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.

In a Mexican city with buildings that reflect its level of modernization, a truck collects waste, mainly plastic, ignoring higher standards of care for health and the environment. Plastic garbage is just the tip of a serious social and environmental problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. CREDIT: Greenpeace

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 24 2023 (IPS)

Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have made progress towards partial regulations to reduce plastic pollution, but the problem is serious and environmental activists are calling for regulations in the entire chain of production, consumption and disposal of plastic waste.

The release of plastic waste into the environment “is the tip of the iceberg of a problem that begins much earlier, from the exploitation of hydrocarbons, to the transport and transformation of these precursors of an endless number of products,” Andrés del Castillo, a Colombian expert based in Switzerland, told IPS."That is why our main call is for an immediate moratorium on increased plastics production, followed by a phased out reduction in supply, and complemented by other crucial measures such as reuse and landfill systems." -- Andrés del Castillo

Ecuadorian biologist María Esther Briz, an activist with the international campaign Break Free From Plastic, said “plastic pollution in our countries is not on its way to becoming a big problem: it already is.”

“From the extraction of raw materials, since we know that 99 percent of plastic is made from fossil fuels – oil and gas – plus the pollutants that are released during the transformation into resins and in consumption, and in the more well-known phase of when they become waste, our region is already very much affected,” the activist told IPS from the Colombian city of Guayaquil.

Plastic production in the region exceeds 20 million tons per year – almost five percent of the global total of 430 million tons per year – and consumption stands at 26 million tons per year, according to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), a coalition of 800 environmental organizations.

In the region, the largest installed production capacity is in Brazil (48 percent), followed by Mexico (29 percent), Argentina (10 percent), Colombia (8.0 percent) and Venezuela (5.0 percent).

The average annual consumption in Latin America and the Caribbean is about 40 kilos per inhabitant, and each year the region throws 3.7 million tons of plastic waste into rivers, lakes, seas and oceans, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

Del Castillo, a senior lawyer at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), warned that “if the trend is not reversed, by 2050 plastic production will reach 1.2 billion tons annually. Paraphrasing (famed Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude) Gabriel García Márquez, that is the size of our solitude.”

“That is why our main call is for an immediate moratorium on increased plastics production, followed by a phased out reduction in supply, and complemented by other crucial measures such as reuse and landfill systems,” del Castillo said from Geneva.

Volunteers from Peru’s Life Institute for Environmental Protection clean up plastic garbage washed up on the coast near Lima. In the waters surrounding cities, as well as in the oceans, discarded plastic waste that is not reused or recycled is added to other forms of pollution, severely affecting nature, including species and the landscape. CREDIT: IPMAV

Fearsome enemy

The plastic life chain is an enemy to health due to the release of more than 170 toxic substances in the production process of the raw material, in the refining and manufacture of its products, in consumption, and in the management and disposal of waste.

Once it reaches the environment, in the form of macro or microplastics, it accumulates in terrestrial and aquatic food chains, pollutes water and causes serious damage to human health, to animal species – such as aquatic species that die from consuming or being suffocated by these products – and to the landscape.

It also accounts for 12 percent of urban waste. UNEP estimates the social and economic costs of global plastic pollution to be between 300 billion dollars and 600 billion dollars per year.

It also affects the climate: the world’s 20 largest producers of virgin polymers employed in single-use plastics, led by the oil companies Exxon (USA) and Sinopec (China), generate 450 million tons a year of planet-warming greenhouse gases, almost as much as the entire United Kingdom.

And prominent villains are single-use plastics, such as packaging, beverage bottles and cups and their lids, cigarette butts, supermarket bags, food wrappers, straws and stirrers. Of these, 139 million tons were manufactured in 2021 alone, according to an index produced by the Australian Minderoo Foundation.

After alarm bells went off at the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on plastic pollution, composed of 175 countries, was created. It held its first two meetings last year, in Montevideo and Paris, and will hold its third in November in Nairobi, in a process aimed at drafting a binding international treaty on plastic pollution.

As if the boom in the production, consumption and improper disposal of plastics were not enough, the Latin American region is also importing plastic waste from other latitudes.

Studies by GAIA and the Peruvian investigative journalism website Ojo Público reported that in the last decade (2012-2022) Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Colombia received more than one million tons of plastic waste from different parts of the world.

Although it is claimed that plastic waste is sold to be recycled into raw material for lower quality products or textiles, this rarely happens and it ends up adding to the millions of tons that go into landfills every year.

“We cannot even deal with our own waste and yet we are importing plastic garbage from other countries, often with very little clarity and transparency, so there is no traceability of what is imported under the pretext of recycling,” Briz complained.

Single-use plastics, more than a third of global production and ubiquitous in everyday life, are seen as the main villains in the entire plastics business chain, and Latin American and Caribbean countries are moving towards banning them altogether or at least limiting production and use. CREDIT: Goula

Laws and regulations are on their way

On the other side of the coin, in 2016 Antigua and Barbuda became the first country in the region to ban single-use plastic bags, and it has gradually expanded the ban to include polystyrene food storage containers, as well as single-use plates, glasses, cutlery and cups.

Since then, 27 of the 33 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have enacted national or local laws to reduce, ban or eliminate single-use articles and, in some cases, other plastic products.

“There is a wide range: countries that already have strong rules to regulate plastics, especially single-use plastics, and they are applied. Others have very good regulations but they are not enforced. In others there are no regulations, and there are countries where nothing is happening,” Briz said.

In Argentina a 2019 resolution by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development covers the life cycle of plastic (production, use, waste and pollution reduction) and a 2020 law bans cosmetic and personal hygiene products containing plastic microbeads.

Belize, Chile, Colombia, most Mexican states and Panama have passed regulations to progressively ban or limit the consumption of single-use plastics, as have Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. But in some cases there are doubts as to whether these provisions are effectively enforced.

Brazil has had a National Plan to Combat Marine Litter since 2019, which, however, has not yet been implemented. Costa Rica also has a National Marine Litter Plan, which seeks to reduce waste with the support of the communities.

Ecuador is turning the Galapagos Islands into a plastic-free archipelago, and phased out plastic bags, straws, “to-go” containers and plastic bottles in 2018.

Fences, including those made from recovered plastic waste, are being installed in rivers in Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and the Dominican Republic to collect plastic waste and prevent it from being washed out to sea.

In Guatemala, Castillo noted, the municipality of San Pedro La Laguna, in the Lake Atitlán basin, was a pioneer, banning sales of straws and plastic bags in 2016, and the city government won lawsuits in court over the ordinance. The example is spreading throughout the country.

View of a petrochemical plant of the Brazilian giant Braskem. Environmentalists’ demands for a halt to the expansion of plastics production focus on states in Mexico and Brazil, which have the largest petrochemical facilities in the Latin American region. CREDIT: Braskem

From landfills to petrochemicals

Del Castillo, the Ecuadorian expert, said that “apart from initiatives of a voluntary nature, regional action plans, and the regulation of single-use plastic products, the ongoing negotiation of an international treaty promises to be the path that has been chosen to put an end to plastic pollution.”

The treaty should cover “all emissions and risks from plastics during production, use, waste management and leakage,” del Castillo said, but “we don’t have to wait for the treaty to act: States can already say ‘No to the expansion of virgin plastics production’.”

The MarViva Foundation, which fights marine pollution in Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama, argues that “the best way to manage single-use plastic waste is not to create it,” and advocates discouraging the production, use and consumption of these materials.

But in the face of such proposals, “one of the biggest obstacles has to do with the economic power of the petrochemical industry, which refuses to reduce production. In Latin America, the largest producers of plastics are the petrochemical companies of Mexico and Brazil,” said Briz, the Ecuadorian biologist.

“Plastic is a cheap product, since its environmental and social costs are not taken into account, and while the cost of production and distribution is low, the cost for the health of people and the environment is not,” said the activist.

In short, for activists, an approach based only on recycling and bans will be of limited scope until a moratorium is imposed on the expansion of plastics production, with a global market worth 600 billion dollars a year and which at the current rate could triple in the next two decades.

Sofía Quispe, the president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, finds a good haul of paper and cardboard in a municipal dumpster at the end of Avenida 6 de Agosto in La Paz, in a nighttime job that the southern hemisphere winter makes more challenging. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 12 2023 (IPS)

They haul many kilos of recyclable materials on their backs but receive little in return. These Bolivian women who help clean up the environment from dawn to dusk are fighting for recognition of their work and social and labor rights.

The inhabitants of La Paz, Bolivia’s political center, walk hurriedly and almost oblivious to the women of different ages silently opening heavy lids of municipal garbage dumpsters that are taller than the women themselves."This sector isn't noticed by society, especially because we work with waste, that is, with what society throws away; this work is 'devalued'." -- Bárbara Giavarini

They use a homemade tool, a kind of hook with a long wooden handle, to dig through the unsorted waste, trying to avoid getting cut by broken glass, and in search of plastic containers, paper, cardboard or aluminum cans.

People walk by on the avenues and squares without looking at them, and sometimes actively avoiding them. The recyclers feel this indifference and even rejection, but they overcome it with the courage gained over years and generations, convincing themselves that they have a dignified vocation.

“People call us dirty pigs (cochinas), they humiliate us and we can never respond,” says Rosario Ramos, a 16-year-old who accompanies her mother, Valeriana Chacolla, 58, sorting through the trash for recyclable waste.

A study by the United Nations Joint Program on self-employed women workers in the country describes them generally as being “of indigenous origin, adults with primary school education. Seventy percent of them are also involved in activities related to commerce, while 16 percent work in the manufacturing industry.”

Of a population of 12.2 million projected by the National Institute of Statistics for the year 2022, 5.9 million are women. La Paz is home to 1.53 million people.

