In Johannesburg’s Landfills, Refugee Women Risk Their Lives for Pennies and Survival

In Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital and a megacity of five million, most of the country’s 250,000 refugees are shut out from the formal job market due to highly restrictive immigration rules and a struggling local economy. Female refugees and asylum seekers make up just 23 percent of those who have jobs, accounting for formal and informal employment. 

To make ends meet, many female refugees who have no legal right to work told More to Her Story that they are forced to eke out a living by sneaking into Johannesburg’s municipal landfills to sort trash by hand from the hills of waste and resell it to commercial waste companies. 

“I do this because I am a single mother refugee — breastfeeding and jobless,” Maureen Nyoka, 30, originally from Zimbabwe, told More to Her Story in Boksburg, the eastern suburb that is the industrial hinterland of Johannesburg. She said one of the few other options left for refugees is unpalatable – hawking herself in unlicensed Johannesburg brothels.

For every kilogram of recycled trash she processes with her hands, Nyoka is paid ZAR9 ($0.40), she said. Though Nyoka works in a group of twelve women whose diverse nationalities range from Mozambique to Lesotho and Malawi, refugees and asylum seekers of Zimbabwe origin make up the largest number of migrants residing in South Africa. 

Marais de Vaal, an environmental advisor at Afriforum, a non-profit civil rights organization, stated that many of South Africa’s municipalities, with few exceptions, lack the financial resources and effective governance necessary to maintain proper recycling at city waste sites. Only 14 percent of the municipal landfill sites that AfriForum surveyed in 2024 fulfilled the basic requirements for clean, safe, and proper rubbish management, punctuating the growing burden of neglected trash sites across the country’s cities.

Ester Zaka, 35, a single mother and refugee, is among the many women who quietly enter municipal landfills to collect and sell recyclable materials. She told More to Her Story that she does it out of desperation.

“I have two mouths to feed and two lives to live,” she explained. As a migrant woman living in Johannesburg, she supports her five-year-old son while also sending money home to Zimbabwe each month to help her widowed mother with basic household needs.

Nyoka last held a job in 2022, working as a cleaner at a restaurant chain in Soweto, the largest low-income township west of Johannesburg. Her employment ended after what she described as xenophobic mobs threatened to burn down the establishment unless it stopped hiring foreign nationals.

Indeed, South Africa has experienced recurring waves of anti-immigrant violence. Recently, in 2023, bigoted mobs reportedly blocked refugees and asylum seekers from accessing public hospital care. Businesses owned by refugees were raided by South Africans that same year.

“It’s not easy for females — worse [if they are] pregnant or breastfeeding — to be found toiling in the municipal rubbish dumps,” Nyoka said. 

To access the rubbish dumps, refugee women like Nyoka are often required to pay a weekly fee of ZAR 40 ($2) to municipal security guards. Those who can't afford the bribe resort to crawling under sharp wire fences at unsecured entry points.

The work is degrading, she told More to Her Story. She sorts through items like used baby wipes, broken wine glasses, and lead-contaminated pipes without protective gear. She has seen some of her co-workers battling discolored skin, punctured fingers, and recurring stomach cramps.

Even more dangerous are the frequent, unmonitored landfill fires, which have burned the legs of female waste pickers and, in some cases, proven fatal. In March 2023, four trash pickers died in a landfill in Lawley, a suburb of Johannesburg.

“On our way out, we take extreme caution, lest robbers dispossess us of our wallets. It’s inhuman, but what can we do?” she said, recalling a September incident where a robber brandished a knife, and went away with her wallet and day’s earnings. 

When approached by More to Her Story, Kenny Kunene, the Johannesburg City Council executive in charge of public safety, denied that guards posted to landfills take bribes to allow irregular trash pickers. 

South Africa’s failure to integrate refugees into dignified, formal job markets has left female asylum seekers grappling with hazardous work, explained environmentalist Shamiso Mupara.

Sneaking into polluted municipal landfills is like rolling “a dice with danger,” she said, describing how these landfills are often teeming with rats, polluted wastewater, and toxic chemicals like lead and discarded needles.

Maki Lebakeng, a former deputy leader of the South African National Union of Mine Workers in Johannesburg, said female refugees are already living on the margins of society in South Africa and are at the bottom of the ‘economic food chain’ of dignified labor access. The South African statistics agency says that in December, the average monthly salary for middle-class professional workers was R28,000 ($1420). 

Refugee trash pickers like Nyoka have drastically lower earnings. “The best month for us, if we work through weekends, brings just R4500 ($228),” Nyoka says.

It’s systemic unfairness, Lebakeng added. Large corporate recycling companies are making money out of the free labor of these women while paying them a pittance, while failing to provide protective gear, training, and personal insurance. 

PikitUp, the largest trash recycling firm in Johannesburg, denied that their corporate industry profiteers from the labor of refugee trash pickers like Nyoka. 

“They are not our employees, and they are taking a risk for themselves. It is their [refugee trash pickers] personal obligation to buy workplace injury insurance,” said Arnold Maloba, a company representative, in a statement. “Like in any decentralized marketplace, if they bring trash for us to carry, we pay them what both parties agree on.” 

Johannesburg’s deputy mayor, Eugene Modise, insisted that municipal rubbish dumps must only be accessed by the city’s recycling officers, and anyone sorting trash there is violating rules. “The city has zero tolerance, will arrest offenders, and won’t pay liability for anyone injured while illegally sorting trash,” he said. 

To Nyoka, the women risking their lives in South Africa’s landfills deserve to be recognized, protected, and formally integrated into the municipal workforce, with access to proper safety gear, healthcare, and fair wages.

“We are heroines,” she said. “This work may be brutal now, but with training and support, it could become dignified, even empowering.”

Despite being marginalized by the system and targeted by xenophobic hostility, Nyoka insists on one truth: “We belong to South Africa.”