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.

Honiara’s rapid urban growth and increased urban waste have become the focus of municipal efforts to stem the spread of dengue fever. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
HONIARA, Solomon Islands, May 15 2013 (IPS)

City and health authorities in the Solomon Islands, located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, are calling for effective and consistent urban waste management as they battle to control a serious outbreak of dengue fever, the world’s fastest spreading vector-borne viral disease, which was identified in the country in February.

This archipelago nation of more than 900 forest-covered islands, lying just east of Papua New Guinea, has since recorded over 4,200 suspected and over 1,000 confirmed cases, with six fatalities. The outbreak has impacted eight of nine provinces in the country of 552,000, with 88 percent of cases located in the capital, Honiara.

According to Dr. Tenneth Dalipanda, under-secretary for health improvement and chairman of the national dengue fever task force, the crisis has not yet peaked and the country is still in “active outbreak mode.”

Dengue fever is an infectious tropical virus transmitted to humans by the bite of female mosquitoes, which breed in clean, warm water. In urban and semi-urban areas, gutters, old tyres, plastic containers and refuse – in short, any items that have become water receptacles in close proximity to households – make excellent hatcheries for dengue-carrying mosquito larvae.

In the Solomon Islands dengue is associated predominantly with the Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which bite during the day. The incubation period of the virus is typically four to 10 days, with symptoms including fever, headaches, nausea, a body rash and joint and muscle pain.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the global incidence of dengue has grown 30-fold during the past 50 years, reaching an estimated 50 million infections every year. Transmission of the disease is particularly rapid in high-density urban areas in tropical and sub-tropical climates, where mosquitoes proliferate during monsoonal seasons or following periods of heavy rainfall.

But according to Dalipanda, a dengue outbreak of this magnitude has never been seen in the Solomon Islands before.

A small outbreak of “type 2” dengue in 2002 resulted only in a very small number of cases, he told IPS.

“The current outbreak is the first in the country that we have a record of and the strain that we now have is a type 3 dengue virus, which is one of the more virulent,” he explained, adding there are some 500 cases per 10,000 residents in Honiara.

The capacity of the nation’s health services has been under strain and the main National Referral Hospital located in Honiara was closed to routine services until last week, as resources were diverted to cope with the disease emergency.

The government has established a national task force to coordinate a response to the outbreak, with Australia and New Zealand providing teams of specialised medical and public health staff to assist local authorities.

There is no known cure or vaccine for dengue, making prevention critical. So in March the government spearheaded a citywide cleanup campaign in Honiara to try and contain breeding sites.

Through a public awareness programme, households, businesses and residents across the city were advised on how to clear accumulated solid waste such as tin cans, coconut shells, plastic bags and containers, used tyres, buckets and tin drums, and instructed to remove or cover water containers.

Honiara City Council Chief Health Inspector George Titiulu told IPS he had “longstanding” concerns about waste management and public health in the capital, since there is a strong link between the disease and urban refuse.

“The key mosquito breeding sites are (those areas) where the city’s waste collection services do not currently reach,” Titiulu said, referring to residential areas on the city’s periphery.

Population expansion coupled with rapid urbanisation in small Pacific Island nations has created major waste disposal challenges for the region.

Hand in hand with Honiara’s expansion has come an increasing volume of solid waste from shops, offices, markets and residential areas, while informal settlements mushrooming on the city’s boundary have now exceeded the capacity of service providers.

Thirty-five percent of the city’s population of 64,600, which is growing at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent, live in unplanned communities that have inadequate power, sanitation and garbage collection services, as well as a poor water supply.

The waste burden is even greater in the absence of recycling facilities in Honiara, although some agents collect aluminium cans for foreign recycling companies. The majority of organic, recyclable household waste, together with a great deal of plastic, is either burnt, discarded in coastal and land areas, or collected for landfill sites.

Acknowledging that the cleanup campaign likely prevented a steep increase in dengue cases, Dalipanda still feels its impact has not been adequate. “We would like to see the (incidence of cases) coming down.”

He confirmed that it was vital to continue vector-control measures such as managing and eliminating waste, covering water storage containers and applying insecticides, but warned that these should not be “one-off activities”.

“Different communities, institutions and ministries should become involved, because it is the only way we can break the cycle of the disease,” he emphasised.

The challenge has been taken up by the Honiara City Council, which recently submitted a 960,000-dollar proposal to the government to implement a comprehensive, yearlong garbage collection programme.

“This will be an integrated approach to waste management to include the cleaning of drains where rubbish collects, mass spraying and the social mobilisation of communities,” Titiulu elaborated.

“We want to work with those communities where services don’t reach and engage especially with youth to implement a (full-scale) cleanup of the city.”

But he stressed that the council, which currently only has three vehicles, will need funds, equipment and logistical support in order to carry out the plan.  If successful, it could disrupt the breeding momentum of the mosquitoes and reduce the likelihood of outbreaks in the near future.