Of the total population of this Andean country, 41 percent defined themselves as indigenous in the last census, while according to the latest official data available, 26 percent of urban dwellers live in moderate poverty and 7.2 percent in extreme poverty, including most of the informal recyclers.

One of the groups of women of the Ecorecicladoras de La Paz association gather next to a municipal dumpster in a corner of Plaza Avaroa in Bolivia’s political capital, after finishing their nightly collection of reusable materials. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

On this southern hemisphere wintertime July night in La Paz, the group of women are virtually invisible as they gather around the dumpsters located in a corner of the Plaza Avaroa, in the area of Sopocachi, where residential and public office buildings are interspersed with banks, supermarkets and other businesses.

It’s a good place for picking through the waste in the dumpsters, and the women find paper, newspapers, plastic and aluminum containers. Although the volume of waste is large, each one of the garbage pickers manages to collect no more than one or two kg on one of the days that IPS accompanied different groups of the women in their work.

The silence is broken on some occasions when salaried municipal cleaners show up and throw the women out of the place, because they also compete to obtain materials that they then sell to recyclers. This is a moment when it becomes especially clear that garbage has value.

That is one of several reasons that forced the informal garbage pickers to come together in an association called EcoRecicladoras de La Paz. “There is no work for us, and they only listen to us when we organize,” says María Martínez, 50, the recording secretary of the 45 members, who also include a few men.

In Bolivia, trash is not separated into reusable and non-reusable waste in homes or offices. This task is carried out by private recycling companies, who buy the raw materials from informal waste collectors such as EcoRecicladoras.

Leonor Colque Rodríguez, 78, wearily ends her night shift collecting recyclable waste in Sopocachi, an area in La Paz, Bolivia. She has been working for 40 years as a “grassroots recycler” and is the head of her household. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Martínez, with slightly graying hair, says she comes out every evening. “I was a domestic worker until I was 30 years old. When my daughter was born I couldn’t get a job. I collected plastic bottles, clothes and shoes and sold them to the factories, but the recycling companies who pay really low prices emerged,” she complains.

It takes about three months between the initial collection and the final sale of the recyclable materials. Martínez collects the materials, carries around seven kg on her back, walks about three kilometers and patiently stores them until she has enough to sell them to the wholesaler.

“One year I collected 200 kg of scrap metal and sold it for 150 bolivianos (about 20 dollars),” she recalls. The recycling companies want to buy by the ton, she explains, with a grin, because it is impossible for them to reach that volume.

She represents a second generation of garbage collectors. Her mother, Leonor Colque, is two years short of turning 80, and has been combing through garbage dumps and trash on the streets for 40 years. On her back she carries a cloth in which she hauls a number of pieces of paper and some plastic waste.

“They should stay in school because this job is not for young girls,” she recommends, sadly, because she could not achieve her goal of sending one of her daughters to a teacher training school.

At 58, Chacolla, like almost all women garbage pickers, is the head of her household. Her husband, a former public transport driver, lost his job due to health problems and occasionally works as a welder, door-maker or bricklayer.

When she goes out to sort through trash she is accompanied by her daughter, Rosario, who explains and expands on what her mother says, calling for a change in the public’s attitude towards them and respect for the work they do as dignified, emphasizing, as they all do, that they deal with recyclable waste, not garbage.

Vests like this one identify women “grassroots recyclers” in their work of sorting through waste in dumpsters installed by the municipal government of La Paz in different parts of the Bolivian city. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

“I walk with the Lord in my heart, he always helps me,” says Angelica Yana, who at 63 years of age defies the dangers of the wee hours of the morning in the Achachicala area, on the outskirts of La Paz, five kilometers north of the city.

“Nothing has ever happened to me,” says Yana, who leaves her home at three in the morning to scrape up enough to support a son who offers fine finishing masonry services, and her sick husband.

At the age of 70, Alberta Caisana says that she was assaulted by municipal cleanup workers while she was scrounging for recyclable materials. She now carries a credential issued by the Environmental Prevention and Control Directorate of the Autonomous Municipal Government of La Paz, and wears a work vest donated by development aid agencies from the governments of Sweden and Switzerland.

She relies on her uniform and identification card as symbols of protection from the indifference of the people and aggression from local officials.

The mother of a daughter and the head of her household, Anahí Lovera, saw her wish to continue her university studies frustrated, and at the age of 32 she combines collecting plastic bottles with helping in different tasks in the construction of houses.

In the foreground, the secretary of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, María Martínez (50), together with Carla Chávez (42) and her mother Leonarda Chávez (72) take a break from sorting through waste in the Sopocachi area of the Bolivian city of La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Others, they say, sell clothes and other recovered objects in street markets, such as the famous one in Villa 16 de Julio in the neighboring city of El Alto, where used and new objects are sold in an area covering two kilometers.

Lovera’s work appears to go smoothly, but she and her colleagues describe the moment of dealing with the buyers. They deliver an exact volume and weight of products and the buyers declare a lower weight in order to pay less.

“This sector isn’t noticed by society, especially because we work with waste, that is, with what society throws away; this work is ‘devalued’,” Bárbara Giavarini, coordinator of Redcicla Bolivia-Reciclaje Inclusivo, told IPS.

One sign of the public’s recognition of the “grassroots recyclers,” as they call themselves, could be the direct, sorted delivery of the waste, which would facilitate the women’s work, she said.

Redcicla, a platform that promotes the integrated treatment of waste, has been helping since 2017 to organize them and bring visibility to their work, while fostering the delivery of waste from citizens to “grassroots recyclers” and working for the recognition of their work as dignified.

The president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofía Quispe, supports the idea of getting help from local residents in sorting materials and delivering them to their affiliates, instead of throwing them into dumpsters where they are mixed with products that prevent subsequent recycling.

The president of the women’s group Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofia Quispe, walks along the central Arce Avenue in this Bolivian city in search of dumpsters where local residents throw their waste. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Quispe is a 42-year-old mother of three. Like most of her fellow recyclers, she walks about two kilometers on foot in search of dumpsters, dressed in the customary indigenous wide-brimmed hat and pollera or skirt.

On the night that IPS accompanied her, she did not find the dumpster that was usually on Avenida 6 de Agosto, probably because it had been removed and taken to another part of the city.

The impoverished garbage picker was once a skilled seamstress who worked in small family-owned factories in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Upon her return due to an illness, she was unable to raise the money she needed to buy a machine and raw materials.

She was also discouraged by the lack of interest among local residents in buying garments made in Bolivia, as they preferred low-cost clothing smuggled into the country as contraband.

Leonarda Chávez, another 72-year-old head of household, who collects recyclable materials every day with her daughter Carla Chávez (42) and granddaughter Maya Muga Chávez (25), feels satisfied because she can see her dream come true.

This month, her granddaughter earned a diploma in Business Social Responsibility, with which she completed her university education, in addition to a degree in commercial engineering and business administration, in a country where higher studies do not always guarantee good jobs.

Among the darkness and the objects discarded by people, hope is also alive. Rosario Ramos took the lessons of hard work and created her own goal: “I will study advanced robotics and prosthetic assembly,” she says with a confidence that contrasts with the group’s sad stories.

Tomasa Chávez, bundled up against the cold of the southern hemisphere winter, works at the Central Market in Buenos Aires, where she was hired in 2021 to separate edible waste that can be recovered. Until then, she went there daily on her own for 30 years to look for food and other recyclable materials among the waste that has now been given new value. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 6 2022 (IPS)

For 30 years, Tomasa Chávez visited the Central Market of Buenos Aires and rummaged through the tons of fruits and vegetables that the stallholders discarded, in search of food. Today she continues to do so, but there is a difference: since 2021 she has been one of the workers hired to recover food as part of a formal program launched by the Central Market.

“Before, I used to come almost every day and collect whatever was edible and whatever could be sold in my neighborhood. Food, cardboard, wood… Now I still come to separate edible food, but I work from 7:00 to 15:00 and I get paid some money,” the short, good-natured woman told IPS.

The Central Market of the Argentine capital is a universe that seems vast and unfathomable to those who venture into it for the first time.

Covering 550 hectares in the municipality of La Matanza, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, it is full of life; to describe it merely as a central market that supplies fruits and vegetables to a metropolis of 15 million inhabitants would be an oversimplification.

In the market there are large companies and small businesses, streets, avenues, warehouses, buildings and even areas taken over by homeless people and a rehabilitation center for people with substance abuse problems. In some places people are crowded among crates of fruit and the noise is overwhelming, but there are also large empty areas where everything is quiet.

Nearly 1,000 trucks enter the Central Market every day to pick up fresh food that is sold in the stores of the city and Greater Buenos Aires. Every month, 106,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold, according to official data.

There is also a retail market with food of all kinds, attended by thousands of people from all over the city, in search of better prices than in their neighborhoods, in a context of inflation that does not stop growing – it already exceeds 60 percent annually – and which is destroying the buying power of the middle class and the poor.

View of one of the 12 bays where the fruits and vegetables that supply the 15 million inhabitants of the Greater Buenos Aires region are sold wholesale. The activity begins at 2:00 a.m. and every day some 1,000 trucks enter the market and some 10,000 people work there. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

As a reflection of the social situation in Argentina, where even before the COVID-19 pandemic the poverty rate exceeded 40 percent, a common image of the Market has been that of hundreds of people like Chávez rummaging through the waste, looking for something to eat or to sell.

But since August 2021, much of that energy has been poured into the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program, which is based on two main ideas: to use food fit for consumption for social assistance and the rest for the production of compost or organic fertilizer to promote agroecology.

“There was a social and environmental problem that needed to be addressed. Today we have fewer losses, we provide social assistance and create jobs,” Marisol Troya, quality and transparency manager at the Central Market, told IPS.

