1 CHALLENGES OF SCAVENGERS IN MALAYSIA Seow Tawee Department of Construction and Property Management Kolej Universiti Teknologi Tun Hussein Onn 86400 Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia. tawee@kuittho.edu.my Abstract: The scavenging activities are one of the common phenomena in the Third World Countries. The scavengers often related to poorness, uneducated and unhealthy group but they are playing the importance role in the recycling activities in Malaysia. The article discusses the scavenging activities and the socioeconomic situation of scavengers in Malaysia. The result showed that the scavenging activities could generate the good income for most of the scavengers, there are four types of scavengers in Malaysia, the scavengers did not report their true health information due to the some constraints, 60 percent of scavengers need necessity at their work place, they realize that the activities of scavenging can reduce amount of solid waste, and lastly scavengers are exposed to the hazardous and unhealthy work place environment. Introduction In large cities throughout the developing world, poor individuals survive by salvaging waste materials, primarily recyclable materials, in open dump sites. These people recover the material to sell for reuse or recycling. They also collect different items for their own consumption. These people are generally known as scavengers or ragpickers. Scavenging is a widespread phenomenon. In many developing countries, scavengers can be found on the streets or in open dumps or landfill areas (JICA 2002). In most Asian countries, there is an informal recycling system which works along with the formal system of municipal waste management system. Scavengers go from home to home and buy recyclable material like paper, plastic, glass and old clothes, thus preventing these things from going into dump sites. It is difficult to quantify the total contribution of the informal sector to urban waste management. The informal nature of this sector inherently implies lack of official statistical data. Quantification of informal recovery is therefore scarce an uncertain. For Mexico, scavengers are estimated to remove 10% of the municipal waste (Bartone et al., 1991). In Bangalore, India the informal sector is claimed to prevent 15% of the municipal waste going to the dumpsite (Baud and Schenk, 1994). In Karachi, the informal sector reduces municipal waste collection by 10% (Ali et al., 1993). Based on the World Bank estimation, 1 – 2% of the population of big cities is supported directly or indirectly by the refuse generated by the upper 10 – 20% of the population (Hogland and Marques, 2000). Scavenging not only provides a source of income to the poorer segments of the population but also reduces the need for highly sophisticated and costly recovery systems. The objectives of this paper are (i) to determine the type of scavengers in Malaysia; (ii) to determine the level of social economic of scavengers; (iii) to determine the need at the work environment as a scavenger; (iv) to determine the level of health and issue environmental knowledge among the scavengers. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by UTHM Institutional Repository