Community orchard in Ribeirão, a neighbourhood in Florianopolis, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. There are more than 150 such orchards in the city, which serve as a final destination for the compost produced from their organic waste. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
FLORIANOPOLIS, Brazil, Jun 26 2025 (IPS)

Living with her neighbours, getting to know them and chatting with them is what Lucila Neves enjoys most in the community orchard of Portal de Ribeirão, a neighbourhood in the south of Florianopolis, considered the most sustainable of Brazil’s 27 state capitals.

The biodegradable packaging entrepreneur chose to live in the capital of the southern state of Santa Catarina, where she came from Ribeirão Preto, 950 kilometres to the north.

She is one of the people who voluntarily take care of the huge variety of vegetables, medicinal plants and fruit trees planted on about 1000 square metres.

The neighbourhood’s residents accepted the planting started 15 months ago, because it cleaned up the area where a private company used to compost organic waste for the municipality, without the necessary care.

Gone are the mice, mosquitoes, cockroaches and the bad smell that had infested the place, said biologist Bruna do Nascimento Koti, a primary school teacher and permanent volunteer in the garden, where she was together with Neves on the day IPS visited the space.

Now the state-owned Capital Improvement Company (Comcap) also makes clean compost there, with organic waste collected by the population in closed plastic buckets distributed by the Florianopolis city government.

In addition to providing inexpensive and healthy vegetables without agrochemicals, the orchard promotes conviviality, with a Thursday tea gathering and sometimes collective cultivation on Saturdays, Koti said.

Bruna do Nascimento Koti is one of the volunteers who tends the garden at Portal de Ribeirão, in the south of the Brazilian city of Florianopolis, where community life is promoted and healthy food is provided to neighbours and volunteer gardeners. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The Florianopolis municipality has chosen composting and recycling as the main alternatives for managing the solid waste generated by the city’s 537 000 people, to which many tourists and seasonal residents are added during the southern summer.

It is estimated that of the 700 tonnes of daily waste, 43% is dry recyclable waste and 35% organic waste, the use of which is to be increased in order to reduce the proportion of waste destined for landfill. There is 22% of non-recyclable waste left over.

Currently only 13% of the total is recycled, while the remaining 87% goes to the landfill in the neighbouring municipality of Biguaçu, 45 kilometres from Florianopolis, which receives waste from 23 cities, Karina de Souza, director of solid waste at the Florianopolis Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development, told IPS.

But official statistics point to significant progress. Food waste used in composting increased more than four times, from 1175 tonnes in 2020 to 5126 tonnes in 2024, according to Souza’s records.

Green organics, as waste from tree pruning and other vegetation is called, more than doubled during that period. Glass also increased by a factor of 2.5 and materials that arrive mixed and go through separation before recycling almost quadrupled.

The ‘Zero Waste’ programme adopted by the mayor’s office in 2018 sets a target of recycling 60% of dry waste and 90% of organic waste by 2030, a goal that seems far off.

Waste already separated for recycling, in this case glass. Tyres, plastics and cardboard are other materials collected for recycling at the Waste Recovery Centre near the city centre of Florianopolis in southern Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Waste has value

The Comcap Waste Recovery Centre, located in the Itacorubi neighbourhood, near the city centre and next to the Botanical Garden, is at the heart of the municipal policy to solve the waste challenge.

It concentrates the city’s large composting yard, a central facility for separating recyclable waste and another for transferring disposable waste and compacting it into larger trucks for transport to the landfill.

It also includes a Waste Museum, especially for environmental education, and an ecopoint where residents deposit their recyclable waste, such as wood, electronics, paper, plastics and glass.

There are nine ecopoints distributed throughout the city, which receive around 11 000 tonnes of recyclable waste per year for sorting and handling.

This waste, also collected from other sources, is transferred to warehouses where glass, packaging cartons, corrugated paper, plastics and tyres are collected separately for recycling. But they arrive mixed with rubbish and have to go through human separation and sorting, called triage.

