True story: Barbra “Barbie” Weber went from living outside following a serious brain injury to representing North America at Global Plastics Treaty negotiations. She’s the co-founder and co-executive director of Ground Score Association, a waste picker organization in Portland, Oregon. Waste pickers are those who make a living off waste. In Oregon, which is one of the 10 states with a bottle bill—a container deposit law that financially incentivizes recycling certain beverage containers—this means collecting aluminum cans and plastic beverage containers and turning them in for cash. “People started waste picking because they had no other option. I want you to understand that,” Barbie says.
Ground Score is affiliated with the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, a union of over 460,000 waste pickers from around the world. “A group of waste pickers have been to every Plastics Treaty negotiation through the entire process. I went to all of them except for the last one in Geneva. Because of the political climate, I felt like sending the Canadian representative in my stead,” she says.
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Beyond these negotiations, Barbie has traveled extensively representing waste pickers. “It was quite a journey for a homeless lady to go from living in a tent, creating this organization, and then I basically have flown to a different country about once every three months. It’s sort of like from the ground to the mountaintop experience,” she says. Read on to learn more about Barbie’s job and waste picking’s unique role in combatting today’s plastic pollution crisis.
representing North America at Global Plastics Treaty
negotiations. Photo by Scotty Sunday.
What does your job entail on a daily basis?
We create jobs for people who are housing and income insecure. And we’re waste pickers. In 2021, I created the G.L.I.T.T.E.R program, a very long acronym. It’s Ground Score Leading Inclusively Together Through Environmental Recovery. We provide material waste management to people living out on the streets. We clean the public access areas. Anyone can pick up trash, but we try to divert at least 25% of that waste out of landfill. We get all our textiles recycled. We started with three routes; now we have 35 different routes. One day a week, we dedicate a route to nothing but picking up cigarette butts—the most invasive source of microplastics on the planet. We also have a reuse program. We collect a lot of tent material—an organization used it to create a humongous shade structure. We created bags we sell at our events.
And we have 60 people now formalized into employment, including myself. It was quite a feat. We were 95% homeless when Ground Score started, and—this outcome is most important to me—we’re about 85% not homeless now.
Are there health impacts of being a waste picker, of handling discarded plastic and more all day?
Waste pickers in every country, on every continent, are on the front lines of plastic and pollution. I went to Dandora dump site [in Nairobi], and it’s a smell like you [she shakes her head]… It’s burning plastic. It’s dead animal. And I’m walking through this. You have women carrying their children on their backs as they’re picking through plastic and waste to get what’s valuable to go back and sell it to a middle person. The children impacted me the most—babies with their eyes crusted or their nose covered. The International Alliance of Waste Pickers promotes not having children on dump sites at all.
So how does it affect our bodies? People who recycle electronic waste have no fingerprints left. They’re breathing in all the toxic fumes—there’s places they burn plastic off copper wiring. And a dump site is different than a landfill, which is engineered to release the gases. A dump site doesn’t release gases, so in the middle is a fire that will never go out. As you’re walking through, there’s spots that will just spark with fire. It’s so dangerous.
What are the health fears when waste picking outside dump sites?
Here in the States, the way we pick waste, we’re putting our hands into dumpsters. There’s risk of infection. A lot of us won’t wear gloves. They’re just not easy to come by. And also you can’t feel. I can put my hand in a dumpster, and I can feel an aluminum can. I can feel a plastic bottle. I know the difference. Ground Score did a whole thing about unlocking trash cans because of that danger.
Also a lot of people who live in poverty live in the environment, right? In Portland, people are living on sidewalks, they’re breathing in all the air, the chemicals. A lot of people have chest issues, bronchitis, and heart issues are a huge thing as well. Life expectancy for someone in my certain circumstances is 47 or 49 years old. I’m going to be 55 in March, so I’ve exceeded my life expectancy, which is cool. But when I went to Africa, I didn’t see any old people.
How did waste pickers get involved with Global Plastics Treaty negotiations?
We’ve had a lot of plastic, right? There’s a finite amount that has been recycled. Waste pickers have recycled over 60% of that. Let that sink in. That’s how we got to the table. Some organizations basically said that we weren’t intelligent enough, that we would need advocates. And then we took that place by storm. It’s amazing that with no training, with really nothing, waste pickers hit the stage in the Plastics Treaty negotiations and made a very solid impact. True solutions will not be found without our inclusion.
How does waste picking help fight the climate crisis?
Our number one mission is to change society’s perception of who and what is considered valuable. We want to educate people that you don’t need that new thing. I mean, the earth is dying, right? We want to open people’s eyes to the impact, what’s right in front of them. We’re talking how this is going to affect their kids and their grandkids in generations to come. Besides cleaning up—picking up trash and diverting as much as we can—we’re educating people on what they can do to lessen their impact. This underrepresented part of society has been reusing and surviving and can really share how we’ve been doing it.
What can people do to help waste pickers?
Pay attention to the Plastics Treaty process and what the waste pickers are doing. Work to increase deposits in various states. Make relationships. If you have a waste picker you see coming to your neighborhood, say hi, make sure they have proper protection, offer them gloves, offer them water.
Also just stop using plastic, period. We’re a plastic world. Buy aluminum, buy glass. Every little bit that we can do, if we all do that, we’ll save our planet. I mean, in this conversation we have had, I don’t know if you realize how much plastic just went into the ocean.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry