A recycling, biodigestion and composting complex is being installed next to the landfill of the Intermunicipal Consortium of the Middle Valley of the Itajaí River (Cimvi), to take advantage of all the solid waste from 19 municipalities in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
TIMBO / FLORIANOPOLIS, Brazil , Jun 13 2025 (IPS)

In 2014, Santa Catarina became the first and only state free of open-air garbage dumps in Brazil. Now, 14 of its municipalities are seeking to also free themselves from landfills and make use of nearly all urban solid waste.

The Intermunicipal Consortium of the Middle Itajaí Valley (Cimvi) expects to process in recycling, biodigestion and composting more than 90% of the garbage, surpassing the 65% benchmark reached by the Nordic countries of Europe, emphasized its executive director, Fernando Tomaselli.“We have 36 landfills in the state, only three public, the rest are private and there is little interest in changing the system, because whoever dominates the landfill also dominates the garbage collection service”: Fernando Tomaselli.

“It is a utopia,” said the executive president of the Brazilian Association of Energy from Waste (Abren), Yuri Schmitke.

“The unrealistic goal compromises the project,” he warned. Several European countries, Japan and South Korea have already eliminated sanitary landfills – the areas for the final disposal of solid waste – but resort to incineration to generate energy with non-recyclable garbage, he added.

Cimvi rules out that alternative. Its goal is to expand recycling and the circular economy of waste to an unprecedented proportion. “Our obsession is to take advantage of everything, to prove that garbage does not exist,” said Tomaselli.

But recycling has limits. Europe, after many attempts and advances, covers 25 % of waste on average and 32 % in the exceptional case of Germany. In addition, 19% of the waste still goes to landfills, according to data from Abren, which had its sixth annual congress in Florianopolis, capital of Santa Catarina, on June 5 and 6.

Cimvi was created in 1998, with only five participating municipalities, to jointly manage several issues, but not yet garbage. It reached its current composition of 14 municipalities in 2017 after taking over the management of the sanitary landfill in 2016, previously in charge of the water and sewage authorities.

Its headquarters was installed in Timbo, a town of 46 099 people, according to the 2022 national census. The 14 municipalities had 283 594 residents that year, the most populous being Indaial, with 71 549.

Fernando Tomaselli, director of Cimvi, an intermunicipal initiative that promotes circular waste management in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Landfill and recycling

The landfill receives garbage from five other “partner” cities, in addition to the 14 in the consortium, with a total of between 5,000 and 7,000 tons per month. Environmental education campaigns in schools, businesses and the streets have gradually expanded selective waste collection.

Yellow sacks were popularized and disseminated where the population put recyclable waste which, collected by the municipalities, are taken to the Waste Assessment Center (CVR I) at the Cimvi headquarters, on the outskirts of Timbo.

“Today we recover 20 to 22% of recyclable waste, against a Brazilian average of 2%. We want to reach 27%,” Tomaselli told IPS.

“We receive an average of 60 tons a day, 24 hours a day, in three shifts, Monday to Monday,” said Rosane Valério, president of the Medio Vale Cooperative, hired to separate and send the waste to purchasing companies, at CVR I, where 87 recyclers are employed.

The cooperative has another unit to process waste from two other nearby cities, Ituporanga and Aurora, with a total of 33 300 people.

“Of the material received, we still discard 30% that comes mixed or dirty with food remains, sometimes blood that attracts mosquitoes, glass and other dangerous objects such as syringes and medicines, which generate major difficulties for recycling,” explained Valério.

A bench at the entrance of Cimvi’s headquarters, made of thermoplastic produced from waste that was previously considered non-recyclable and destined for landfills. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Thermoplastic

She regretted that “we do not know the origin, there is a lack of awareness of the population in the correct disposal”. In any case, half of that 30% of discarded waste can be used for the production of thermoplastic, a hard material like concrete, which is used to make benches for squares, sidewalks, pavements and walls.

The cooperative already operates a pilot plant, with experimental production that has not yet been sold externally. “The municipalities are the initial market for the thermoplastic plates, as well as for the compost from the composting,” says Tomaselli.

Abren’s president, Schmitke, is skeptical. The consortium municipalities have a limited, insufficient demand, and the population does not trust products made from garbage, he argued.