This is the area of the Association of Collectors of Recyclable Material, which, hired by Comcap, separates the waste for the buyers, generally the recycling industry.

Of the 75 members, about 40% are immigrants, mostly Venezuelans, but also Peruvians, Haitians and Colombians, according to Volmir dos Santos, the association’s president, during IPS’ visit to the facility.

Founded in 1999, the group was initially made up of street waste collectors. With the advance of municipal management, selective collection in residences, industries and commerce, in addition to the ecopoints, they became ‘triadores’, those who separate, classify and sell the waste ready for recycling.

“We suffered prejudice, discrimination and shame, now we gain respect,” Dos Santos celebrated.

Two young Venezuelans who immigrated to Brazil and found employment at the Waste Valorisation Centre in Florianopolis. Haitian and Peruvian migrants also work at the facility. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

No incineration of waste

But the broad movement of recycling workers, from various associations and cooperatives, seeks to influence municipal plans. It opposes, for example, the burning of non-recyclable waste for energy generation, an alternative that is growing among industrial countries.

There are at least 3035 solid waste combustion plants in the world, known as Waste-to-Energy, said Yuri Schmitke, president of the Brazilian Association of Energy from Waste (Abren), which brings together 28 companies in the sector.

It is the way to achieve the goal of ‘zero waste’ or the elimination of landfills, since recycling has limits –there is always a percentage that cannot be reused and incineration replaces fossil fuels, he argued.

Countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Nordic European nations have managed to use 100% of their waste, he said, by eliminating these landfills or final solid waste deposits.

Restrictions and allegations of environmental and even sanitary damage have been dispelled in several European countries, Japan and Korea, with the implementation of these plants even in central parts of large cities, without such negative effects, he pointed out.

Paris already has three of them in its so-called extended city centre, where the population density reaches 15 000 people per square kilometre, he said.

“Incineration puts an end to the cycle, it excludes recycling definitively, and Brazil is very different from Europe, it has already had failed experiences,” countered Dorival Rodrigues dos Santos, president of the Federation of Associations and Cooperatives of Waste Pickers of Santa Catarina, which claims to represent 28,000 workers.

It calls for a broad debate between technicians and collectors on the subject, given that this alternative is beginning to gain followers in Brazil. The municipality of Joinville, with 616 000 inhabitants and 170 kilometres from Florianopolis, has plans to install a plant to generate electricity by burning waste.

Florianopolis is looking to send non-recyclable waste to the cement industry, which is interested in using it as fuel instead of fossil fuels, said De Souza, Florianopolis’ director of solid waste.

Aparecida Napoleão leads a waste collection movement in her building, an example of the benefits of separating and recycling different materials in the southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Recycling first

“We defend the primacy of recycling over incineration. The goal is to improve recycling, we have not exhausted the advances,” according to Karolina Zimmermann, the engineer who works with the collectors.

Progress in recycling depends not only on new technologies, such as those that separate mixed or even melted materials, dyes and chemical elements in plastics or paperboard. The environmental education of consumers in order to separate waste is key to increase reuse.

Aparecida Napoleão is an example of how recycling monitoring has taken hold. In her building of 126 luxury flats, she spearheads a movement to separate all waste, from the small glass containers she sends to artisanal jelly producers to special papers that can be turned into notebooks, plastics and even bottle caps.

A retired social worker from the Florianopolis municipality, she has organised a chain of shelves and bins on the ground floor of the building for dozens of different types of materials. She tries to guide her neighbours, but recognises that even so, there are always those who put rubbish in the wrong place.

“It’s a lot of work, you have to be patient, explain, ask repeatedly until they understand the importance of separation,” she says.

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.

Gaucho dancers at the Pollution Festival in Bouwer, Argentina. Courtesy of Bouwer Sin Basura

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BOUWER, Argentina, Mar 14 2014 (IPS)

While the magnificent samba schools of Brazil were getting ready for the grand carnival in Rio de Janeiro, a modest carnival troupe toured a small Argentine town to draw attention to an urban problem that has brought the central province of Córdoba to the brink of environmental disaster: garbage.

