Beneath the poverty line:Horrific pictures of Filipino children sifting through rivers of rubbish in desperate bid to find something to sell
A boy struggles to keep his head above water, swimming in a river thick with the reams of rubbish that have brought him there. Nearby, a girl balances on a makeshift styrofoam raft as she collects recyclable material from floating garbage in a polluted river at Navotas city, north of Manila. These children are just a handful of the thousands of young Filipinos paradoxically risking their lives in the heavily polluted water, in order to survive.
+9 Dangerous: Children in the Philippines are risking their lives to scavenge for recyclable materials to sell for scrap Families living in the nearby slums are some of the poorest in the world, with both adults and children reduced to scavenging through waste for the quantities of recyclable materials needed to make a living. Many still live in squalor and spend their days sifting through polluted water to find anything they can sell to 24-hour ‘junk shops’ that buy plastic, metal, paper and glass by the kilo, which are sold to massive recycling plants in southern China. The youngsters are at risk of diseases such as respiratory infections, pneumonia, diarrhoea and tuberculosis from wading through the dirty waters or working on one of the massive neighbouring rubbish dumps. Unicef says the junk shops take all the profit and none of the risk, typically turning over millions of pesos a year, while paying the dump workers around 50 pesos (£2) a day. And the charity warned the huge risks they are taking are often for even less gains with less demand than ever for the scrap materials they are desperately collecting.
+9 Desperate: A girl sits on a makeshift styrofoam raft as she collects recyclable material from floating garbage in a polluted river at Navotas city, north of Manila
+9 Scavenging: A boy sift through floating garbage as he collect recyclable materials in a dirty river
+9 Unsafe: Children use makeshift boats to trawl the litter-strewn rivers of the Philippines, collecting recyclable materials A number of recycling plants closed in China as a result of the economic crash, with junk shops responding by slashing their prices by up to half. The grim reality has meant people are effectively having to collect twice as much for the same minimal return, charities warn. The Philippines was one of the first developing countries to face up to the huge increase in waste due to urbanisation and growth. It passed legislation in 2000 which encouragied separate streams for recyclable and organic material in its waste management system. According to a 2012 World Bank report, South Asian and Pacific countries will have to cope with a 150 per cent increase in household waste by 2025. Lakes of rubbish still fill the coast of the Philippines
+9 Poverty: A Filipino girl inspects the contents of a small bag scavenged from one of thousands of bags of garbage at the Payatas dump (file photo)
+9 Dump: A girl scavenges for recyclable materials at a garbage dumpsite in Las Pinas, south of Manila in the Philippines (file photo)
+9 Deadly: A Filipino man walks up a mountain of steaming decaying garbage to scavenge at the Payatas Dump in Quezon City. Thousands of the poorest Filipinos still scavenge for a living at the Payatas dump, despite a landslide killing hundreds in 2000
+9 Clean up: A child swims in the waters full of water lilies and rubbish floating in Manila Bay as he participates in the clean up of the coastal areas near the Philippine capital Manila
+9 A homeless woman eats in front of a garbage dump in a Manila bay in 2007 with social welfare groups and left-wing organisations maintaining that poverty is increasing in the Philippines
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