Jaqueline Wagenknetht and Maria Eduarda Pegoretti, Cimvi’s environmental education and communication advisors, promote environmental education in the so-called European Valley to improve selective garbage collection and promote tourism and sustainable living. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

But thermoplastic has been around for four decades and now there is equipment that facilitates its production at a high temperature, 160 degrees Celsius, and as an input, half of the plastic that is added to other waste, such as textiles, is enough, countered the director of Cimvi.

The use of local waste will take a leap forward with the inauguration of CVR II, which is expected in early 2026 and will use a large part of the organic waste for the production of biogas and biofertilizers. Another part will go to composting.

“The goal is to take advantage of 100% or 98%,” for which alternatives must be sought for waste, the “common garbage” for which there are still no ways to recycle, he said.

Cimvi headquarters, in the Sunflower Park, which combines ecotourism, sanitary landfill and urban waste utilization plants for biogas generation, recycling and composting. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Bottlenecks

One stumbling block is selective collection, which needs to be perfected. “In Milan, Italy, five types of garbage are separated at the source, be it food, plastics, paper, metals or glass. Here, it’s harder because everything is mixed together,” said Tomaselli.

That is why Cimvi gives priority to environmental education, through several campaigns such as “Vale reciclar”, and sustainable tourism, which highlights the beauties of the so-called European Valley, which includes other municipalities in addition to the 14 consortium members.

The Girasol Park was also created for this purpose, a tourist complex that includes the landfill, the Cimvi facilities and the surrounding forest, with trails for walks, said Jaqueline Wagenknetht, environmental education advisor.

Design and poetry contests among local students seek to promote the valley, which is called European because its population includes many immigrants, especially Germans, Italians and Poles.

The name Sunflower was chosen for the park because, in addition to its beauty, the flower symbolizes sustainability, as a source of oil and biofuel, the advisor explained.

Design of the future Sunflower Park, in which the green buildings, in the center, are intended for recycling and energy biodigestion. In the background on the left is the landfill already covered, able to receive solar energy panels. Credit: Courtesy of Cimvi

Cimvi benefits from the experiences of São Bento do Sul, a municipality of 83 277 people, 120 kilometers north of Timbo, which has a similar program that seeks to use up to 100% of the waste.

A process of dehydration of the organic part allows a better use of the waste, explained Jacó Phoren, consultant of the company 100lixo, which is involved in the project, during his speech at the Abren congress on June 6.

Fostering new companies that generate solutions for the waste industry is another focus of Cimvi, said Tomaselli.

In Curitibanos, a city 185 kilometers southwest of Timbo, with 40 045 people, the company Inventus Ambiental claims to have invented equipment that will facilitate the separation of garbage for better energy recovery or recycling, reducing the waste that makes landfills bigger.

Its pilot project will be inaugurated in a few months and is based on the use of 90-degree heat to treat organic material, informed Dirnei Ferri, director of the company.

Santa Catarina has already eliminated open dumps, although it is ignored if all of them have been cleaned up. Now it is a matter of “breaking the landfill trench”, said Tomaselli.

“We have 36 landfills in the state, only three public, the rest are private and there is little interest in changing the system, because whoever dominates the landfill also dominates the garbage collection service,” he concluded.

“This isn’t like a tsunami, which appears all of a sudden, but a silent enemy that kills you slowly, as you breathe and drink the water,” says Hugo Ozores, who lives in González Catán, a working-class district in Greater Buenos Aires.

For the past decade, local residents in this district on the southwest side of the Argentine capital, which has a population of 300,000, have been complaining about health problems that they blame on a sanitary landfill in the area that receives 2,500 tons a day of garbage

The case was among those heard by the sixth edition of the International Water Tribunal, held in November in Buenos Aires to study five Latin American disputes over access to clean water.

The International Water Tribunal ruling urged the Metropolitan Environmental Association (CEAMSE) – the municipal company that runs the landfill – and local residents to work out a solution. In the meantime, the people of González Catán continue drinking polluted water.

The Tribunal’s resolution “has no legal standing and is not binding, but it has political and scientific weight, and we see it as a step forward,” said Ozores, one of the local residents who testified before the panel of judges.

