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Street workers, including street vendors, buskers, and waste pickers, constitute around 10–20% of the total working population of the world. Yet they are often denied their right to organise, they cannot exercise their right to be represented in decisions that directly affect their lives and futures. The entries in this chapter gathered from the leaders of street vendors associations and media representatives throughout the world, reflect their struggles to organise, to maintain a livelihood and to survive in pandemic conditions. Arbind Singh and César García Arnal give a profile of the street vendors in India and Spain respectively and explore how social and solidarity economy, a concept that, however, is still not clear to some experts in the field offers a solution to the problems rising after Corona pandemic. Evren Laçin tells the story of the foundation of the Street Vendors Association of İzmir and explains how it provides a great example to other municipalities across Turkey by bringing the ‘street economy’ model to our city and making life a part of the street. Dinçer Mendillioğlu, on the other hand, bring out the story of the Association of Recycling Workers, which is the first of its kind and which is established by the recycling workers or waste pickers, who are clinging to life by collecting paper and waste materials from the streets. Journalist Kasım Akan provides an example from Erzurum, where street vendors grow and sell inexpensive vital products that the lower income group can easily access during Corona crisis days.

Recycling Workers Association (RWA), founded in 1993, has been the oldest associations in Turkey advocating the rights of recycling workers and conducting studies to ensure the security of their business through organisation. There were more than 2,000 families in Ankara, who emigrated from Gaziantep and lived in the Çankaya district of Ankara. We, as RWA, gained legal status by integrating with Çankaya Municipality’s licenced waste collection company. In the same year, the company we worked with was successful and received an award. Our work in this business, as being the first one in Turkey, has become known throughout Turkey and some provinces (Antalya, Gaziantep, Konya and Adana) began to implement the project. Our project was heard in foreign countries such as Norway and Germany.

This article explores the protective measures and the occupational health and safety (OHS) prevention strategies in place in the formal electronic equipment recycling (e-recycling) industry, more specifically in the Greater Montreal area (Quebec, Canada) and their consequences: health inequalities and level of compliance with environmental standards.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted using two respondent-specific questionnaires, one for workers and one for supervisors. Data collection and analytic procedures drew from qualitative content analysis. It was tempted to identify differences in OHS practices in relation to the workers' employment status and to link the companies' OHS concerns to their level of compliance with environmental standards.

The article highlights specific OHS issues in the formal e-recycling industry. Enforcing compliance with environmental standards as a lever for promoting OHS appears to be a promising strategy. Another main finding was the workforce diversity and related OHS vulnerabilities in this industry and the challenges they pose to employers' ability to adequately and equally reach and protect all workers involved.

To date, too little attention appears to have been paid to working conditions and worker protection in this rapidly growing sector. Specific prevention programmes could be implemented and adapted to the industry's diverse workforce and its multiple OHS vulnerabilities. This issue calls for the international community to take responsibility, as many electronic waste (e-waste) generated worldwide is shipped to developing countries, where lack of regulation and control is much more striking in a sector that remains very largely informal.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.

A systems perspective of waste management allows an integrated approach not only to the five basic functional elements of waste management itself (generation, reduction, collection, recycling, disposal), but to the problems arising at the interfaces with the management of energy, nature conservation, environmental protection, economic factors like unemployment and productivity, etc. This monograph separately describes present practices and the problems to be solved in each of the functional areas of waste management and at the important interfaces. Strategies for more efficient control are then proposed from a systems perspective. Systematic and objective means of solving problems become possible leading to optimal management and a positive contribution to economic development, not least through resource conservation. India is the particular context within which waste generation and management are discussed. In considering waste disposal techniques, special attention is given to sewage and radioactive wastes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the role and practices of informal waste pickers and the implications for waste management policy in urban contexts of the Global South.

Qualitative case studies were used, including interviews, observations and document analyses. The authors compared informal waste management in two cities of the Global South: Accra (Ghana) and Porto Alegre (Brazil).

The analysis points out that informal waste pickers play a crucial role in the implementation of waste policies in both cities, despite differing economic, social and institutional contexts. The study of the waste management system also points to multiple connections between informal and formal parts of the economy. Although the informal waste pickers are integral to the waste management systems, their economically disadvantaged position excludes them from the formal labour market. Faced with these challenges, they develop creative solutions to guarantee their livelihood and gain more effective collective voice.

The comparison of two case studies, conducted about the same social phenomenon in two different economic, institutional and social contexts, has limited generalisability but is theoretically and practically important.

The findings are relevant to policy-makers who deal with urban waste management and for organisations who develop support actions for informal workers.

The authors draw on a comparison of qualitative case studies to explore the multidimensionality of the waste picker’s phenomenon. This paper sparks discussion among scholars and experts who study the informal economy from different perspectives, in this case bridging insights from sociology and victimology.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze e-waste management systems in Germany, Switzerland, Japan and India and benchmark best practices in the Indian scenario.

The first part of the research paper focuses on the description of e-waste management systems in the above-mentioned countries using a case study analysis approach while the second part analyzes, evaluates and compares e-waste management systems performance based on seven performance indicators using a five-point scale. Finally, the RADAR chart approach is used to benchmark the best practices of e-waste management in these countries in the Indian scenario.

The study finds that India is lagging far behind from Germany, Switzerland, and Japan in e-waste management despite being the fifth largest e-waste generator across the globe. India must adopt best practices followed in these nations like a dedicated agency to oversee and coordinate the e-waste management, coordination among different value chain partners involved in e-waste management, development of infrastructure to collect and process e-waste, monitoring and control of all processes and stakeholders, etc.

The study suggests the solution to the loopholes in the Indian e-waste management system by adopting the collection, recycling and reporting mechanism followed in German, Swiss and the Japanese e-waste management system. There is a dire need to improve e-waste management systems in India as only 5 percent of e-waste is processed through the organized sector.

E-waste is increasing at an alarming rate and most of e-waste in India is being handled by the unorganized sector, where rudimentary methods are used to process e-waste severely damaging the environment and health of workers. The unorganized market employs 0.5m child laborers. Hence, routing the e-waste to the organized sector will result in social benefits by putting a check on unsafe practices and will create green jobs.

This paper’s contribution lies in extracting the best practices followed in nations excelling in e-waste management and recommend their implications in the Indian scenario. This study is aimed at all the stakeholders, but especially at policy-makers and producers, who have the onus to tackle the e-waste problem.