Sustainability of Recycling Waste Picker Sustainopreneurs for Prevention and Mitigation of Municipal Solid Waste in Swat

Abstract

This study assessed the role of waste picker sustainopreneurs (WPS) by examining their recycling contributions in a special case of District Swat, Pakistan. Using a transformative worldview, this study acknowledges their contributions to recycling. The study envisages how entrepreneurial agency works in unanticipated ways where the poorest of the poor enterprise without resources demonstrate unexpected agency to improve the environment. An inductive research design in conjunction with grounded theory was used to analyze data from 37 interviews in three tehsils of District Swat. The recycling sector uses primitive measures, which are completely informal, self-organized, and self-controlled. Surprisingly, we discovered that informal recycling contributes unfavorably to waste, energy, and food (WEF) security due to intermixing and adulteration, as well as acts as a gray channel for illicit practices that have taken advantage of tax amnesty in the area until 2023. The uncontrolled welding of half cut and nose cut car parts has skyrocketed the motorization index and CO2 emissions; however, it has also resulted in alternative sources of livelihoods, as these accidental environmentalists had found modern sources of income. This is similar to low-tech innovation and business creation that takes advantage of tax holidays due to the special status of District Swat. The study highlights the most and least valuable recyclables and identifies the gray channel markets of spare parts, metal recycling, counterfeit products, fuel intermixing, and adulteration. The study contributes by untangling the understanding of a legal gambit of tax amnesty at a critical pre-policy input as well as advocates for rights of invisible stakeholders of waste management in Pakistan.

The Relationship Of Leadership Styles And Sustainability: Regression Analysis Of The Antecedents In Achieving Sustainable Performance

“…As a result, the term "sustainopreneurship" was introduced. Sustainopreneurship is the implementation of sustainability innovations: entrepreneurship and Innovation for sustainability (Lynch et al, 2021;Nawaz et al, 2021;Perera & Abeysekera, 2021;Vaicekauskaite & Valackiene, 2018). These findings suggest that entrepreneurship plays a vital role in business management and influences firm performance.…”

Becoming an entrepreneur in the cooperation and poverty contexts

“…Although waste pickers are seen as “sustainable entrepreneurs” (Nawaz et al , 2021; Yousafzai et al , 2020), aspects associated with their transformation into cooperatives’ RC managers, and with the potential development of entrepreneurial competencies, are yet to be fully explored. This factor led to the following research question: how do representatives of waste picker cooperatives and associations become entrepreneurs in the self-management of social enterprises?…”

Assessing the Formal and Informal Waste Recycling Business Processes through a Stakeholders Lens in Pakistan

“…Public-private partnerships are frequently proposed as a remedial measure to ameliorate the quality of services, minimize the cost of MSWM and create a formal connection between the public and private sector for improved productivity [7]. Still, the majority of the work is performed by autonomous waste pickers in the recycling sector in Pakistan, who act as helping hand to the government and are characterized by traits such as low technology, lack of work permits, small-scale work, unregistered operations, labor-intensive work and self-administered working [8,9]. The informal sector work, which is unregulated due to lack of licenses, incur no taxes and as a result is kept outside formal welfare schemes of the government [10].…”

“…In Pakistan, garbage collection ranges from 57 percent in Lahore to around 40 percent in other major cities of Pakistan [13]. For certain specific items, many countries such as Sweden proclaim an impressive recycling rate of up to 99 percent, followed by Germany with 87 percent and Singapore with 60 percent [9,14,15]. These impressive numbers do not reveal the notion that in Sweden, the 99 percent recycling rate also includes controlled incineration as a form of recycling [16].…”