A decade ago, the people of González Catán, which forms part of the densely populated district of La Matanza, began to notice a stench coming from the landfill, and started to associate the increasing frequency of health problems with the dump.

The landfill is run by CEAMSE, a company created 33 years ago, during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, to collect and dispose of garbage in the metropolitan area.

At first it received rubbish from the city of Buenos Aires and several outlying districts. But as a result of the pressure from local residents, a new law was passed limiting the reception of waste to La Matanza.

The rest of the trash goes to other dumps operated by CEAMSE on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, which are almost filled to capacity, as environmental organisations complain. The company itself has recognised that the landfills are operating at the limits of capacity, and is seeking new land.

“We inherited CEAMSE from the dictatorship,” Ozores said. “They say they dug a pit and lined it. But the legal investigation found leachate in the Morales stream and the Puelche aquifer, from which water for local consumption is extracted.”

He was referring to a study carried out by experts with the Gendarmería Nacional, a national police force, which found high levels of Escherichia coli, arsenic, nitrates, chromium, toluene, benzene and hydrocarbons in the water samples.

The Gendarmería investigation was ordered by the courts after a community organisation, the Asamblea de Vecinos Autoconvocados de González Catán, filed a legal complaint alleging that the groundwater that they drank was polluted.

“The water we drink comes from wells, and just adding chlorine isn’t enough to eliminate the chemicals and heavy metals it contains,” Ozores said. In 2006, Judge Juan Salas instructed local residents not to use the water from their taps, “not even to brush your teeth.”

But no government authority has distributed clean water in the neighbourhoods, and few people can afford to buy bottled water.

The only official distribution of water is done in local schools – basically an acknowledgement that tap water in the area is not safe.

The local residents then filed a complaint for “breach of public duty.”

But no solution has been reached. And in the meantime, cases of cancer, lupus, purpura and allergies are on the rise, local residents and activists report.

The hardest-hit neighbourhood is Nicole, which is next to the landfill. From houses in Nicole, the mountains of trash dumped by a steady stream of trucks are clearly visible. The waste is later covered over with dirt.

Greenpeace Argentina activist Lorena Pujó told IPS that the problem of waste in the metropolitan area “has reached a crisis point, because the landfills are full and have to be closed.”

Pujó said that for the past 10 years, CEAMSE has been seeking authorisation to open new dumps, but has been blocked by the resistance of local communities that do not want a landfill in their area.

Since 2003, Greenpeace has been pressing for a city law that would require the separation of waste at source, and would create recycling plans that would gradually reduce the trash disposed of at dumps, until achieving 100 percent waste recycling.

“The ‘Zero Waste’ law was approved in 2005, but nothing was done until 2007, and in 2008, it was dismantled,” she said. The plan was to reduce the proportion of waste that went to landfills by 50 percent as of this year. But no progress was made towards that goal.

The people of González Catán successfully pressed for a regulation reducing the amount of garbage buried in the dump. They also presented a proposal to the La Matanza authorities for the recycling and reuse of waste.

“We aren’t professionals, but we investigated local initiatives as well as experiences in other countries, like the case of Sao Paulo (in Brazil) or the U.S. city of San Francisco, and we presented a proposal for integrated waste management,” Ozores said.

“But nothing has happened, because the big business here is burying the garbage,” he lamented.

As Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which will discuss the green economy, the Brazilian city has put an end to one of its worst environmental sins: the enormous Jardim Gramacho garbage dump on Guanabara Bay.

For over three decades, 60 million tons of solid waste were dumped at the landfill – the largest in Latin America, and one of the largest in the world – creating a 50-metre-tall mountain of untreated rubbish on a site where there was no lining to prevent leakage into the bay, located to the north of the city.

Jardim Gramacho was the most glaring example of the solid waste management problem faced by Brazil’s cities, which affects many households located on the edges of improvised garbage dumps, as well as the environment.

“Rio de Janeiro will not tolerate any more violence against the environment, like this environmental crime that the city has committed for so long,” said Mayor Eduardo Paes when he announced the closure of the dump on Sunday Jun. 3, alongside Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira.

