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.

Thales Motta, director of GNR Fortaleza, stands in front of the biomethane plant located in northeastern Brazil, the development of which required overcoming prejudices, mistrust and misinformation to open up the market for gas generated from garbage. Now biomethane is expanding, making use of landfills and agricultural biomass. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FORTALEZA, Brazil , Sep 5 2022 (IPS)

The increasing productivity with which humankind generates waste has gained at least one sustainable counterpart: the extraction of biogas from landfills, a growing activity in Brazil.

"There was a great deal of prejudice even among engineers, skepticism in the gas companies. We had to present analyses and quality tests that were more rigorous than the ones required for fossil fuel gas. But we broke down the barrier of discredit and opened a new market, proving that it is a safe, stable gas with predictable prices.” -- Thales Motta
Two small plateaus stand out in the landscape on the outskirts of Caucaia, one of the 19 municipalities that make up the metropolitan region of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in the Northeast of the country.

Although they look similar, one of the hills receives about 5,000 tons per day of solid waste collected in the metropolitan region of 4.2 million inhabitants. The other, the old sanitary landfill which began to operate in 1991, is already closed, but it is the one that generates more gas.

“We are pioneers in the production of biomethane from garbage,” said Thales Motta, director of Fortaleza Renewable Natural Gas (GNR), a partnership between the private companies Ecometano, of the MDC renewable energy and natural gas group, and Marquise Ambiental, of Fortaleza, which manages the Caucaia landfills.

Biomethane is the by-product of biogas refining that removes other gases, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.

GNR Fortaleza produces about 100,000 cubic meters per day of this gas, which is sold to the state-owned Ceará Gas Company (Cegás), which mixes it with natural gas in its pipelines.

“We supply 15 percent of the gas distributed by Cegás, which trusted the quality of our biomethane,” Motta said during IPS’s visit to the GNR plant, inaugurated in December 2017.

This labyrinth of pipes collect biogas from the landfill and refine it to produce biomethane with 95 percent purity. The renewable gas is mixed with natural gas for industrial use, in vehicles and thermoelectric plants, as well as in homes and businesses in the metropolitan region of Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Initial difficulties

Ecometano’s pioneering activity is due to another plant, Dos Arcos, established in 2014 in São Pedro da Aldeia, a coastal city of 108,000 inhabitants, 140 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. Its capacity is limited to 14,000 cubic meters per day.

“There was no regulation for biomethane then and the National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels denied us authorization to sell it,” said Motta, an electrical engineer. There were losses; the sales were made directly to a limited number of customers, such as supermarkets.

But the company persevered and the regulation came out in 2017, shortly before the start of GNR Fortaleza’s operations.

“There was a great deal of prejudice even among engineers, skepticism in the gas companies. We had to present analyses and quality tests that were more rigorous than the ones required for fossil fuel gas,” said the plant manager.

“But we broke down the barrier of discredit and opened a new market, proving that it is a safe, stable gas with predictable prices,” he added.

A view of the new Caucaia landfill, near Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, which receives about 5,000 tons of garbage a day. It already produces biogas, but will do so on a larger scale in a few years. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Advantageous costs

At the beginning, biomethane cost 30 percent more, but today it is 30 percent cheaper than natural gas, in view of the rise in fossil fuels, he pointed out. Its price depends on internal factors, such as inflation, and is not subject to unpredictable oil prices on the international market or exchange rate fluctuations, he stressed.

“Biomethane competes with fossil gas on an advantageous footing today. But even if oil becomes cheaper, the market is predisposed to betting on biomethane” because of environmental issues, he said.

“Cegás decided to distribute biomethane because it considers it strategic to diversify its mix with a cleaner, renewable and sustainable gas, thus contributing to reducing pollution and improving the environment,” the company’s president, Hugo de Figueiredo Junior, told IPS.

“It is also an opportunity to expand suppliers, competition and conditions to offer better prices to the end consumer,” he added.

Cegás, in which the state of Ceará is a majority shareholder, was a pioneer within Brazil in the injection of biomethane into its network, starting in May 2018.

The nearly 15 percent proportion of biomethane in the total volume constitutes “one of the highest percentages of renewable gas injected into the grid by a distributor in the world,” Figueiredo said.

That proportion may expand in the future, but biomethane faces several challenges, he added.

There is a need to disseminate existing technological solutions and facilitate access to them, expand knowledge about potential uses of green gases, and improve regulation and processes for the collection and disposal of solid waste and wastewater, he said.

The old landfill, now covered, still generates biogas that is converted to biomethane by refining, in Caucaia in northeastern Brazil. The dark lake is leachate, a highly polluting waste liquid that is treated before being discarded by sprinkling it on the soil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Expansion

In terms of production, GNR Fortaleza is now the second largest biomethane plant in Brazil. It is surpassed by Gas Verde, from Seropédica, a town near Rio de Janeiro, which has been producing 120,000 cubic meters per day since 2019.

Many interested parties visit GNR, which has become a reference point for gas generated from waste because it has developed process technologies that make it possible to integrate equipment from different national and international suppliers, “with its own codes that are open” to anyone, said Motta.

Currently, many companies that extract biogas from landfills for electricity generation are preparing to convert their plants to biomethane production, he said.

“We receive visits here from universities and groups of interested parties. We have to build an auditorium for lectures. There was no laboratory for biomethane analysis in the Northeast. Now we have one and research on this gas is mushrooming,” Motta said.

But it is necessary to take a broader view, he acknowledged. Landfills are limited. A minimum of 2,000 tons of waste per day is needed to make a biomethane plant viable, he estimated. Only large cities with at least one million inhabitants generate that much solid waste.

“We have to look for other kinds of biomass,” he said.

Hundreds of trucks travel the roads transporting garbage to the Caucaia landfill, some 20 kilometers from Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará in Brazil’s Northeast region. About 5,000 tons of garbage are produced daily from the metropolitan region, which has 4.2 million inhabitants. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This process is already underway, especially in the South and Southeast regions of Brazil, where largescale agricultural production offers a large volume of waste. Sugarcane is the main source of biomass, as it is also planted to produce ethanol, whose consumption in vehicles is on par with that of gasoline.

Livestock manure, especially from pigs, drives the production of biogas for electricity generation, and a growing proportion goes towards conversion into biomethane, especially for use in vehicles.

“Biomethane is a suitable fuel for the energy transition, has more predictable prices (than fossil fuels) and can be produced in regions far from the existing natural gas network,” which in Brazil is concentrated along the eastern coast, Figueiredo, the president of Cegás, said from the company’s headquarters in Fortaleza.

But not having a pipeline nearby can frustrate large projects, Motta said. He gave the example of a sugar agribusiness company that could produce 30,000 cubic meters of methane a day. As this is double its own consumption and the nearest big city is 90 kilometers away, the project was unfeasible.

Harnessing gas from garbage, and from biomass in general, has become an urgent necessity in the face of the climate emergency. Methane contributes more intensely to the greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, which is used to gauge threats to the climate.

Brazil and other countries pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, as a crucial step towards keeping global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius by 2050.

GNR Fortaleza, located in Caucaia, a city of some 370,000 inhabitants 15 kilometers from Fortaleza, plays an environmental role. But in terms of employment, it generates only 32 direct jobs and an uncertain number of indirect jobs, including outsourced services, temporary consultants and suppliers of certain equipment.

Cegás serves only 24,000 gas consumers in Greater Fortaleza. According to its data, industry accounts for 46.26 percent of consumption, thermoelectric plants for 30 percent and motor vehicles for 22.71 percent. There is little left – just 0.73 percent for households and 1.22 percent for commerce.

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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