Some 2,300 kilometres away from Rio de Janeiro, a murga (band of street musicians) named Colour and Joy gathered at the foot of a replica of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue in the Cordoban town of Bouwer.

But this town of 2,000 people bears a different cross.“It is no coincidence that waste is dumped in the poorest towns around Córdoba.” -- Cintia Frencia, a provincial lawmaker for the leftwing Workers Party

After a long struggle to close an open sky rubbish dump with an accumulated 12 million tonnes of garbage that finally succeeded in 2010, Bouwer is once again facing the prospect of another waste tip being opened, which would exacerbate chronic pollution in the area.

Twenty-four million tonnes of rubbish generated by the provincial capital and other municipalities over the next 30 years may be deposited on 270 hectares of land only 600 metres away from the old dump.

“Carnival should be for the people, and today we are here to raise awareness about what is happening with the garbage,” Sergio Moggi, the head of the murga, which is made up of children and teenagers, told IPS.

The Colour and Joy murga was one of the attractions at the Festival de la Contaminación (Pollution Festival) organised by residents to call attention to their plight.

One of the criteria for choosing the location for the new dump was the land value, and this counted against Bouwer because of its poverty.

The town is also burdened with the nearby remains of a lead smelter, a storage facility for toxic waste and a vehicle pound, and there is constant spraying of pesticides on the surrounding plantations.

The Environment Defence Foundation (FUNAM) regards Bouwer as “one of the most polluted zones of Argentina.” The large number of sources of pollution and the alarming perinatal and child mortality rates led this municipality to declare a “public health emergency.”

“In the summertime, every town in Córdoba holds a festival to celebrate something typical that represents it: salami, potatoes, and so on. Our characteristic feature, unfortunately, is garbage,” teacher Daniela Arce, of Bouwer Sin Basura (Garbage-Free Bouwer), a local residents’ association, told IPS.

Musicians of the Colour and Joy group tuning drum heads next to a replica of the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

But Bouwer’s problems are shared by this province, which has extensive fertile plains in the east and the Sierras de Córdoba mountain chains in the west.

The capital city, Córdoba, and 16 smaller surrounding municipalities generate some 2,200 tonnes of solid waste a day, according to the inter-municipal corporation for sustainable waste management in the Córdoba metropolitan area (CORMECOR), a public limited company that is studying technical alternatives for the handling and ultimate disposal of waste from the greater Córdoba area.

“The problem calls for waste treatment technology and a space for its disposal, and so far has not been handled in an integrated way,” says CORMECOR’s website.

The main shareholders of CORMECOR are the city of Córdoba, nine other municipalities and the garbage collectors’ union.

The normal practice was to bury garbage or dump it in open sky pits until 1981, when it began to be sent to the Bouwer tip.

Since that closed in 2010 – and it still contains 30 years’ worth of rubbish – waste has been taken to a temporary dump in Piedras Blancas, hastily made ready in less than two months and located beside national route 36, only five kilometres away from Bouwer.

Piedras Blancas has received 2,500 tonnes a day since 2010, when its estimated useful life was declared to be one year. According to the authorities it is now on the verge of collapse.

“The garbage is deposited and crushed daily, and earth is spread on top of it at the end of each day. The gases are vented, without being captured or treated; the liquid leached from decomposition of organic material is not treated either,” Nayla Azzinnari, FUNAM’s press officer, told IPS.

Now the provincial government is preparing to expropriate two pieces of land for the new project: one near the unfortunate Bouwer and another, for a transfer station, near the town of Estación Juárez Celman in the centre-north of the province.

CORMECOR is analysing proposals for waste treatment from 27 companies (from Argentina, the Netherlands, the United States and Brazil) and universities, while the people who have had the problem dumped on them have some answers of their own.

“Every town should look after its own rubbish. The Córdoba municipality should look after its waste, and so should the other municipalities,” the mayor of Bouwer, Juan Lupi, told IPS.