Coping with the crisis

The 12 gigantic bays where fruits and vegetables are sold wholesale are the heart of the Central Market, which employs 800 people and where a total of 10,000 people work every day.

At 2:00 a.m. the activity begins every day in the market with frenetic movement of crates containing local products from all over Argentina and neighboring countries, which are a festival of colors. Each bay has 55 stalls.

Three people look for food in a container of discarded products at the Central Market of Buenos Aires, where more than 100,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold every month to supply retail stores in the Argentine capital and its suburbs. With the recovery program, the Market seeks to provide environmental and social solutions. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“The search for food among the Market’s waste was spurred by the economic crisis and the pandemic,” said Marcelo Pascal, a consultant to the management. “We realized very quickly that there was a lot of merchandise in good condition that was discarded for commercial reasons but could be recuperated.

“There were even small stands that used vegetables found in the garbage. A lot of edible products were recovered, but the process was disorderly, so an effort was made to organize it,” he told IPS.

From August 2021 to June 2022, 1,891 tons of food were recovered for social aid, while 3,276 tons have been used to make compost, according to official figures from the Central Market, which is run by a board of directors made up of representatives of the central, provincial and city governments.

“We have reduced by 48 percent the amount of garbage that the Market was sending to landfills for final disposal, which was 50 tons a day,” agronomist Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction Program, told IPS.

Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program of the Central Market of Buenos Aires, stands in front of one of the mountains of organic waste that are used to produce compost, which serves as fertilizer for agroecological enterprises. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Orderly recovery of edible products

Justo Gregorio Ayala is working in an esplanade next to one of the wholesale bays. In front of him he has a crate of bruised tomatoes, impossible to sell at a store, but many of which are ripe and edible. His task is to separate the edible ones from the waste.

“I live here in the Market, in the Hogar de Cristo San Cayetano, and six months ago I got this job,” Ayala said, referring to the rehab center for addicts that opened in 2020 inside the Market itself.

“There were always a lot of products to recover in the Market, but now we do it better,” added Ayala, who is one of the workers hired for the Program.

He clarified, however, that the scenario varies depending on the temperature. “In summertime, because of the heat, the fruits and vegetables last much less time and the stallholders throw away more products. Now in winter we don’t find so much.”

The workers work in eight of the market’s 12 bays. There are a total of 24 workers, divided into groups of three, who separate the merchandise that the stallholders are asked to leave in the center of the bay.

The recovered goods are loaded onto trucks that are taken to a huge warehouse in the Community Action section of the Market, where they are prepared for use in social aid projects.

Justo Gregorio Ayala is one of the 24 workers who select edible fruits and vegetables discarded by vendors at the Buenos Aires Central Market. Since August last year, almost 19,000 tons of food fit for human consumption have been recovered and have gone to soup kitchens and other kinds of social assistance. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“We deliver food to 700 soup kitchens, according to a weekly schedule: about 130 per day,” said Martin Romero, head of the Community Action section, where 22 workers perform their duties, as the first vehicles begin to arrive to pick up their cargo.

“We also put together eight-kilo bags, with whatever we have available, which we deliver to 130 families,” he added to IPS.

What is not fit for human consumption ends up in the composting yard, a plot of land covering almost three hectares, where the process of decomposition of organic matter takes about four months.

“The organic waste is mixed with wood chips made from the crates, which absorb water and reduce the leachate that contaminates the soil. The organic compost is donated to agroecological gardens which use it for fertilization and the recovery of degraded soils,” explained Rainoldi.

The goal is a Central Market that makes use of everything and does not send waste to the dump. It’s a long road that has just begun.

David Mande shows the walls of a house made out ecobricks. The ecobricks, according to Mande, are filled with moist soil to ensure that they become hard. The bottle top is then tightly closed to ensure that the moist sand and soil bond to make a brick that can be turned into a strong wall. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
MPIGI/MUKONO/KAMPALA, Uganda , Sep 21 2020 (IPS)

About 40 kilometres out of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, in the Mpigi area, you can find an entire village hill with houses that have plastic bottles walls and car tyre rooftops.

Plastic bottles, which you can usually found littered almost everywhere in rural and urban Uganda, could help alleviate the country’s housing shortage as well as avoid environmental harm. An innovative idea of turning plastic bottles into “ecological bricks” is one of the latest solutions being promoted by environmentally sensitive individuals and NGOs here.

The village in Mpigi is part of a project by the Social Innovation Enterprise Academy (SINA), which promotes the use of ecobricks as an upcycling solution to the plastic waste problem rather than reverting to recycling.

• Recycling would involve the waste being reduced or destroyed from its current form to create something new. Whereas upcycling uses the existing waste and incorporates it into something new.

The initiative has spread out to a number of refugee camps in Uganda.

Uganda’s plastic headache 

Like many other African countries, Uganda is faced with the threats of plastics arising from the packing and beverages industry.

The plastics from bottled soft drinks end up in landfills, scattered all over the streets and block roadside drainage. Most of the plastics waste has been found floating on shores of Lake Victoria, it’s swamps and wetland or are simply burnt in the open air.

It is estimated that Kampala, the country’s capital, alone generates more than 350,000 tons of solid waste every year, only half of which is collected. So plastic remains one of the huge environmental concerns for the country whose plastic consumption increases by the day.

David Mande is a promoter of the ecobrick solution. He works as a builder and a trainer at SINA. The plastic waste have huge significance for him. Mande’s younger brother died tragically after trying to cross a swamp. After several hours of searching for the dead boy, his body was found concealed under a pile of bottles.

“I need to make use of these bottles. I found out that in Nepal and Nigeria, they were using those bottles to build houses in rural communities. And it has worked too in Uganda,” he told IPS.

He has become an enthusiastic promoter of upcycling plastic bottles instead of recycling.

The ecobricks, according to Mande, are filled with moist soil to ensure that they become hard. The bottle top is then tightly closed to ensure that the moist sand and soil bond to make a brick that can be turned into a strong wall.

Ultimately, Mande said, the aim is to maintain a green planet.

“So we collect the bottles and tyres from the environment and turn them into ecobricks and tiles. Then we use them for the construction of beautiful houses like the ones you are seeing across there,” said Mande. 

Are ecobricks a solution to the country’s housing shortage?

Mande estimates that three million plastic bottles that were littering the environment have been used to construct some 117 houses across this East African nation.

Though it may take a while yet to alleviate the country’s housing shortage. According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, the country has a deficit of 2.1 million housing units, growing at a rate of 200,000 units a year. It is estimated that by 2030, the country’s housing deficit is expected to reach in excess of five million units.

Edison Nuwamanya, who runs a shop from one of the houses constructed with plastic bottles or eco-bricks, told IPS that he had not seen these types of buildings until he moved to Mpigi area.

“Nature always provides the cool environment; it is rarely hot in here. It looks nice and it feels good to be in,” Nuwamanya told IPS of the house.

Back in Kampala’s Kamokya slum, a group of young people have turned plastic waste bottles to their advantage by promoting ecobricks as an alternative to mud and wattle houses common in this area.

The men and women from the Ghetto Research Lab collect plastic bags and bottles and repurpose them into ecobricks. From a distance one is welcomed by piles of bottles and polythene bags, which they use to make the bricks.

Rehema Naluekenge is one of the women involved constructing houses using the bottles. She uses a metal rod to staff soil and polythene bags into the bottle.

“I compact polythene bags and soil into the bottle until it gets hard. Because if the bottle remains soft as it was meant to be, it can’t make a brick,” she explained to IPS.

“The houses constructed with bottles or ecobricks are proving to be quite durable. We have not seen any develop cracks,” said Nalukenge. “Our operating principal at Ghetto Research is that waste is only waste when you waste it.” 

Women in eastern Uganda’s Mbale city collect plastic waste for recycling. Proponents of upcycling say that in recycling waste one ends up polluting the environment. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

The demand for Uganda’s plastic waste has dropped

It has been common to find huge heaps of plastics in urban areas, these are usually collected by women and children for recycling into plastic flake products, which would be exported to China and India.

Manufacturers in India and China would recycle the flakes into products like polyester fibres for cloth and carpets or back into plastics bottles. But the market seems to have dried up. A middleman who was supplying these plastic flakes to China told IPS that the closure of particularly the China imports has had huge blow to the recycling industry in Uganda.

“There is no demand from our usual customers. It is not a COVID-19 effect. China’s demand reduced [before the outbreak], followed by India in mid-October last year,” the middleman, who declined to be named, told IPS.

A kinder method of construction

In the central Ugandan district of Mukono stands another upcycling project — this one is by high school teacher Allan Obbo. Obbo is the owner of the Bottle Garden Resort, whose entire perimeter wall and a number of cottages have been constructed from waste bottles.

“Research tells us that plastics are very dangerous to the environment … look at our lakes, the lakes are choked. And research tells us that for this bottle to degrade, it will take 300 years.

“So if I use one for building, it has more life than when left in the soil. So using this bottle as an alternative for construction saves the environment,” Obbo told IPS.

“Construction materials are detrimental to the environment. When you get the bricks, sometimes you are using soils that you could have used for farming. Then on top of that you go on cutting down trees, but when you are using the bottles, you are retrieving them from the environment,” said Obbo

Obbo doesn’t know how many bottles he has retrieved from waste bins to construct his Bottle Garden Resort. 

“I have one unit I took the time to count and it has 12,000 bottles. But if you put all the structures together, they are over a million bottles. It would have choked the environment,” he said

Lack of awareness and government support

While Obbo thinks that eco-bricks can serve as alternative building material, he told IPS that he was disappointed that construction engineers in the country’s urban areas cannot approve building plans for developers planning to construct houses using waste plastic bottles.

