Deepening poverty and increased demand for scrap materials are driving ever more people, including children, to scavenge for rubbish in Myanmar’s cities, but worsening power cuts are creating recycling bottlenecks.
By FRONTIER
Her face darkened by the sun despite its coating of yellow thanaka paste, 11-year-old Aye Aye* matter-of-factly describes her family’s struggle to survive as rubbish scavengers in Yangon.
“We used to make about K20,000 (US$9.5) a day. Now my sister and I collect only enough for about K7,000 and my father about K5,000, so altogether we make only around K12,000 a day. Mum can’t work because she’s pregnant and stays at home,” she says.
Home lies among the shanties of Yangon’s outlying South Dagon Township, where the family has lived from rubbish scavenging for the past four years. Her mother is 35 years old, and her father 37.
Aye Aye and her eight-year-old sister work long days with their father as pa lon collectors. Their trade is named after ah sone pa lon, meaning “all sorts of things”, which for scavengers means discarded bits of aluminium, copper and iron as well as plastics and glass bottles.
She knows the Yangon market price of all these materials as well as a Wall Street trader following the rise and fall of global commodities. At her young age, she has learned the dynamics of supply and demand the hard way.
“The price of pa lon has risen but the numbers of collectors have gone up, so we find less rubbish and this means less money,” Aye Aye told Frontier on a scorching day in May.
Giving a rundown of market prices, she says a viss (1.6 kilogrammes) of aluminium cans has recently gone up from K600 to K850, and a Myanmar Beer bottle from K50 to K150.
For the past three months the family has had to stretch out their working day from nine hours to 11, she explains. In these conditions, the two sisters can’t attend school. The lessons offered by a teacher on an ad hoc, voluntary basis are the only education they have received.
The day for Aye Aye, her father and her little sister begins before dawn and by seven in the morning they are already down with their plastic gunny bags collecting bottles at the liquor and beer houses in the streets of South Dagon. In the afternoon they move on to Thaketa and Dawbon townships and sell what they have collected to the buyers that offer the highest price. Sometimes, when their father takes a different route, the two sisters go alone.
“We collect from the back alleys of buildings, around teashops, near liquor shops, and some restaurants. Some residents don’t like it and drive us away. Some liquor shop owners tell us to go away when we try to pick up the pa lon. I feel very sad when we are chased away like that. But it makes me happy to make money to pay for our house.” Aye Aye said.
The whole family is trapped in a cycle of debt to a local loan shark who charges an extortionate interest rate of 10 per cent a day on the loans they need for medical care and daily survival.
“Because we have to repay a loan, we need to get at least K10,000 a day. Since there are many collectors, we don’t get as much money as before. Some days are really tough and we don’t make enough to pay the debt. It’s a relief when pa lon fetches a higher price,” says Aye Aye.
Stiff competition and power cuts
As Aye Aye indicates, the rising prices of pa lon – which traders say have increased three-fold on average since February – have a downside: they have naturally attracted more impoverished scavengers, thereby stiffening competition.
Moreover, Yangon is filling up with people displaced by the widening conflict between the military regime and resistance forces outside Myanmar’s main cities, increasing the numbers of urban poor desperate to make a living at a time of scarcity.
Yet the main factor driving pa lon market volatility is the deteriorating power supply, with blackouts regularly hitting the whole city.
Since the 2021 military coup, a mass walkout by investors has crippled an already-squeezed power sector. Starting last year, Yangon has had as little as 12 hours of power a day during the March to May hot season, when demand peaks, with rotating cuts lasting for four hours. Until March this year, industrial zones were only granted power from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, but since then factories have often experienced day-long blackouts.
Among those most affected are bottle producers, who have had to reduce their output. Imports have also fallen as the junta has imposed trade and foreign currency restrictions to shore up its dwindling foreign reserves.
Traders say that difficulties with imports mean that distilleries and breweries in Myanmar are buying back bottles from the pa lon market, with military-owned Myanmar Brewery, which used to import bottles, now paying K200 each. Used beer cans in Yangon are meanwhile sold to melting plants in the industrial suburb of Hlaing Tharyar, while iron goes to plants in the Myaung Ta Kar industrial zone in Hmawbi Township.
But the worsening power cuts have also hampered the recycling sector, by leaving trading centres unable to clean bottles and other pa lon before tins are crushed and plastic is cut up.
A year ago, businessman U Myint was sending a daily average of four truckloads of recycled iron and ten thousand bottles to plants and depots, but a lack of electricity has grounded his processing machines for hours and sometimes days. “Bottles and cans are piling up every day and we don’t have enough storage space,” he said of his raw material.
U Myint added that the lost production left him with cash flow problems. “If the power is down and we can’t process stuff in time, we have no money for the next day. Sometimes we have to borrow just to keep the operation going,” he said.
It has also left him vulnerable to swings in the market. Because prices are so volatile, U Myint and other traders aim to buy and sell pa lon within 24 hours or risk losing money.
Another problem is melting plants stopping orders or even closing, also due to power shortages. “I can’t blame them because they simply don’t have the electricity to work,” he said. But despite the difficulty he has processing and selling his product, U Myint needs to maintain his supply lines. “If I stop buying pa lon, I risk losing my business contacts,” he said.
“Our family has had this business for over 20 years, but it’s never been as hard as it is now.”
The pa lon pyramid
The pa lon bottle and can market is structured like a pyramid, with big liquor and beer companies at the top and lone scavengers like Aye Aye and her family at the bottom.
The companies sign one or three-month contracts with wholesalers, specifying the price and numbers of bottles to be delivered. The contractors, who have to deposit a sum with the big companies as insurance, then buy bottles from pa lon shop owners and other small-scale traders, who source their stock from the likes of Aye Aye.
With confidence in the banking sector collapsing after the junta seized control, investment has flowed into sectors such as real estate, cars, solar energy businesses and liquor and beer outlets.
Money has also poured into more “experimental” business areas, including the trade in pa lon, according to U Myint.
“You don’t need specialist knowledge when buying from individual pa lon collectors, so people from all sorts of backgrounds started up businesses in large numbers,” he said.
“But unwary beginners have been the victims of fraudsters, like those who put stones in beer cans to increase their weight. With a boom in the number of scavengers, there has been a lot of confusion and problems,” he explained.
Daw Zar Li, a 50-year-old wholesale contractor, explained that the company hiring her services can lower the price it pays if she fails to meet the terms of her contract. Sometimes contractors who are struggling to meet their deadline have to pay the shop owners as much as they are receiving from the big companies.
“People are turning to the pa lon business because now there is almost no alternative, so competition is strong. Sometimes I have to buy bottles from others at the full price to supply the company in time. That’s why I now only take contracts for around 100,000 to 150,000 bottles per month. Some big contractors sign agreements for millions of bottles over two or three months,” she explained.
Zar Li said her husband had been in the pa lon business even before they were married over 20 years ago, but he died of COVID-19 in 2020.
“When my husband passed, I kept the business going. I have a child at school and need to devote time to her, so I can’t take on too much business, just contracts with two companies. But with such competition in the market nowadays, it’s really hard to get enough pa lon,” she said.
Meanwhile, the 11-year-old Aye Aye said she and her family has no choice but to keep toiling at the bottom of the pa lon pyramid.
“People often drive us away, but we can’t live without scavenging. If we don’t get enough bottles and cans to feed our hungry stomachs, we just work longer hours,” she said, adding, “I’m happy when I find lots of bottles and cans.”
*denotes use of a pseudonym for security reasons
