention or directive from SWaCH. A typical SWM organisation would seek to accumulate the high value waste materials and profit from it by directly selling it to recyclers, and would typically pay less heed to the low value, hard-to-recycle plastics. The worker-centric model of SWaCH , on the other hand, ensures the highest amount of recycling (which would include low value materials ) and therefore the highest amount of income to individual waste pickers, leading to the greatest reduction of waste going to the landfill.
A cooperative scrap store being run by the waste pickers of Katraj
05 | How the Deep Design Enables Strategy and Action
SWaCH’s worker-centric cooperative structure is key to the success of its innovative initiatives. At the heart of its model is the principle of decentralized decision-making, where waste pickers themselves determine operational strategies, ensuring that their work directly benefits their communities and their own livelihoods. This collective ownership allows them to address real-time challenges, such as low user fee collections and provide support to the most marginalized communities of the city. This system is more responsive than traditional, top-down management structures because it places decision-making in the hands of those directly affected, allowing the cooperative to prioritize social equity and environmental responsibility in a way that centralized models cannot.
Moreover, SWaCH's structure provides a platform for individual waste pickers to propose and manage independent income-generating activities like cooperative scrap stores. This gives members a sense of control and fosters entrepreneurship. Since waste pickers are shaping these enterprises, they are better aligned with worker and community needs, creating a sustainable ecosystem of income generation within the cooperative. This self-governance not only boosts individual incomes but also strengthens the collective by promoting accountability and fostering a sense of ownership. These initiatives are a direct outcome of the cooperative’s deep design, where horizontal power distribution ensures that workers are not just beneficiaries but active shapers of their own livelihoods.
06 | Reflections and Lessons for Other Businesses
While SWaCH’s pioneering model has unlocked numerous socio-economic benefits for Pune’s informal waste pickers and has thrived for the past 18 years, it remains a singular example in the realm of large-scale worker-owned cooperatives in waste management. The challenge of replicating this model in other cities lies in its unique origin—a grassroots movement of socially marginalized waste pickers who mobilized themselves to challenge the status quo and gain governmental recognition. This dynamic of self-advocacy and collective action was essential to SWaCH’s success, and such conditions do not exist uniformly in other urban settings of India. Many cities lack similarly vocal and organized groups of waste pickers with the capacity to demand systemic change and implement a cooperative model on this scale.
Additionally, because SWaCH is a cooperative owned by Pune's waste pickers rather than by a private entity or external board, there is no intrinsic drive to "expand" the business into other cities. Instead, SWaCH's focus is on sharing its lessons and advocating for policy changes that can benefit waste pickers more broadly. This approach has already influenced organizations like Hasiru Dala in Bangalore, which has adopted some aspects of the SWaCH model. Rather than direct expansion, SWaCH sees its role as a catalyst for change, aiming to inspire similar initiatives and influence waste management policies at national and international levels to create long-term, systemic improvements for waste pickers everywhere.
This case study was researched and written by Sujay Hammannavar in collaboration with DEAL.