Obbo thinks recycling has not helped to retrieve all the bottles and that it cannot be comparable to upcycling.

“Remember recycling it into a reusable plastic, again there is that carbon emitted. And when that carbon goes to the ozone layer, it will affect the environment. With this one, there is nothing that goes in the air to pollute the environment,” he said.

Architect Patricia Kayongo, the managing director of Kampala-based Dream Architects Ltd., has been involved in supervision of construction projects in government and the private sector in Uganda. 

She told IPS that while the ecobricks have not been tested and approved by the country’s bureau of standards, they, together with other buildings materials, can be used as a sustainable building solution.

“And not much research has been done on them. It means that people have been denied of more options for constructing houses cheaply,” said Kayongo.

She said recycled materials like glass and plastics are good for construction but they were not being utilised to solve the housing deficit in most countries.

Shanty town near Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: Chell Hill(CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Busani Bafana
LUANDA, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

Slums are a curse and blessing in fast urbanising Africa. They have challenged Africa’s progress towards better living and working spaces but they also provide shelter for the swelling populations seeking a life in cities.

Rural Africans are pouring into towns and cities in search of jobs and other opportunities, but African cities – 25 of which are among the 100 fastest growing cities in the world – are not delivering the much needed support services, including housing, at the same rate as people are demanding them.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) projects that nearly 1.3 billion people – more than the current population of China – will be living in cities in Africa in the next 15 years."We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture" – Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association

Africa’s urbanisation rate of four percent a year is already over-stretching the capacity of its cities to provide adequate shelter, water, sanitation, energy and even food for its growing population.

Safe and resilient cities and human settlements is one of the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed on in New York next month. As the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in September 2000, UN-Habitat has largely succeeded in meeting the target of taking 100 million people out of slums by the time the MDGs expired in Asia, China and part of India … but not in Africa.

However, Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association, believes that Africa can solve its slums situation by planning and developing towns and cities that strike a balance in the provision of housing, water sanitation, energy and transport while luring investments to create jobs.

According to Omisore, the problem lies in the fact that so far settlements have been developed for people but not with people, and he asks if Africa wants the humane aspects of its cultural values and heritage reflected in its cities or has to replicate the cities of developed nations to become classified as developed.

“Slums and sprawls demand understanding the reasons and problems resulting in their existence and identifying the class of people living there,” says Omisore.

“African governments focus on the infrastructural development of developed nations without consideration for the human development of our different communities and ensuring creation of employment opportunities which is key to the sustainability of our cities. People make the cities, not the other way around.”

By redefining slums, policy-makers in Africa can work more on understanding the rural-urban links to arrive at African solutions for African problems, he argues, calling for a “campaign of marketing Africa and appreciating what is African.”

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture.”

At a time Africa is grappling with the issue of land tenure, particularly in agriculture, limited and often expensive land in urban settlements is posing the question of whether Africa should build up or build across, and there are those who argue that densification is the answer to Africa’s housing woes.

At the 2nd Africa Urban Infrastructure Investment Forum hosted by United Cities and Local Government-Africa (UCLG-A) and the government of Angola in Luanda in April,  Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat argued that densification is an avenue for the transformation of Africa and its cities.

“If urbanisation should be possible and if we are going to build landed housing without going up, it simply means it will be expensive, but if we have to densify then we need to go up,” said Kacyira.

“Yes, let us stick to our identity and culture, but let us stick to principles that make economic sense. We are not going to have vibrant cities by running away from the problem and spreading and sprawling.”

Kacyira also argued that by planning, reducing desertification and recycling waste, African cities can help reduce their carbon footprint, a key issue on the post-MDG agenda.

Meanwhile, a Kenya housing project could represent a model for the future of

Housing in Africa. Muungano Wa Wanavijiji, a federation of slum dwellers, has partnered with Shack/Slum Dwellers International to provide decent shelter for people living in slums by creating a low cost three-level house called  ‘The Footprint’, which costs 1,000 dollars.

The project has built 300 houses in two settlements this year. Dwellers pay 20 percent towards the structure and are given support to access a microloan covering 80 percent of the cost.

The UCLG-A network which represents over 1,000 cities in Africa, estimates that Africa needs to mobilise investments of 80 billion dollars a year for upgrading urban infrastructure to meet the needs of urban residents.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, Lebanon, has been given a new lease of life thanks to an initiative for recycling waste glass normally destined for landfills. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Apr 5 2015 (IPS)

In the Khalife workshop, in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, four men stand beside an oven, fixed in concentration despite the oppressive temperature. Blowing through a long tube, one of the group carefully shapes white-hot melted glass into a small ball, while two others coax it into the form of a beer glass. The fourth, the veteran of the group, cuts off the top of the glass, creating an opening from which beer will one day flow.

Working in shifts, the members of Lebanon’s last dynasty of glass blowers work tirelessly day and night to ensure customers receive their products on time. Currently they are in the process of producing 133,000 artisan glasses commissioned by Almaza, a subsidiary of Heineken, and the most popular beer in Lebanon.

When Ziad Abichaker phoned the Khalife family two years ago, they could not even dream of an order of such a size. The workshop’s oven had been idle for five months and the business was about to close.The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

As manager Hussein Khalife explains, the workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

However, Abichaker, a multi-disciplinary engineer and owner of Cedar Environmental, an environmental and industrial engineering organisation that aims to build recycling plants to produce organically certified fertilisers, saw an opportunity to revive the family business.

During the July 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the country’s only green glass manufacturing plant, located in the Bekaa valley. Lacking investors to pump in the about 40 million dollars necessary to rebuild it, the plant has remained in a state of disrepair and as a consequence, local beer and wine companies have become reliant on importing their bottles.

Abichaker – who operates ten municipal waste management plants through Cedar Environmental which had previously supplied the Bekaa glass plant – began stockpiling glass rather than see it end up in Lebanon’s landfills.

“Around 71 million bottles end up in the landfills per year,” says Abichaker. “All the green glass that we sorted from the waste management plants had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to throw it away, so we started stocking the bottles while thinking of a solution”.  By the time Abichaker started working with Hussein Khalife in 2013, he had already stocked around 60 tonnes of beer bottles.

Together, they began working on a solution that would give new life to all the stocked glass, and also save the Khalife business. After putting together a business plan, they decided to create a number of new glass designs with a chic and modern finish as well as create more niche sales points.

Besides glasses, the business plan also called for the production of cups, vases and lamps whose bases are made from recycled wood.

Known as the Green Glass Recycling Initiative – Lebanon (GGRIL), Abichaker explains that for Cedar Environmental, the project is a non-profit initiative. “Eighty percent of the revenues go back to the Khalife glass blowers and the remaining 20 percent to the retailer. What we gain as Cedar Environmental is that they take all the green glass from our plants. So we still maintain zero waste status in our recycling plants.”

Today, the initiative’s products are on sale in ten different locations in Beirut, including restaurants, alternative galleries and gift shops, and recently Abichaker and Khalife also started selling them online.

Hussein Khalife shows his satisfaction at being able to preserve the family’s artisan business, the legacy of generations of glass blowers. “When Ziad [Abichaker] proposed creating new designs, we decided to go ahead,” says Khalife. “It was a risk for us but it was worth it.”

After closing 2014 over 42,000 dollars up on sales, the Almaza order – GGRI’s biggest to date – came through and Abichaker is adamant that it will not be a one-off.

The most recent step for the fledgling initiative was to raise funds to purchase a truck to pick up used glasses from bins they plan to place around some of Beirut’s more popular nightspots. A crowd-funding project last year raised 30,000 dollars.

“I think that by the end of 2015 we will have diverted one million beer bottles from landfills,” estimates Abichaker, but while this is a considerable amount, it constitutes only a tiny portion of the 1.57 million of tonnes of solid waste that Lebanon produces per year, according to a 2010 report from SWEEP-Net, a regional solid waste exchange of information and expertise network in Mashreq and Maghreb countries.

Currently, most of Lebanon’s green glass ends up in the landfill of the coastal municipality of Naameh, a town just south of Beirut. Created in 1997, the landfill was only meant to be active for six years due to environmental concerns. However, 18 years later it is still in use. Once again scheduled to close in January this year, the Lebanese government approved an extensions of the deadline for three months due to the absence of an alternative site.

“It is a catastrophe there, it is overfull”, says Paul Abi Rached, president of the Lebanese environmental non-governmental organisation TERRE Liban. “You have big impacts on air pollution, climate change. In particular,  leachate – the liquid that drains from a landfill – is being thrown into the Mediterranean Sea.”

Abi Rached criticises the government for a perceived lack of commitment to developing recycling policies. The government, notes Abi Rached, award contracts to private sector waste management companies without prioritising environmentally friendly methods.

In addition to the shortcomings of governmental waste-management programs, Abichaker argues that it is absolutely necessary to raise the general public’s awareness of the importance of protecting the environment.

“Now people are becoming more aware that they should safeguard their environment because they have realised that it affects their own health, their own habitat,” he says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

Edited by Phil Harris

One of the walkways built by the community of Santa Rosa de Aguán to connect the local houses with the beach to preserve the sand dunes. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
SANTA ROSA DE AGUÁN, Honduras , Mar 26 2014 (IPS)

At the mouth of the Aguán river on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, a Garífuna community living in a natural paradise that was devastated 15 years ago by Hurricane Mitch has set an example of adaptation to climate change.

“We don’t want to make the sea angry again, we don’t want a repeat of what happened with Mitch, which destroyed so many houses in the town – nearly all of the ones along the seashore,” community leader Claudina Gamboa, 35, told IPS.

Around the coastal town of Santa Rosa de Aguán, the stunning landscape is almost as pristine as when the first Garífunas came to Honduras in the 18th century.

