First picture:
Left to right: Abena Afriyie, Dorcas Owusua, Paul Macharia, Jiayi Yao, Alejandra Flores Mejia, Silvio Ruiz, Mercy Nabwire, Manuel Rosaldo, Luis Mendoza, Haoju Lu, and Muzammal Afzal.

Second picture:
Left to right: Freyca Calderon-Berumen, Silvio Ruiz, and Manuel Rosaldo

4:00 P.M. | Foster Auditorium (102 Paterno Library)

Discussion with Silvio Ruiz Grisalez, a Colombian waste picker and a trailblazing leader in the global movement for waste picker rights. The took place on Wednesday, January 31 at 4:00 P.M. in Foster Auditorium (102 Paterno Library).

Around the world, fifteen million people eke out a living by salvaging recyclable and reusable materials from dumps, streets, and buildings. Since the 1980s, waste pickers in Colombia and other countries have collectively organized on the local, national, and transnational levels to demand policies that improve both the quality of their work and of recycling services. Such policies represent paradigm shifts for countries that historically treated waste pickers as criminals, and treated trash merely as a sanitary problem, rather than as a social, environmental, and cultural one.

This event was co-hosted by the Sustainability Institute and the Center for Global Workers' Rights.