Bouwer produces less than half a truckload of waste a week, while the capital contributes 95 percent of the total.

In the view of biologist Ricardo Suárez, a technical adviser for local people in Bouwer, garbage should be tracked back to its origins. “Our problem is out of all proportion,” he complained.

The executive, legislative and judicial branches should take action to moderate consumption and persuade companies to sell their products with less throw-away packaging, he suggested.

The justice system should punish environmental crimes, such as failure to process waste, and municipalities should invest heavily in separation and recycling programmes and educate citizens in these new habits.

“We could achieve really low, tolerable limits [of pollution]. What we cannot accept is 12 million tonnes of garbage buried in one place, as we have now,” Suárez said.

To accomplish this, waste management must be “decentralised,” so that there are no more “sacrificed zones” like Bouwer, he told IPS.

“The first thing to do is to sit down and study the problem, and not to underestimate waste,” said chemical engineer Eduardo Riaño, who has analysed the effects of the gas and liquid emissions in Bouwer, which persist decades after the dumps were closed.

“Volatile organic compounds are very dangerous” and can cause cancer, he told IPS.

On the other hand, these deposits of organic material can be used to generate energy.

The amount of biogas emitted by the Bouwer garbage dump “until it was closed in 2010 was equivalent to one and a half years of domestic gas use, and two and a half years of compressed natural gas” for the local population , he said.

In the view of Cintia Frencia, a provincial lawmaker for the leftwing Workers Party, there are vested economic interests standing in the way of waste treatment and recycling.

“It is no coincidence that waste is dumped in the poorest towns around Córdoba,” she told IPS.

“Now there is talk of a new garbage burial site with a 30-year lifetime, which means that for the next three decades there are no plans to develop any technology for reducing and treating rubbish, in other words it’s just a business,” she said.

CORMECOR wants to raise capital by being listed on the national stock market.

Garbage is big business all over the world. In countries like Italy, it is profitable not only to companies but to the mafias that control them.

IPS obtained no replies to its requests for information from CORMECOR and the environmental secretariats of the provincial and city government.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

“Area of sacrifice” – a sign put up by local residents in Bouwer, Argentina to protest the garbage and toxic waste dumped in their town. Credit: Courtesy of Bouwer Sin Basura

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BOUWER, Argentina , Dec 16 2013 (IPS)

Towns traditionally celebrate their most characteristic aspect. So the town of Bouwer in central Argentina decided to “celebrate” garbage.

But the “first provincial festival of pollution and against discrimination” is not a reason for pride, but a mechanism of resistance by a town that wants to stop being “an area of environmental sacrifice” in the central province of Córdoba.

In the festival, to be held Feb. 22 in this working-class town of 2,000 inhabitants located 17 km south of the provincial capital, Córdoba, “there will be ‘asado con cuero’ [beef barbecued in its hide over an open fire, a traditional meal] and different artists,” the signs say.

For 28 years, Bouwer was known as the site of a garbage dump that accumulated, in nine different landfills without protective membranes – 12 million tons of waste from the capital and surrounding municipalities.

After years of struggle by local residents, the dump was closed in 2010. But no clean-up was carried out to reduce the environmental and health impacts, as the townspeople and local government of Bouwer are demanding.

“Besides affecting our quality of life, the dump is still polluting the water and the soil, from surface runoff, and the atmosphere, from the gases that are emitted,” the municipal environmental adviser, Adolfo González, tells Tierramérica.

But the festival won’t only feature the dump, Nayla Azzinnari, the press secretary for the Bouwer Sin Basura (Garbage-Free Bouwer) movement, comments to Tierramérica.

These include a vehicle pound, a hazardous waste incinerator (which is now closed), a lead smelter whose open smokestack created health problems for local residents between 1984 and 2005, a shipment of 12 tons of DDT and other dangerous pesticides that arrived in 2005 but were removed due to the protests by the locals, and a pit containing toxic industrial waste.

And as if this weren’t enough, fields of genetically modified soy surrounding the town are constantly sprayed with toxic agrochemicals, like in the rest of the rural areas in Córdoba province.