To reach Santa Rosa de Aguán, founded in 1886 and home to just over 3,000 people, IPS drove by car for 12 hours from Tegucigalpa through five of this Central American country’s 18 departments or provinces, until reaching the village of Dos Bocas, 567 km northeast of the capital.

From this village on the mainland, a small boat runs to Santa Rosa de Aguán, located on the sand in the delta of the Aguán river, whose name in the Garífuna language means “abundant waters.”

Half of the trip is on roads in terrible conditions, which become unnerving when it gets dark. But after crossing the river late at night, under a starry sky with a sea breeze caressing the skin, the journey finally comes to a peaceful end.

A three-year project to help the sand dunes recover, which was completed in 2013, was carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) Small Grants Programme, with additional support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

The project sought to generate conditions that would enable the local community to adapt to the risks of climate change and protect the natural ecosystem of the dunes.

The initiative enlisted 40 local volunteers, almost all of them women, who went door to door to raise awareness on the importance of protecting the environment and to educate people about the risks posed by climate change.

“They called them crazy, and thought the people working on that were stupid, but I asked them ‘don’t stop, just keep doing it.’ Now there is greater awareness and people have seen the winds aren’t hitting so hard,” Atanasia Ruíz, a former deputy mayor of the town (2008-2014) and a survivor of Hurricane Mitch, told IPS.

She and Gamboa said the women played an essential role in raising awareness on climate change, and added that thanks to their efforts, the project left an imprint on the white sand and the local inhabitants.

People in the community now understand the importance of protecting the coastal system and preserving the dunes, and have learned to organise behind that goal, Gamboa said. “It’s really touching to see the old women from our town picking up garbage for recycling,” she said.

The sand dunes act as natural protective barriers that keep the wind or waves from smashing into the town during storms.

“When the sea got mad, it made us pay. When Mitch hit, everything here was flattened, it was just horrible,” Gamboa said.

Some people left town, she said, “because we were told that we couldn’t live here, that it was too vulnerable and that the sea would always flood us because there was no way to keep it out.

“But many of us stayed, and with the knowledge they gave us, we know how to protect ourselves and our town,” she said, proudly pointing out how the vegetation has begun to grow in the dunes.

In late October 1998, Hurricane Mitch left 11,000 dead and 8,000 missing in Honduras, while causing enormous economic losses and damage to infrastructure.

Santa Rosa de Aguán was hit especially hard, with storm surges up to five metres high. The bodies of more than 40 people from the town were found, while others went missing.

The effort to recover the sand dunes along the coast included the construction of wide wooden walkways to protect the sand.

In addition, the remains of cinder block houses destroyed by Mitch were finally removed, to prevent them from inhibiting the natural formation of dunes.

The project also introduced recycling, to clear garbage from the beach and the sandy unpaved streets of this town, where visitors are greeted with “buiti achuluruni”, which means “welcome” in the Garífuna language.

Lícida Nicolasa Gómez is an 18-year-old member of the Garífuna community who prefers to be called “Alondra”, her nickname since childhood.

“I loved it when they invited me to the dunes and recycling project, because we were deforesting the dunes, hurting them, destroying the vegetation, but we’re not doing that anymore,” she said.

“We even made a mural on one of the walls of the community centre, to remember what kind of town we wanted,” she added, with a broad smile.

The mural of scraps of plastic and other recyclable materials made on the community centre wall by the people of Santa Rosa de Aguán to celebrate their way of life and the beauty of Garífuna women, and remind the town of the need to mitigate climate change. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The mural includes scraps of plastic, metal, tiles and bottle tops. It reflects the beauty of the Garífunas, showing people fishing, crops of mandioc and plantain, and the sea and bright sun, while reflecting the desire to live in harmony with the environment.

The sand dunes are up to five metres high in this small town at the mouth of a river that runs through the country’s tropical rainforest.

Hugo Galeano, from GEF’s Small Grants Programme, told IPS that Santa Rosa de Aguán became even more vulnerable after Hurricane Mitch, which affected the local livelihoods based on fishing, farming and livestock.

For this community built between the river and the sea, flooding is one of the main threats to survival, said the representative of the GEF programme.

Ricardo Norales, 80, told IPS that, although the sand dunes and vegetation are growing, “the location of our community means we are still exposed to inclement weather.

“With the project, we saw how the wind and the sea don’t penetrate our homes as much anymore. But we need this kind of aid to be more sustainable,” he said.

The history of Santa Rosa de Aguán is marked by the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes, which have hit the town directly or indirectly many times since it was founded.

But the sand dunes are once again taking shape along the shoreline, where the community has built walkways to the sea.

Local inhabitants want their town to be seen as an example of adaptation to climate change and the construction of alternatives making survival possible. Several of them said they did not want an “ayó” – good-bye in Garífuna – for their community.

Recycling at last near Naples. Credit: A. D. McKenzie/IPS.

By A. D. McKenzie
NAPLES, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

Before one reaches the premises of the Società Recupero Imballaggi (SRI), the smell in the air announces that this company in the southern Italian region of Campania deals with waste.

The strange chemically tinged aroma invades one’s nostrils, making one feel the need to don a mask. At the company itself, workers in protective gear busily sort plastic bottles, paper packaging and other substances, while another division transforms some of the waste into secondary raw materials that can be reused by industry.

The quantity of waste is striking: a constant stream of plastic bottles of various colours; hills of cardboard; giant stacks of paper. Italy has long had a waste management problem, and plants like this are an attempt to find solutions."Every year, more than 8 billion plastic bags end up as litter in Europe, causing enormous environmental damage."

But Italy is not alone. As the current European Week for Waste Reduction (Nov. 16 – 24) is highlighting, many countries in the 28-member European Union need to work harder to decrease the amount of waste generated.

“EU legislation has already driven the beginning of a revolution in European waste management,” says Janez Potočnik, the EU’s Environment Commissioner. “We are composting and recycling more than ever, and landfill is progressively falling – but of course some member states are far ahead of others in this.”

According to figures from the statistics directorate Eurostat, the EU generates some 3 billion tonnes of waste annually, of which 90 million tonnes are hazardous. By 2020, the bloc could be generating 45 percent more waste than it did in 1995.

Among the recalcitrant siblings in the EU family, Italy is a special case, attracting the attention of both EU officials and international environmentalists. Naples, capital of the Campania region, has been seen globally as a textbook case of bad waste management policies, where illegal disposal of waste by criminal syndicates has caused widespread environmental pollution.

The air, soil and water contamination has come from the burning and dumping of waste by the so-called ecomafia, and experts believe the pollution is linked to increased rates of cancer and other diseases in the region that are above the national average.

Now trying to cleanse its image and raise public awareness, Naples hosted the 10th International Media Forum on the Protection of Nature earlier this month, organised by the Rome-based environmental group Greenaccord.

Titled ‘People Building Future: A Future Without Waste’, the annual conference brought together experts, journalists and educators from around the world in yet another initiative to emphasise the need to reduce waste to shield the environment, mitigate climate change, and protect health.

“There is sufficient evidence that atmospheric pollution causes cancer,” said Federico Valerio, a scientist at the National Institute for Cancer Research in Genova and a participant in the conference. “We need to change how we deal with environmental pollution.”

Rosario Capone, a teacher at the Osvaldo Conti technical school near Naples, said that both educators and students were fed up with the slow political response to the pollution problems and their impact on health, and she called for urgent political action.

“There are teachers and students at our school who have been diagnosed with cancer, so we personally see the effects,” she told journalists. “We all want to see solutions to the problem.”

Answers at the national level may be slow in coming, however. The Italian government has been involved in a court case with the European Commission over the “inadequate treatment of waste” that is landfilled in the Lazio region north of Naples. The government and the Commission disagree on what constitutes sufficient treatment of waste.

According to the EU, “landfills operating in breach of EU waste legislation constitute a serious threat to human health and the environment.”

The EU wants to phase out landfilling. But in the meantime, Commissioner Potočnik said that the priorities were to reduce the waste generated per person, to maximise recycling and re-use, and to limit incineration to non-recyclable materials.

Besides the court case, the EU is taking regulatory action to get its member states to deal with their waste. Earlier this month, the Commission adopted a proposal that requires states to reduce their use of lightweight plastic carrier bags.

According to the Commission, lightweight plastic bags are often used only once, but they can last in the environment for hundreds of years and are particularly dangerous to marine life.

Potočnik, who launched an exhibition in Brussels last Friday to emphasise the marine aspect, stated, “We’re taking action to solve a very serious and highly visible environmental problem. Every year, more than 8 billion plastic bags end up as litter in Europe, causing enormous environmental damage.

“Some member states have already achieved great results in terms of reducing their use of plastic bags. If others followed suit we could reduce today’s overall consumption in the European Union by as much as 80 percent.”

The Danish government, for instance, imposed taxes on plastic bags and has seen the use of thin plastic bags drop to an estimated four bags per person each year – the lowest in the EU, according to the Commission.

Italians, meanwhile, use a total of about 20 billion plastic bags per year, according to environmentalists, and one only has to glance at the polluted Bay of Naples to see the results.

“The destructive levels of consumption must end,” said William Rees, inventor of the “ecologicial footprint” concept and a keynote speaker at the Naples conference.

“We need to become much more activist regarding the environment, and to push for change,” he told IPS.

A waste picker unloads empty soda cans at the San José de las Lajas recycling cooperative in Mayabeque province. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Oct 23 2013 (IPS)

As self-employment and cooperatives expand in socialist Cuba, they are making incursions into new areas, such as waste picking and recycling – for many a means of subsistence, but for others, a gold mine.

