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.

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

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Dec 13 2013 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the Petro administration suffered a severe backlash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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.