“It’s a cocktail of pollutants…we can’t accept any new sources,” says González.

But there are new reasons for the festival. The Córdoba city and provincial governments plan to open a new dump 600 metres from the first, which will receive some 2,500 tons of waste a day from the city and adjacent municipalities.

“It sounds like a joke: closing down one dump and opening another in the same place,” Mónica Rescala, another member of Bouwer Sin Basura, tells Tierramérica.

In the Cornelio Saavedra rural school, which stands next to the old dump and around 1,000 metres from the site of the new one, schoolchildren, teachers and mothers like Rescala are watching a video explaining the risks posed by the landfill.

“We were shocked by the stench and the number of pests in the school: flies, mosquitoes, huge rats. We couldn’t work in such an unhealthy environment,” the school principal, María Teresa Destéfanis, tells Tierramérica.

The cruel irony is that the school has no garbage collection service.

Part of the Bouwer dump. Credit: Courtesy of Bouwer Sin Basura

In October, Bouwer Mayor Juan Lupi declared a public health emergency.

From 2000 to 2012, infant mortality in Bouwer stood at 22 deaths per 1,000 live births.

That rate, obtained from the records of births and deaths in the civil registry, is nearly two times the provincial average of 11 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2010.

The perinatal mortality rate (stillbirths or newborns who die in their first week of life) stood at 25 for every 1,000 – two and a half times the provincial rate.

But no epidemiological studies have been carried out here, despite the fact that the numbers of cases of respiratory and skin ailments, cancer, miscarriages and premature births in Bouwer are also alarming.

“We started to see malformations in animals, which became particularly noticeable around 2008: dogs with cleft lip and cleft palate, pigs that are born without hair and with their stomachs and testicles full of water, cats without claws, chickens without feet,” Rescala says.

The Foundation for the Defence of the Environment (FUNAM) warns that living next to a sanitary landfill “is dangerous because the gases can cause cancer of the bladder, stomach, liver, prostate, lungs, cervix and uterus, leukaemia, changes in embryonic and foetal development, low birth weight and even birth defects.”

“Dumps mainly emit methane and carbon dioxide, but also nonmethane organic compounds, which include toxic, carcinogenic gases,” FUNAM says.

“In these polluted landfills, which have no membrane, the volatile substances in the waste, many of which are toxic and carcinogenic, can be carried by the wind long distances. And the stench is nauseating,” the organisation adds.

According to González, approval is about to be obtained for landfarming – a bioremediation treatment process used in the management and disposal of petroleum refinery waste products. The site would be installed two and a half km from Bouwer.

González sums up: “Our town has been chosen as a place of environmental sacrifice.”

The schoolchildren make drawings about the video they watched. “I don’t want there to be garbage here,” says 10-year-old Alan Serrano.

“Living in the enormous dump, there’s nowhere to play football,” he complains. “I want to run around free on the streets, but I have to stay home, and always with mosquito screens so the flies and the dengue mosquitoes don’t come in.”

The report that described the outskirts of Bouwer as “optimum” for the installation of a new dump was carried out by the National University of Córdoba, at the request of the city government of the provincial capital.

But the university’s secretary of science and technology, Joaquín Navarro, clarifies to Tierramérica that it was “just the first part of the study.”

The second part, on specific socioenvironmental aspects of the focal areas [which has involved work on the ground by teams] is in the final stages…the draft document is being corrected after being revised by the municipal government,” he says.

But in the first part of the report, it becomes clear that Bouwer is a highly vulnerable part of the province.

The unemployment and illiteracy rates are among the highest in the province, 63.3 percent of the population has no health coverage – the highest proportion among the areas studied – and nearly 24 percent of local residents have unmet basic needs.

While academics and government technicians analyse the report, and quietly argue that “the garbage has to be dumped somewhere,” the local residents of Bouwer know that there are other solutions.

“Everyone should become aware and start to recycle,” says Rescala, who recycles nearly 100 percent of her trash, even though she is surrounded by dumps.