“Pitusa” said the trash thrown out by the people of Havana is an inexhaustible source of useful materials. “I don’t waste anything – I collect, select, clean and keep for myself when I need it,” said this middle-aged Cuban who uses discarded components to fix windows or make “multi-functional” furniture.

“I’m 43 years old and I’ve been working in recycling for 19 years,” he told Tierramérica*, after asking to be identified merely as Pitusa, because he does not have a permit to be a self-employed worker or “cuentapropista”.

“I do so many different things that I wouldn’t know how to register and pay taxes,” he said, to justify his lack of a permit.

He said the garbage yielded everything from broken furniture to bottles, glass, plastic tubes, steel pipes, fishing reels, or old sofas, doors and windows. “Nothing is completely useless, although to make a new piece of furniture from a piece of junk isn’t easy. For me it’s an artistic thing to give a use to something that was abandoned and no one wants anymore,” he said, with a touch of pride.

Pitusa is a “buzo”, as waste pickers who salvage reusable or recyclable materials are known in Cuba.

“At this time there are 5,800 recoverers with cuentapropista permits, but we know that there are many more who aren’t registered,” said Marilyn Ramos, assistant director general of the Unión de Empresas de Recuperación de Materias Primas (UERMP) – the state association of companies that salvage raw materials, which recycles scavenged trash.

Odilia Ferro has dedicated herself to collecting and selling recyclable waste – “legally” she stresses – for the past 20 years in San José de las Lajas, the municipal seat in Mayabeque, a province that borders Havana.

“Sometimes I go out on the streets and look for stuff myself. But because people know that I work in this, they come to my house to sell things to me,” she told Tierramérica.

She buys aluminium, bronze, steel, plastic and empty rum or beer bottles. Until July she sold them to the state-run salvage company of Mayabeque, which has since then become a cooperative of nine members, four of whom are women.

“The good thing is that now they always have money to buy what you bring them, and in cash,” Ferro said.

In Cuba’s centralised economy, for many years cooperatives were only allowed in agriculture. But in mid-2013, the government of Raúl Castro made it possible to establish cooperatives in other areas, as part of wider reforms to boost “prosperous, sustainable socialism.”

Of the first 124 cooperatives established outside of agriculture, two are involved in salvaging waste materials.

The government’s aim is for each of the country’s 168 municipalities to have a waste recovery cooperative.

Ramos said the UERMP association is not equipped to go door to door collecting recyclable waste materials. That task is left to the growing private sector, while the state reserves for itself the large sources of recoverable waste products, she explained in an interview with Tierramérica.

Ignoring the stigma traditionally faced by waste pickers, Eida Pérez, a 39-year-old accountant, has found the recovery of waste materials to be surprisingly lucrative. In just two months, the cooperative she heads earned a profit of 14,750 dollars. (The average salary in Cuba is 19 dollars a month.)

“Three years ago, we couldn’t imagine this could happen” she said. Pérez said her cooperative is moving towards labour autonomy, overcoming fears and obstacles from a recent past when people only did what was indicated “from above.”

“We have increased the products we recover…Now we see ourselves as more efficient, and at an advantage compared to the state companies, because I don’t face restrictions. We operate in cash, we can pay more if the product merits it, lease our trucks and hire the services of cuentapropistas,” she said.

“We earn a 50 percent profit on all of the products we buy,” Pérez added. Her fellow cooperative members, who elected her as president, hope to reach the end of the year with a strong profit margin. But in the last two months they have already managed to pay off the initial interest-free loan of 5,400 dollars.

At the start, most of the new cooperatives were created on the initiative of the state, which later handed operations over to employees.

“It’s a bad way to start, because one basic principle of these forms of business management is individual enterprise,” an economist who preferred to remain anonymous told Tierramérica.

But in Ramos’s view, “the benefit is double. We increased the recovery of recyclable waste materials and kept them from going into the dump – in other words, there’s also an environmental impact.

There are 986 garbage dumps in Cuba, which received just over 5.3 million tonnes of trash in 2012, according to the government statistics office.

In the past year, around 420,000 tonnes of waste were recovered, including steel, cast iron, lead, bronze, aluminium, paper, cardboard, plastic, textiles, electronic scrap and glass bottles.

These products were exported or sold to national industries, like the metallurgical industry, wire and cable production factories or paper and cardboard companies.

If local industry had had to import these materials, it would have cost the country 120 million dollars, Ramos said. “We want to increasingly industrialise this work and increase the value added of recycled products.”

The UERMP recycling association wants to foment the creation of provincial cooperatives that would carry out “at least basic” processing of waste products, Ramos said. Today there are only two garbage separating plants.

The ideal thing, she admitted, would be to get households to classify their own garbage. But that achievement, which would require heavy investment, is still a far-off dream for Cuba.

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

Excerpt:

Poland wastes at least 8.9 million tonnes of food every year. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Marina Lalovic
ROME, Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

If all food loss and waste around the world could be recovered, half the world’s population, or 3.5 billion people, could be fed. Yet people throw away a third of food produced globally, an issue that inspired the theme of these year’s World Food Day, sustainable food systems for food security and nutrition.

While World Food Day, held Oct. 16, set the goal of completely eliminating food waste before increasing food production, much of the global population remains uneducated and uninformed about the problem, so many obstacles must be overcome before such a feat can be attained.

“I come from a country where people don’t even try to harvest agricultural products because the price of these products is so low and the work is too hard,” Albanian chef Fundim Gjpali told IPS while working at the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s World Food Day event organised at EATALY, a slow food hub in Rome.

Today, Gjpali is fighting food waste in the land of abundance: Europe. For World Food Day, he specially prepared a dish of recovered food. “I took tomatoes, bread and Italian ricotta cheese that were about to be thrown away, and I made a very decent dish,” he said."In Cuba...until you have eaten everything you've bought, you don't go to the market."
-- Lesmer Oquedo Curbelo

Other countries, such as Cuba, represent the land of food recycling. “With the embargo in Cuba, we don’t have other choices,” Lesmer Oquedo Curbelo, a Cuban chef, told IPS. “A Cuban toreja, fried bread, is an example of how people could use stale bread.”

He compared food-buying practices in Cuba to those in Western countries. “In Cuba we buy food day by day,” he described. “Until you have eaten everything you’ve bought, you don’t go to the market.”

According to research by the FAO, nearly 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night. Even though food production will have to increase by at least 70 percent in order to feed a population that will reach 9 billion in 2050, the world wastes more than a third of the food that it is producing. And this waste affects everyone, regardless where they are born or live, and covers the entire food supply chain from the farm to the table.

According to FAO estimates, in developing countries, food waste tends to occur upstream of the food chain (six to eleven kilograms per capita in 2010), meaning that the food is lost just after production. In developed countries, however, loss occurs downstream, or in distribution, catering and domestic consumption (95-115 kilograms per person).

“While in the western world we only talk about the waste, in the developing countries the buzzword is the food loss,” Andrea Segrè, director of the Department of Agro-Food Science and Technology, University of Bologna and president of Last Minute Market, told IPS. Food waste differs from loss in that waste is literally throwing away food, while loss is due to a lack of storage. Many developing countries have plenty of food but no way to preserve.

“In India, for instance, the problem is not the lack of food but the storage,” explained Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Emma Bonino. She stressed that regardless of personal habits, people must be aware of different ways to reduce food waste.

“On an individual level, we are supposed to think about the size of our food portions. We should also think about what and where we are buying food,” José Graziano da Silva, director-general of FAO, told IPS.

Filling the gap

Andrea Segrè described to IPS a Last Minute Market, a spin-off society founded in 2000 that implemented the first professional system of recycling the unsold food of big distributors by filling in the gap between supply and demand. LMM doesn’t directly manage unsold food, instead offering services to prevent and reduce the production of waste.

“But our goal is to close the LMM, because we want to reach zero food loss,” Segrè added. “In that kind of world, we are not going to need projects like LMM.”

Federico Spadini from OXFAM Italy, offered IPS five ways people can help alleviate this issue: reduce the consumption of meat and dairy products, reduce food waste, be aware of how much water and electricity one uses while cooking, eat seasonal products, and sustain small farmers instead of corporate agriculture.

An estimated 800 million people working in agriculture around the world live below the poverty line, and approximately half of the world’s inhabitants who suffer from hunger are smallholder farmers.

“Supporting smallholder farmers will go a long way toward alleviating food insecurity and increasing incomes where most needed,” says Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of Food Tank, a non-profit working in environmentally sustainable ways to alleviate hunger and other food-related ailments.

Unique efforts to eliminate loss

Peruvian chef Elsa Javier, who deals primarily with ethnic food, has been devising creative ways to reduce food waste, such as by combining Italian Mediterranean food and Andean biodiversity.

“If we add Andean quinoa to Italian vegetable soup, you’ll have a perfect combination and this dish might last much longer than an ordinary one,” she explained to IPS. “In order to fight food waste, we have to unite gastronomic cultures. Ethnic food in developed countries is completely wasted and underestimated by the locals. So by unifying food cultures, we might help stop this kind of food waste.”

Others have turned to technology to combat food waste. ICT4G (ICT for Good), an Italian group that uses technology to foster economic and social development, has developed a smartphone application called “Bring the Food” that facilitates food donations.

“If I have a restaurant, thanks to this application, I can spread the word that I have, for instance, ten boxes of unsold pizza,” Pietro Molini, an  ICT4G collaborator, told IPS. “Our app users are mostly charity associations but also individuals not necessarily belonging to lower classes.”

By Silvia Giannelli
CAPANNORI, Italy, May 17 2013 (IPS)

Capannori, a rural town in the Italian province of Lucca, in Tuscany, boasts a proud history. Six years ago, it became a trendsetter and leader, not just in Italy but throughout all of Europe, as the continent’s first Zero Waste town.

