The EU’s vision of the circular economy is one in which the planet will be saved from garbage, the economy will grow and there will be lots of new jobs, from the sophisticated to the minimum-wage.
Now the promise of millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of new jobs seems to be overblown.
In his introduction to the Circular Economy Package in 2015, European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen, who is responsible for jobs, growth, investment and competitiveness, said the “job creation potential of the circular economy is huge.”
The European Parliament last year cited a report estimating the transition to a circular economy could create between 1.2 million and 3 million new jobs by 2030. The Commission used a more narrow definition, and predicted that a circular approach to waste would create up to 170,000 direct jobs “at all skills levels” in Europe by 2030, and reducing demand for raw materials by 20 percent would boost the bloc’s GDP by 3 percent.
The Commission’s promise to deliver jobs and growth requires investments of up to €320 billion, according to a recent report.
But how many jobs will emerge remains unclear, in part based how those jobs are defined. And for now, the EU executive uses some fuzzy math to count who is a part of the circular economy workforce, raising questions about what it will look like in the future.
The European Commission says that “circular economy sectors” now employ 3.9 million people. But more than three-quarters of these jobs are in repairing and maintenance, keeping up everything from planes and industrial machinery to clothes and shoes.
The repair and maintenance sectors certainly help reduce waste and lengthen a product’s life. But those types of jobs have been around for a long time, and the industry growth rate is low. (It was 3.8 percent from 2011 to 2015, according to Eurostat.) Most growth expected from fields within the Commission’s definition is in the waste and recycling industries.
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The EU is increasing how much municipal waste it recycles. The bloc recycled 25.3 percent of its waste in 2000, and 43.8 percent in 2014, an increase of 72 percent, according to Eurostat. Waste management employment rose over the same period by 36 percent, from 800,000 full-time equivalents in 2000 to 1.1 million in 2014, the most recent data available.
But the circular economy jobs that are being created in this sector aren’t always top of the line.
Dirty work
“In the enthusiasm about job creation, the discussions of the conditions and the pay of these jobs are often sidelined,” reads a report on jobs in the circular economy by Epsu, the federation of European public workers’ unions. “To date not much has been written about the quality of these jobs and what the transition to a circular economy means for skills changes and job relocation.”
These jobs are largely low-paid and low-skilled, and include over half a million people working in waste collection.
“The work is hard — in one day, two men behind a garbage truck can collect up to 10 tons,” said Regis Vieceili, a garbage collector for the city of Paris: “Many of us are spent before their time.”
Increased collection also means more people are needed to stand at conveyor belts sorting garbage into different recycling streams.
Those jobs are often “hard, dirty, manufacturing work,” said a report that examined such facilities in Belgium and the United Kingdom. They are “the kind of low-paid assembly line working that largely disappeared from Northern and Western Europe with the flight of manufacturing to Asia.”
Workers in these “picking cabins” are typically paid minimum wage, the report said, and they stand by a conveyor belt for eight-hour shifts with very few breaks, sorting through municipal waste. The work environment is “very noisy, smelly,” and the tasks “monotonous.” The report on factories inspected in Belgium and the U.K. also found that most workers were migrants.
When asked whether it could point to examples of substantial numbers of jobs being created by the circular economy, beyond low-skill positions, the Commission cited a quote from Katainen saying that the “job creation potential of the circular economy is huge, and the demand for better, more efficient products and services is booming,” but declined to comment further.
Invisible jobs
Some of the most crucial but statistically invisible circular economy workers are those at the bottom of the economic ladder — “informal recyclers” who make a living collecting recyclables from streets and trash cans to sell back.
As many as 1 million informal recyclers live in Europe, most of them of Roma ethnicity, refugees or migrants without formal papers, or homeless persons, according to Epsu’s report. Their work saves a lot of recyclable trash from landfills. But the jobs are dirty, dangerous and unpaid aside from what is made selling recyclables.
In the city of Turin, about 800 Roma, Romanians, Moroccans and Italians make a living this way, according to Alessandro Stillo, with the Vivabalon association that organizes the city’s main market.
“In one year, it adds up to thousands of tons of waste diverted from landfilling,” he said. “They avoid a full bin and a higher cost for the city, but they’re seen as a social problem instead of being recognized as a resource.”
In France, the Amelior association is financing a study to show the environmental and economic benefits of informal recyclers, but said that for now, “everything happens in the shadows, in denial, and with a persecutory attitude.”
This article is part of a series on the circular economy, Getting Wasted.