Zimbabwe’s Scrap Metal Scavengers: A Climate Effort Amid Economic Desperation

In the streets and illegal dumpsites of Harare, Zimbabwe, hundreds of men and women like Ezekiel Mabhiza engage daily in informal scrap metal collection. With minimal tools—often just their hands or a stick—they sift through mountains of trash to salvage metal they can sell for pennies. While this labor may appear as a grassroots environmental effort, it starkly underscores the failures of government and formal economy to provide meaningful opportunities for hardworking citizens. Mabhiza’s story is instructive: after abandoning hope for formal employment, he now depends on collecting about 66 kilograms of scrap metal daily for barely $8—a sum that...