Today, about 3.5 million Italian citizens carefully separate their waste into coloured bags before leaving them on their doorsteps for collection. The movement has spread further, too, to other European countries.

Giorgio del Ghingaro, the mayor of Capannori (population 46,000), defines this trend as a “cultural revolution” that began with rubbish and in time went much further. Since 2007, residents of Capannori have reduced their urban waste by 30 percent as part of a Zero Waste strategy, which calls for the elimination of all superfluous waste – anything that can be recycled – by 2020.

In Capannori, they are determined to meet this deadline. “Zero waste by 2020 is no utopia,” Del Ghingaro told IPS. “It is a concrete goal that we intend to achieve”.

Initially, the project looked quite ambitious. Its model was that of San Francisco, California, which differs from the Tuscan town in size and conformation. Nevertheless, Capannori’s midterm goal of recycling 75 percent of waste by 2015 was met long in advance; the town currently recycles 82 percent.

After Capannori tested door-to-door collection methods in one part of the town, successfully increasing waste recycling from 30 to 70 percent, “we decided to embark in the zero waste adventure”, Del Ghingaro said.

Locals leading the charge

Since then, Capannori’s waste management has become a model for all of Europe. Joan Marc Simon, executive director of Zero Waste Europe and European coordinator of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, confirms that the Zero Waste strategy came to Spain through the Italian experience."Italy, and Capannori in particular, was definitely the model to follow."
-- Jean Marc Simon

“When it comes to waste, Italy has given the best and worst examples. But if you look at the good practices…Italy, and Capannori in particular, was definitely the model to follow,” Simon said.

Since 2008, one hundred cities in Spain, all concentrated in Catalonia and the Basque Country, have adopted the strategy. “Southern Europe is giving a lesson on how things can and should be done in a more sustainable way,” Simon stressed.

Rossano Ercolini, Capannori resident, primary school teacher and environmental activist who is the winner of the Goldman Prize for the environment, knows well how local experience can serve the rest of Europe. After all, he is the man who introduced the Zero Waste strategy to Italy – and Europe.

It all started in 1997, when construction plans for an incinerator near the town encountered firm opposition. Ercolini, who is also president of Zero Waste Europe and of Ambiente e Futuro (Environment and Future), a local environmental movement, was part of it.

“Ambiente e Futuro engaged in a strong fight against this proposal,” he explained. Key to the movement’s success was “informing the population about the risks of incineration and offering them a viable alternative. Without the citizens’ commitment, none of this would be possible.”

In introducing the alternative method of separate collection, “we held assemblies…to explain the new system and to hear people’s doubts and concerns,” Ercolini recounted. “We worked together to find solutions.”

Luigi, 67, has lived in Capannori for over 40 years. “People always find a reason to complain,” he said of the door-to-door collection system. “But honestly, I find the system quite easy.” Residents are given different rubbish bins and coloured bags, along with an informational flyer. “If you get it wrong, they just leave a note explaining why they could not collect your bag”.

Indeed, the town decided to avoid fines, so as not to penalise residents for mistakes, and to reward residents instead. Beginning in January, they introduced something called an R-feed waste system.

“Every family has been given a fixed number of gray bags… for non-recyclable waste, with a code on it. The garbage collector has a reader which stores the data so that every family will pay waste tax according to how much non-recyclable rubbish they produced throughout the year,” Del Ghingaro explained.

Targeting the source

Zero Waste does not mean just door-to-door separate collection. It also requires a series of parallel actions aimed at reducing the production of avoidable waste. “We strongly focused on water,” Del Ghingaro told IPS. “Buying water at the supermarket means also buying a lot of plastic. Therefore we made a strong campaign in order to enhance the use of public water.”

Fifteen public water springs were restored and purified, and plastic bottles have been banned from all schools and public buildings, which now use only public water.

For now, Ercolini’s task is to analyse the 18 percent of rubbish that still requires traditional waste management and find a solution. The results so far show that the main problem lies at the roots of the production chain. “Companies need to take responsibility for what they put on the market and redesign their products in order to make them sustainable,” he says.

Following a letter of concern that the Capannori Municipality wrote to the coffee giant Lavazza, the company started a pilot project to substitute standard non-recyclable coffee capsules for espresso machines with new, reusable ones. “We are also studying a way to use the coffee grounds to grow mushrooms,” Ercolini added.

Zero Waste Europe’s Simon told IPS that he is optimistic and convinced that the Zero Waste strategy could become the standard for waste management. Indeed the EU, through the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Strategy, has already established that by 2020 all European countries must stop using incinerators to burn anything that can be recycled.

“Our movement is nothing but the vanguard of what…needs to become the norm,” Simon concluded.

Infomal recyclers in Bogotá, Colombia. Credit: Matt Lemmon/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Constanza Vieira
May 2 2013 (IPS)

Nora Padilla, one of the six winners of this year’s Goldman environmental prize, dedicates her days to organising informal recyclers in the Colombian capital, where the city’s eight million inhabitants are just now reluctantly starting to classify their garbage at source.

Waste pickers in Colombia have finally gained recognition from the state after a 10-year legal battle.

Bogotá’s informal recyclers are now formally recognised as providers of a public service, and since March 2013 the city government pays them 44 dollars per ton of recyclable solid waste that they collect and transport to scrap dealers.

This income is in addition to what they earn selling partially processed, clean recyclable material to the scrap dealers, who pay them per kilo.

Until the city government issued the decree that waste pickers were to be paid for the service that they offer as part of the trash management system, only large private garbage collection consortiums received payment for transporting solid waste, in an industry that collects 7,700 tons of rubbish a day.

“We are very happy because this achievement by Bogotá’s recyclers is to be applied nationwide,” Padilla told IPS by phone from San Francisco, California, where she travelled to receive the Goldman Prize, often referred to as the “Green Nobel”, on Apr. 15.

“This victory – because it is a victory that after so many years of struggle the work of recyclers has been recognised and valued, that social justice has been done, through these payments – is an achievement that the rest of the world is noticing,” she added.

Padilla heads the Bogotá Recyclers Association (ARB), a pioneer organisation that emerged in 1987 and now groups some 5,000 waste pickers – one-third of the city’s informal recyclers.

“Recyclers on every continent, in every country we know about, are saying: ‘yes, it’s possible, we also want that’,” said Padilla, referring to the recognition of Bogotá’s informal recyclers as a valued part of the waste management system.

“This is not only a triumph for Bogotá’s recyclers; it is an achievement for recyclers around the world,” she said. “We thank the city, because it has begun to recognise us and to say: recyclers have rights.”

Padilla calls herself a “grassroots recycler, which means I offer an essential public service.” She estimates that with their manual labour, garbage pickers like herself collect 100 times as much recyclable waste material as is collected by formal industry in Bogotá.

The private garbage companies truck the waste they pick up to a giant landfill to the south of the city, known as Doña Juana, where they are paid by weight, which means classification of the waste is not a priority for them.

The landfill, created in 1988, is at the limit of its capacity. In recent years, there have been frequent complaints about the dumping of liquid waste from Doña Juana into the Tunjuelo river, a tributary of the Bogotá river, which in turn runs into the Magdalena river that crosses the country from south to north.

In the United States, the amount of energy wasted by not recycling aluminium and tin-plated steel cans, paper, printed materials, glass and plastic is equivalent to the annual output of 15 medium-sized power plants, according to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).

In Colombia, such estimates don’t exist.

“I started working as a recycler as a young girl. By the time I was seven or eight, I was already going to the dumps, or to El Cartucho,” a slum in the heart of Bogotá, Padilla said.

She proudly explained that the first decision reached by the association was to guarantee that the members’ children would not have to go out with their parents to sort through waste. Towards that end, the ARB members pay the salaries of several women members who take care of the children while the adults go out to work.

Bogotá’s waste pickers sell the material they collect to scrap dealers at 1,361 centres.

A census of recyclers in Bogotá, commissioned by the city government in 2012, counted 13,984 organised waste pickers, 68.7 percent of whom were men. Over half were between the ages of 26 and 50, 10 percent were over 60, 5.2 percent were under 18, and 14.8 percent were between 18 and 25.

But the census did not count unorganised recyclers, including homeless people.

On Mar. 21, a historic event occurred in Colombia, which was cited by the Goldman prize: 790 recyclers received, for the first time, payments for transporting 5,700 tons of recyclable waste to the scrap dealers over the space of two months. A few days later, another 700 people received payments.

The new system was designed in response to a 2011 Constitutional Court ruling that ordered actions to be taken to foment the social integration of Bogotá’s marginalised scrap pickers.

The garbage strewn across many streets and sidewalks in the Argentine capital reflects the inefficiency of a waste collection and treatment system that, paradoxically, has become increasingly costly for the city’s residents, say civil society groups and opposition parties.

The garbage crisis in Buenos Aires is a result of the saturation of the city’s landfills, due to increased levels of consumption over the last decade, and substandard collection service, with compactor trucks that tend to leave piles of trash and residue in their wake, especially in the city centre.

The generation of solid waste, such as plastics, textiles, glass, metals and food, increased by 24 to 35 percent between 2001 and 2011. The amount of trash sent to landfills from the city of Buenos Aires grew from 1.4 million tonnes to 2.2 million tonnes between 2002 and 2010, despite no significant increase in the number of residents, according to figures from the opposition party Proyecto Sur.

The landfills are located in municipalities in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area such as José León Suárez, González Catán and Punta Lara, all of which fall under the jurisdiction of the province of Buenos Aires, which surrounds the city. Their proximity to these populous municipalities entails a major health risk.

Once the trash is buried in the landfills, it is treated – at least in theory – through various methods including gas collection systems and solvents that separate the soluble substances from liquids.

