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In
2007, on the occasion of Christmas, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
(Lula), the President of Brazil, visited an association of 'catadores'.
'Catadore' is Portuguese for 'human scavenger' or 'rubbish
collector'. The catadores, mostly seen in the larger cities of
Brazil, especially in Brazil's commercial capital Sao Paulo,
picked up metal scraps, paper, plastic bags, etc., for
recycling. Like human scavengers in any other country, they made
a living from the waste thrown out by others while acting as
informal recyclers.
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By helping to recycle the waste, they reduced the
ominous impact of waste on the environment. Analysts noted that though
Brazil was an industrialized economy, it did not have the best of waste
recycle management practices.
Much of the waste came from the packaging
industry and found its way into landfills. The organic wastes decaying
in landfills emitted harmful greenhouse gases like methane, etc., which
threatened public health as well as the environment.
The rest of the
waste materials such as scraps and plastics took hundreds of years to
degrade. Analysts viewed recycling as one of the solutions to reduce the
impact of these wastes on the environment.
Some analysts felt that the catadores were at the heart of waste
recycling management in Brazil. Many of these people were homeless while
some of them lived close to the 16,000-odd open dumps in Brazil.1
They
were traditionally poor and socially marginalized. They worked in
dangerous conditions and were exposed to hazardous materials and toxic
fumes at landfills and to injury and diseases. Besides, the rest of
society tended to look down on them.
But over the years, the catadores
were organized into cooperatives and, with an increase in environmental
awareness among the people of the country, their stature grew in
society. The catadores found that after becoming organized, their
political clout had also increased.
Analysts felt that this was one of
the reasons that Lula had been visiting the catadores every Christmas
since 2003.
In the early 1990s, recognizing the importance of recycling, some
private companies in Brazil joined forces with the government to
organize the catadores into cooperatives.
This was a bid to improve the
living conditions of the catadores so that they could generate a
sustainable income for themselves.
A number of Non-Government
Organizations (NGOs) too extended support and actively participated in
Brazil's waste recycle management initiatives.
Being organized into cooperatives had many benefits for the catadores as
well as the environment. On the one hand, it created jobs and reduced
poverty among the catadores while on the other, it helped to conserve
natural resources, protect the environment, improve industrial
competitiveness, save on collection, transportation, and disposal costs,
and extend the life of disposal sites, according to Martin Medina
(Medina), Professor, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico.2
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1] Geoffrey M Levy, "Packaging, Policy and the Environment," Springer, 2000.
2] Martin Medina, "Co-benefits of Waste Management in
Developing Countries," www.epa.gov, 2007. |