“We know that no place can be sacrificed. This time it’s Bouwer, but it could be any town next,” she says.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Thousands of demonstrators have been protesting in Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar against the removal of Mayor Gustavo Petro over his Zero Garbage programme. Credit: Andrés Monroy Gómez/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Dec 13 2013 (IPS)

The ousted left-wing mayor of the Colombian capital, Gustavo Petro, is a casualty of the battle over the introduction of a Zero Garbage programme, which had included thousands of informal recyclers in the waste disposal business.

“His removal was arbitrary,” said Nelson Rojas, one of the workers in the city government’s Basura Cero (Zero Garbage) programme.

“We don’t know what is going to happen now,” he told IPS in Plaza de Bolívar, where tens of thousands of people have demonstrated every day in front of city hall in support of the mayor since he was sacked on Monday Dec. 9.

Petro was fired and barred from holding public office for 15 years due to three “extremely serious infringements,” according to the inspector general, Alejandro Ordóñez, who has the authority to investigate and dismiss public officials.

Two of the infringements were logistical and the third was a “violation of the principle of free enterprise.”

The measure against Petro appeared to be final. But legal experts have said they found an article in the constitution establishing that the mayor of Bogotá can only be removed by the president, at the inspector general’s request.

According to the ultra-conservative Ordóñez, the mayor’s decision to put 63 percent of the lucrative waste disposal business in public hands violated the principle of free competition. At the time, the business was run by four private contractors.

The inspector general charged Petro with handing garbage collection over to public companies that supposedly lacked experience and that used garbage dumpsters instead of trucks for six months, which caused the death of one worker.

“There’s a lot of money in waste disposal,” said Rojas, wearing a green Basura Cero uniform. “The private companies are opposed because they got rich off the collection of garbage.

“The inspector general is an ally of the rich and they are against the mayor’s policies,” he said, as people rallied in Plaza de Bolívar, where Petro had urged people to come out to protest his removal.

“The private companies don’t give work to women or to older people,” he said.

Three women and a man wearing the same green coveralls agreed. “In Basura Cero, 60 percent of the workers are women. And it is mainly women who are employed to sweep the streets in Bogotá,” said another one of the protesters.

“More than 3,000 families will be left without a livelihood…we’re going to keep working in Basura Cero, we’re going to protest in shifts,” he added.

Jorge Estrada, 37, also wearing a green coverall, held up a sign with the reasons the mayor was fired: “For giving the recyclers decent working conditions”; “For taking the garbage business out of the hands of the Bogotá mafia”.

This city of eight million people is run as an autonomous capital district made up of 20 municipalities. Over the past year, garbage collection in 12 of them – 63 percent of the waste disposal in the city – has been in the hands of Aguas de Bogotá, a subsidiary of the state-run Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogotá water and sewage company.

In the rest of the municipalities waste disposal is still carried out by three of the original four private consortiums.

Dec. 18, 2012 was the deadline for the city government to fulfil a constitutional court order for all organised garbage pickers to be included in the waste disposal business nationwide. The aim was to create equal conditions for those who make a living scavenging for and reselling recyclable materials.

Petro’s predecessors failed to fulfil a similar sentence in 2003, instead extending the contracts held by the private companies, which are the exclusive owners of the rubbish in their areas.

In practice, waste pickers, who go through the bags of unseparated trash that residents of Bogotá leave out on the sidewalk, made a tiny dent in the private companies’ monopoly.

The contractors are paid per ton of garbage trucked to the Doña Juana dump on the south side of Bogotá – a system that discourages recycling.

After taking office in January 2012 it took Petro six months to win city council approval for his development plan, which included a new rubbish collection system.

The idea was to move towards the goal of zero garbage by reducing the amount of waste dumped in landfills by separating garbage at source and recycling.

A city government census found that there were some 15,000 garbage pickers in Bogotá. The Zero Garbage programme hired 3,000 of them, and the rest are paid to transport recyclable waste to warehouses, instead of only paying the private contractors.