The administration of these sites is overseen by the Coordinación Ecológica Área Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado, a company formed through an agreement between the city and the province.

Trash collection is carried out by five private companies and a sixth owned by the local government, with each responsible for a specific section of the city, although an upcoming tender foresees the division of the city into seven sections.

In addition to the obvious health concerns, the collapse of the trash collection system also has economic repercussions. Expenditure on street cleaning in the city has risen from 641 million pesos (128 million dollars) to 2.517 billion pesos (503 million dollars) since 2008, the first year in office of conservative Mayor Mauricio Macri, one of the most ardent opponents of centre-leftist Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

With a population of almost 2.9 million inhabitants, the city of Buenos Aires will end up spending 176 dollars per person on urban sanitation when this year’s draft budget is approved.

In 2006, the city of Buenos Aires adopted the so-called Zero Waste Law, which entered into force in May 2007, and includes among other measures a commitment to drastically reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills.

According to the timeline established under the law, the city was to decrease the proportion of solid waste buried in these dumpsites by 30 percent as of 2010, 50 percent as of 2012, and 75 percent as of 2017. The ultimate goal was to ensure that 100 percent of recyclable waste was in fact recycled, and kept out of the landfills, by the year 2020.

Under the timeline, the trash buried in landfills was supposed to be reduced to 748,828 tonnes last year. In fact, however, the actual amount was three times this much, with an average of more than 6,000 tonnes a day.

Nevertheless, the minister of environment and public areas of the city of Buenos Aires, Diego Santilla, declared, “No other government has made as much progress as we have in fulfilling the Zero Waste Law.”

Although the city government admits to difficulties in meeting the targets until now, it claims that this will change thanks to agreements reached with the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Daniel Scioli, who is a member of the same Justicialista (Peronist) Party as Fernández de Kirchner, but represents the centrist faction within the party.

However, civil society organisations and opposition political leaders point to what they see as a lack of will on the part of the Macri government to effectively implement the Zero Waste Law.

Rafael Gentili, a deputy in the local legislature from the centre-leftist Proyecto Sur, told IPS that Macri’s performance has been “abysmal”, given that “he has not complied with any of the requirements established by the law.”

“The city is dirtier today than it was five years ago,” added Gentili.

In addition to the above-mentioned targets for reducing the proportion of waste sent to landfills, the Zero Waste Law also bans the incineration of garbage and calls for the promotion of the separation of waste at source, a crucial point that has been the subject of the loudest demands.

Consuelo Bilbao, who heads up the toxic waste campaign at Greenpeace Argentina, told IPS that there is “a major imbalance between the system for collecting and burying waste and the money allocated to recycling, which is 200 million pesos (40 million dollars).”

The 2001 crisis that devastated the Argentine economy also led to an upsurge in informal waste recycling, as thousands of families took to the streets to collect recyclable solid waste materials such as glass, plastics, metals, paper and cardboard.

The improvement in socioeconomic conditions since 2005 has led to a decrease in the number of people who make a living picking through trash, known in Buenos Aires as “cartoneros” (from “cartón”, the Spanish word for cardboard). Two years ago, the local government implemented a system that “formalised” the work they do.

Buildings with more than 19 floors, shopping centres, public offices and schools are required to separate recyclable waste, which is turned over to cooperatives of cartoneros registered with the authorities.

Bilbao and Gentili concur that this measure has enabled the recovery of 15 percent of the solid waste generated in the city, in addition to continued waste collection and recycling on an informal basis.

But according to Greenpeace and other critics, the local government is dragging its feet when it comes to further progress in the separation of recyclable waste at source – in homes and neighbourhoods – which could increase the proportion of trash recycled to up to 40 percent.

“Macri has no interest in reducing the amount of trash produced. On the contrary, he wants there to be a lot of it to make the business more lucrative,” said Gentili.

The companies contracted by the local government to process garbage and turn it into biogas and fertiliser, he explained, are paid according to the volumes they produce. As such, it is economically advantageous if a large proportion of solid waste continues to go to landfills, instead of being separated at source and recycled.

Gentili also pointed out that some companies, like Grupo Roggio, one of the largest in this sector in Argentina, are involved in both ends of the waste chain – collection and treatment – which represents a conflict of interests.

Bilbao agrees that the policy of the government of Buenos Aires “emphasises waste treatment, and not the prior stages that we consider crucial.”

She also finds it particularly telling that “the treatment plants are paid for their services, while the cartoneros are provided with a subsidy, not a salary, which leaves them at the mercy of market rates for recyclable materials.”

The result, she says, is “total inequality.”

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

In the foreground, salvaged materials; in the background, fashion design students in action. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 21 2012 (IPS)

A Brazilian designer has taken fashion from the exclusivity of the catwalk to the reality of the favela, to demonstrate that styles, trends and fads are also born in these poor neighborhoods of cities like Rio de Janeiro.

The Mangueira favela or shantytown, home to some 18,000 people, bears no resemblance whatsoever to Milan or Paris.

Once overrun by drug trafficking-related violence, Mangueira is currently undergoing a process of “pacification”– a government strategy combining police repression and social spending. Few of the streets here are paved, most of the houses are unfinished, and the clothing tastes of the female residents run towards very short shorts and skin-tight pants.

“We’re the ones who set trends. Whatever we wear here on the mountain (the steep hillside where the favela is located), a week later, someone is already wearing it out there,” Mangueira resident Vanesa de Oliveira told Tierramérica*.

A different type of braid, a shoe style, a stitching detail on a blouse, or some other idea that occurs one day to a woman in the favela: all of it eventually ends up on the other side of the world, or “out there” as Oliveira sees it.

These new trends spread quickly through the city, because “the people up here are very creative. We’re not afraid to be daring; we don’t care about what people will say. If a woman puts something on, looks in the mirror and thinks she looks good, nothing else matters.”

Oliveira’s point of view seems diametrically opposed to that of Fashion Week in Rio de Janeiro. Held during the Southern hemisphere spring, when temperatures soar above 30 degrees, it showcases the colors and textures dictated by the frigid European winter.

“There are various political struggles, and one of them is the construction of our identity. Are we going to use fabrics from other cultures, adapted to other geographical settings and temperatures? What kind of textile industry do we want?” asked Brazilian fashion designer Almir França, in an interview with Tierramérica.

França is seeking the answers to those questions though EcoModa, a project he is coordinating in Mangueira. In the favela that gave birth to the samba school of the same name, one of the highlights of Rio’s annual Carnival, the project currently offers classes in sewing, embroidery, fashion design and modeling to 150 students.

“The idea is to recognise that fashion in Brazil is born on the periphery, in the suburbs,” said França.

“Contrary to the common belief – that fashion is something very elitist, imposed by Paris, created in Europe – fashions and trends in Brazil are actually established by the majority of the population,” he maintained.

Tierramérica interviewed França at the project headquarters in Mangueira where the courses are being offered, thanks in part to the support of the Ministry of Environment of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

One wall is covered with wallpaper recycled from the dressing rooms of the Mangueira samba school. Hot pink and green, the trademark colors of this Rio Carnival institution, cover another wall brimming with flowers.

The chairs, rescued from garbage dumps, have been revived with fabric remnants recovered from a textile factory.

Oliveira is one of the students in the sewing class. She is using the opportunity to sew a dress for her daughter to wear at a school performance.

Other students are taking classes in embroidery, fashion design and modeling. The common thread running through all the activities is an emphasis on reusing materials and causing the least possible impact on the environment.

The goal is to “get into the students’ heads that it is possible to recycle, that creation does not always have to come from something new, that fashion does not have to be synonymous with consumerism, that transformation is another possibility,” said Vanesa Melo, the administrative director of EcoModa.

The textile industry wastes huge amounts of materials, she told Tierramérica. For example, 20 percent of the fabric used to make a shirt goes unused.

EcoModa works with these cast-offs from the textile industry, with the sequins and feathers left behind from Carnival, even with plastic bottles and glasses.

“The big struggle facing human kind today is survival, and environmental issues are closely linked to this,” said França.

“Our job is to recover everything that has been lost,” commented Melo.

One of those losses is the self-esteem of the women of the favelas, tarnished by the stigma of poverty and violence.

Yet many of the creations worn on the runways by “top models” are crafted on the modest worktables of seamstresses from the favelas.

“Those who truly construct fashion are these seamstresses. That’s why, in the construction of our identity, we are also seeking to create fashion that combines the creative process with environmental awareness and social inclusion,” said França.

The EcoModa course appeared like a “gift from heaven” for Andrea Ferrancini, precisely when she needed a new source of income more than ever. She is especially enthusiastic about the possibility of becoming part of a cooperative, based on the principles of the solidarity economy.

“Ours is a fashion of resistance, of visibility, based on a conception of esthetics as social change,” said França.

EcoModa also seeks to distance itself from the international fashion industry, which uses cheap or even semi-slave labour to lower costs and increase profits.

“In other places people are enslaved or turned into mere cogs in the wheel. We want to make people active participants in the entire process of creating, producing and earning profits,” stressed Ministry of Environment representative Ingrid Geromilich.

“We don’t want to create a green label of solidarity to exploit cheap labour. We want these people to play a leading role in their own story,” she told Tierramérica.

Janice Lima wants to be a part of this process. She currently earns a living from home sales of cosmetics, and is taking the classes because they offer “the opportunity for a profession.”

The women barely lift their heads from their sewing machines, sketches and designs, scissors and scraps of fabric.

Their final creations will be modeled by young women from the favela at a fashion show organised by the police unit involved in the pacification operation in Mangueira. This time, for a change, the catwalk will not be in Paris, Milan or the exclusive beachfront neighborhoods of Rio.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

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