ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Internet Site Provides Solutions for Trash

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 24 2000 (IPS) - Anyone with garbage disposal problems or concerns around the world, but in Latin America in particular, can find solutions and ideas at a novel Internet website.

“Solid Waste – everything you always wanted to know about waste management and never knew where to find it!” is a wep page posted by the Rio de Janeiro environmental consultancy Resol Engineering, aimed at creating an Americas-wide network of companies and others interested in garbage-related services, equipment, technology and trade.

As a public interest site, the webpage has the support of the Brazilian and Inter-American Associations of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering, the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), Germany’s aid agency (GTZ) and the Brazilian Institute of Municipal Administration (IBAM).

The website was posted two years ago, but the idea began taking shape 15 years ago, said engineer José Henrique Penido, one of the partners in Resol, a firm that has been working for two decades with the company in charge of treating solid waste in Rio de Janeiro.

“My concern was to fill a need for information that was lacking in small towns, where city governments, for example, purchased the wrong kind of trucks and equipment,” said Penido, who is also a PAHO consultant and an IBAM professor.

Other errors arise from a lack of familiarity with existing laws, technologies, services and sources of financing.

Penido first compiled information to be disseminated by traditional channels, in print and through seminars, until Internet opened up a new world of possibilities for organising and spreading the information collected, now available to the public at the company’s website: www.resol.com.br.

The service provided is free of charge and growing steadily due to participation by the public. The website promotes an ongoing debate on the question of garbage disposal and information on business opportunities among companies, city governments and other actors involved in the question of urban waste, such as research centres, environmentalists and sewage companies.

Waste Exchanges, a mechanism which provides offers and demand for what is garbage for some but raw material for others, are listed at the website. So far there are links to three in Brazil and two – in California and Texas – in the United States.

But the chief aim of the site is to make information available to those involved in the question of urban waste disposal, said Penido. Business opportunities are an indirect consequence of the posting of information on companies that supply equipment, services and technology, possible sources of financing, public tenderings and events like fairs and conferences, he added.

Information on studies, laws, international treaties, technical standards, institutions specialising in solid waste disposal, including non-governmental organisations, a bibliography and links to other websites complete the information offered by Resol in Spanish, English and Portuguese.

The website “is already recognised as a reference point” in Latin America, and receives 200 visits a day by people involved in the question of garbage disposal, said Penido.

The Waste Exchanges, however, have run into difficulties, at least in Brazil. “Industries do not like to make it known that they generate, or work with, waste,” said Penido. Businesses are even more cautious in places like Rio de Janeiro, where the exchange is coordinated by the government’s environmental authority.

Sao Paulo, the state that accounts for nearly half of the country’s industrial production and which concentrates agribusiness that generates huge quantities of waste, such as the sugar or orange juice industries, does not yet have an exchange of its own.

The Federation of State Industries (FIESP) is trying to promote the Sao Paulo Recycling Programme, which is planning to set up a Waste Exchange accessible through the Internet.

The project, created by TIPS (Technological Trade and Information Promotion System) – an international e-commerce network specialising in information for small and medium sized businesses, with an exchange providing offers and demands – entails plans to organise a databank to generate business opportunities involving industrial waste and green-friendly solutions for recycling or treatment.

A programme of that sort is urgently needed, agreed the state of Sao Paulo’s Secretary of Agriculture, Joao Carlos Meirelles, who pointed, for example, to the problem of empty packaging dumped in the countryside, containing traces of toxic fertilisers and pesticides that end up polluting rivers and the groundwater.

The project would also entail a Technology and Services Exchange for technical solutions on recycling or neutralising the environmental effects of waste, said the operation director of the Brazilian bureau of TIPS, Walkiria Dutra de Oliveira, who lamented that a lengthy restructuring process in FIESP was holding up implementation of the project.

The potential for business opportunities is “nearly unlimited” considering the enormous amount of waste produced by industry, agriculture, and numerous universities and technological centres in Sao Paulo, she pointed out.

The project aims to initially attract some 1,500 companies, to draw up an inventory of industrial waste produced in the state of Sao Paulo, with perhaps one-third of them actively participating in the exchanges.

Although the recycling business has been growing in Brazil in the past few years, it has only involved a limited variety of waste products, such as aluminum cans and PET plastics.

Urban waste continues to go mainly into open-air dumps and landfills, which not only hurt the environment but highlight a cruel social reality in Brazil, where some 50,000 children work in the mountains of rubbish, gathering waste to sell or eat, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

There are families who scrape by from scavenging throughout Latin America, where one out of three people are poor and per capita production of garbage has doubled from half a kilo to one kilo a day in the past 30 years due to urban sprawl and rising consumption.

But non-biodegradable and toxic waste make up a growing proportion of the trash, according to the PAHO’s Centre for Sanitary Engineering and Environmental Sciences (CEPIS), making the livelihood of waste-pickers even more dangerous.

And although per capita garbage production in Latin America is equivalent to just one-quarter to one-half of the rubbish generated by industrialised countries, only three-quarters of the trash is actually collected in the cities of Latin America, and most of that goes into open-air dumps, receiving no treatment whatsoever.