The new system extends the life of the city dump, and incorporates a vulnerable segment of the population in the business of trash collection.

But the private companies, who wanted to bid for new seven-year contracts, were not pleased when Petro tried to temporarily extend their contracts as he worked out the details of the new system.

In heated negotiations, Petro talked about putting the entire system into public hands. That is what inspector general Ordóñez cited when he argued that Petro was violating the principles of free enterprise and free competition.

When the city government saw no agreement was going to be reached, it prepared a district company to collect the garbage after the Dec. 18 deadline.

In just over two months it reconverted Aguas de Bogotá, which cleaned up sludge and garbage from sewers in dumpsters that were specially conditioned to transport leachates.

But the Petro administration suffered a severe backlash.

The contractors did not agree to return the garbage trucks to the city.

There weren’t enough dumpsters and the city government faced legal limits that kept it from acquiring trucks or adopting other measures before Dec. 18 because officially there was no emergency yet.

Three days before that date, the influx of garbage to the landfill dropped, according to measurements by the Special Administrative Unit of Public Services of Bogotá.

The night before, mountains of garbage had begun to appear on the streets, which the city government garbage collection service was unable to pick up because it would have violated the terms of the private companies’ contracts, which gave them exclusive control over the waste.

The city government was careful not to allow the contractors’ trucks into the landfill after Dec. 18, because it would have meant an automatic extension of the contracts.

The Petro administration used the dumpsters for leachate and rented used garbage trucks from the city of New York.

Although it took the trucks weeks to arrive, the system was working again within three to eight days after the Dec. 18 deadline, depending on the municipality.

In the negotiations, Petro finally agreed to allow three consortiums to continue operating in eight of the municipalities.

But in the view of the inspector general, it was not necessary to put garbage collection into public hands in order to live up to the constitutional court order.

The inclusion of thousands of garbage pickers in the system has involved carrying out a census, issuing special cards, and helping people open savings accounts – a process that has not yet been completed.

Justice Minister Alfonso Gómez Méndez announced that the government would propose a constitutional reform to modify the post of inspector general, who is named by Congress, has practically absolute power, and has 30,000 public employees under him.

But in the meantime, the constitution allows the inspector general to sack publicly elected officials, whose only recourse is to appeal to the inspector general’s office itself.

Only if the constitutional article that would leave the case in the hands of the president, Juan Manuel Santos, prevails will Petro be able to return to the mayor’s office.

One of the organic waste collection bins distributed to New York households. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Aug 6 2013 (IPS)

Ask a random New Yorker what their city is famous for and “composting” is about as likely to make the list as “cheap housing” and “warm winters”. But if it is up to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this will soon change.

Bloomberg, who will leave office at the end of this year, announced in June that the city’s Department of Sanitation has begun collecting organic waste in pilot communities across New York and plans to drastically expand the number of participating households in the coming two years.

The ultimate goal will be mandatory organic waste recycling for all city households by 2016. The waste will be turned into compost, a fertiliser obtained from decomposed organic matter, or converted into a source of clean energy.

The initiative is part of Bloomberg’s plan to divert 75 percent of city trash from landfills by 2030 and cut down on the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, to which trash contributes about three percent.

Currently, New York City is hauling a large part of its solid waste, more than 14 million tons annually, to out-of-state landfills in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Ohio, where it is paying 86 dollars a ton to dump the trash – transportation costs not included.

If the residents of the city’s nearly three million residential units separate organic matter from regular trash, the city hopes to divert 1.2 million tons of garbage from landfills. This move could save up to 100 million dollars per year, or just under a third of the total money spent annually to dispose of residential trash, according to the Department of Sanitation.

The initiative’s test phase currently involves two high-rises in Manhattan, the neighborhood of Westerleigh in Staten Island, as well as around 100 restaurants and public schools across the city.

But the Department of Sanitation is preparing to expand the scope to 150,000 single-family homes, 70 high-rises across all five of New York’s boroughs as early as 2014.

