A tosher is someone who scavenges in the sewers, a sewer-hunter, especially in London during the Victorian era. The word tosher was also used to describe the thieves who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames.
A waste picker is a person who salvages reusable or recyclable materials thrown away by others to sell or for personal consumption. A more contemporary term, focusing on the outcome of the professional activity, is "informal sector recycling".
On the supply side, urbanization has facilitated the expansion of waste picking by creating a large pool of unemployed and underemployed residents with few alternative means of earning a livelihood. Known as "the one industry that is always hiring", waste picking provides a cushion for many who lose their jobs during times of war, crisis, and economic downturn in countries that do not have welfare systems. It is also one of the few work opportunities available to people who lack formal education or job experience.
In that era, waste pickers were known as wharf rats, tinkers, rag and bone men, mudlarks, and ragpickers. By the mid-20th century waste picking decreased, as waste management industries were formalized, and welfare states decreased the poor's reliance on informal recycling.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, informal recycling in parts of the United States and Western Europe once again began to mushroom. Two factors fueled the boom: First, the demand for recycling surged due to the increased waste stream, declining room in landfills, new recycling technologies, and the efforts of environmentalists
changes in the political economy including the loss of manufacturing jobs, cutbacks to government employment, and the roll back of the welfare state increased the ranks of the poor, working poor, and homeless—thus there were more people disposed to wastepick as a full-time profession or supplemental job
There is a high prevalence of disease among waste pickers due to their exposure to hazardous materials such as fecal matter, paper saturated by toxic materials, bottles and containers with chemical residues, contaminated needles,[citation needed] and heavy metals from batteries.
Waste pickers who work in open dumps are exposed to large amounts of toxic fumes, and face other severe threats including being run over by trucks and caught in surface subsidence, trash slides, and fires. On 10 July 2000, several hundred waste pickers were killed by a trash slide from a huge garbage mountain after monsoon rains at an open dump in Payatas, Philippines.
there is widespread public scorn against waste pickers due to their poverty and perceived lack of hygiene. In Colombia, where, since the 1980s, "social cleansing" vigilante groups, sometimes working with police complicity, have killed at least two thousand waste collectors, beggars, and prostitutes—whom they refer to as "disposables" (desechables). In 1992, around the peak of this activity, eleven corpses of murdered waste collectors were discovered at a university in Barranquilla. Their organs had been sold for transplants and bodies sold to the medical school for dissection (Medina 2009, 155).
As waste streams have expanded due to increased consumption, the waste management industry is becoming increasingly lucrative. Governments around the world are granting private companies monopolies on waste management systems, meaning that the cooperatives' survival hinges on building political and economic alliances needed to win contracts—often an uphill battle given authorities' distrust of waste collectors and the cooperatives' lack of capital for modern machinery.