After the ceremony, bulldozers covered up the 1.3-square-km dump with thick layers of soil, and a padlock was symbolically placed at the entrance.

But the closure of the dump will not put an end to the environmental damage, such as the continued leakage of toxic liquids, Vera Chevalier, director of Ecomarapendi, a local environmental organisation, told IPS.

“Gramacho is an example of a grave environmental disaster in Brazil, which caused an environmental debt that is impossible to repay, because it is impossible to clean up the area where the damage was caused,” the environmentalist said.

When the dump opened in 1978, in the middle of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, it was designed to receive a maximum of 3,000 tons of waste a day for 20 years.

The Gramacho dump, just before it was closed down. Credit:Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

But the closure of the dump was postponed for 14 years, and around 9,000 tons of rubbish was dumped there every day.

The National Policy on Solid Waste that was created in 2010 finally led to the closing of the dump, setting a 2014 deadline for the elimination of all landfills located in unsuitable areas.

The measure went into effect just days ahead of the U.N. conference known as Rio+20, to be hosted by this city Jun. 20-22, two decades after the 1992 Earth Summit held here.

The authorities announced that the landfill will now be the site of a biogas plant, which will convert methane into clean, usable biomethane.

The garbage will now be managed by a Solid Waste Treatment Centre in the city of Seropédica, 75 km from Rio. Its promoters say the plant will be the most modern of its kind in Latin America.

Jardim Gramacho was a symbol of environmental and social degradation and dirty, dangerous work. About 5,000 people eked out a living by scavenging recyclable material in the dump, alongside vultures and pigs.

Workdays of over 10 hours, sun or rain, in appalling conditions were their daily lot.

Each garbage picker has his or her own story of suffering and illness caused by daily contact with garbage and toxic waste.

Gloria Cristina dos Santos, 36, began to work as a garbage picker at the age of 11, working at the dump with her mother and siblings, because her father’s wages as a dock worker weren’t enough to support the family.

“I’ve been a recycler for 25 years and I had a terrible adolescence,” she said. “I spent a large part of my life in Gramacho. I remember that when I was 18, it was really difficult to move around the city because people avoided contact with us. We were treated like stinky things.”

Today, Santos is the representative of a cooperative of recyclers. She was one of the people who were most active in the process of closing down the dump and training the scavengers so they could have better living and working conditions in the future.

“Working in Gramacho was never disgraceful, but it was always inhuman,” Santos said. “I’m not ashamed to be a recycler; it’s a way to support my family. Now we will remain in the recycling supply chain in a more organised and safer manner.”

Of the 1,700 recyclers left in Jardim Gramacho over the last year, 400 said they wanted to continue doing the same work after the dump was closed.

In the 1990s, many recyclers at the landfill took in as much as 600 dollars a month. But in the last few months, the ones who were left were earning only half that much.

The Rio de Janeiro municipal authorities reached an agreement with the recycling cooperatives to provide 700,000 dollars for compensation for closing the dump.

The president of another cooperative at Gramacho, Sebastião “Tião” Carlos dos Santos, told IPS that he is a staunch defender of formally including recyclers in the labour market.

“This is the first time in 34 years that we will have a voice, and will be recognised,” he said, adding that “the new solid waste policy will eradicate the dumps, but not the recyclers.”

“I hope we can leave Gramacho behind in the best possible way, and show that life after its closure is possible,” Tião said.

Valdenir Pereira da Costa, 29, has been working in Gramacho for 18 years, and until the day before it was closed, he continued his normal daily routine. But he told IPS that he does not belong to any cooperative, and will have to find another way to make a living.

“I don’t really know where to go now,” Costa said, adding that he and his five brothers and sisters grew up in the dump. He said the closing of the landfill left him “a little orphaned.”

Despite the efforts that are being made, the government Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA) said that Brazil is unlikely to meet the goal of eliminating all unsuitable dumps by 2014, because there are still 2,906 dumps in 2,810 municipalities around the country.

“The challenge is enormous, but it is important for us to try to close down all areas that are inappropriate for dumping garbage,” Albino Alvarez, an IPEA researcher who monitors garbage handling in the country, told IPS.

But he said the dumps would remain an environmental challenge until 2020.