About a quarter of New York City trash is made up by residential garbage. Roughly another quarter is produced by businesses, and with 70 percent of that trash coming from restaurants, getting the hospitality sector involved in the initiative is an important part of the composting pie.

For eco-conscious restaurants that are already paying for special food waste pick-up, a citywide scheme for restaurants would likely be welcome. For others, with small kitchens, adding an extra bin may not be feasible, as a report on restaurants published Jun. 20 by the New York Times shows.

In addition to easing the burden on the environment and the city’s chequebook, there are various other ways in which New York can benefit from collecting organics, according to Ron Gonen, deputy commissioner of sanitation for the City of New York.

“There are two main things that can happen with your organic waste currently,” Gonen told Tierramérica*. “It can be turned into compost, which is an organic fertiliser – and we have a composting facility here in New York City – and that compost is donated to local parks and gardens or sold to landscapers.”

“You can also convert organic waste to renewable energy via a process called anaerobic digestion (in the absence of oxygen),” he added. The result is a methane-rich biogas.

New York already has one anaerobic digestor in one of its waste water treatment facilities, and the city is considering issuing a call for proposals for a large anaerobic digesting facility that could convert most of New York City’s food waste either into natural gas or clean electricity.

“But there are also some interesting emerging technologies,” said Gonen.

“One, for example, can turn food waste into a clean-burning fuel called DME (dimethyl ether, a substitute for gas oil), so it’s not unforeseeable that sometime in the near future we’d be running our sanitation vehicles off of the food waste we collect,” he added.

Changing attitudes

Westerleigh, a neighbourhood of 3,500 residents in the New York borough of Staten Island, is one of the test communities for the new composting initiative. While the participation rate stands at around 50 percent, responses of participants are mixed.

Rosemary Caccese, who was already composting in her own backyard before Bloomberg’s plan, welcomes the new city programme. “I put mine out every week,” she told Tierramérica, referring to her new brown trash can that gets picked up once a week.

“It’s work, it’s not easy to do,” she added, but as someone who cares about the environment, it is a small price to pay for her.

When it comes to citywide implementation, she expects it may be difficult for the elderly to keep up.

Across the street, Donald Carullo says the fact that he and his wife are older is precisely what allows them to participate in the initiative. For his son, who has three children, on the other hand, it is too time consuming, he told Tierramérica.

Over on Burnside Avenue, Lois Conti, who describes herself as “green” and proudly runs down a laundry list of environmentally friendly features she has added to her house, is nevertheless sceptical about the new plan, mainly for practical and design reasons.

“My girlfriend has five children; you’re going to need more than this,” she told Tierramérica, while pointing at the new oval-shaped one-gallon (4.4 litres) container in her kitchen, one of the two models that the city is distributing to households.

For a small household like hers, it is hardly worth the effort, she said. And in a hot New York summer, “It starts to smell.”

Changing attitudes is a large part of the challenge for the city in the coming months. Emphasising the financial savings to the city, and ultimately to the taxpayer, is essential to selling the programme, says Gonen.

While the current phase is voluntary, the programme would eventually become mandatory and include fines for trash offenders.

Alexander Allen, who talked to Tierramérica at one of a few dozen compost drop-off locations in the city, thinks the initiative makes a lot of sense environmentally.

He is less sure whether making it mandatory is going to work, however, and thinks that fines alone will not be enough to change attitudes. “In the end, it’s up to people,” he said.

New York City is following in the footsteps of other U.S. cities like San Francisco and Seattle that have implemented similar initiatives. But it is also charting new ground.

“There is no city in North America, and perhaps Europe, where waste management is as complicated as in New York City,” said Gonen.

“We have an old built environment, we have a diverse built environment, and we’re multicultural,” he noted.

But this also means an opportunity for the Big Apple to serve as an example for other cities around the world.

“There is no other major city,” he said, “that can look at what New York City accomplishes and say ‘Oh, we couldn’t do that, we have a more complex system.’”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

 VIDEO: Compost Collection Challenges New Yorkers’ Fast Lifestyles

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