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Good-Bye Garbage Dumps |
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By Mario Osava*
The clean-up of several unregulated garbage dumps in the industrial Brazilian municipality of Sao Bernardo do Campo has served to raise the environmental awareness of the area's 700,000 residents.
SAO PAULO - The purpose of the Waste and Citizenship Program, launched in 1998 by the mayorship of Sao Bernardo, near the city of Sao Paulo, was to remove 92 families -- with 176 children and adolescents -- from Alvarenga, which had become a 40-hectare open-air dump.
The program identified 160 informal garbage collectors, known in Brazilian Portuguese as 'catadores', bringing the total to 1,000 people who live directly or indirectly from urban waste.
Although many Brazilian cities have initiatives in place to eradicate child labor in the garbage dumps -- an estimated 50,000 children work in these subhuman conditions --, the experience of Sao Bernardo is seen as a pioneering effort.
The plan is based on a system of selective waste collection entrusted to workers' cooperatives and aid for children to attend school or day-care and literacy and vocational training for adults.
Garbage has turned into an access of a process of sustainable human development, which fights discrimination and promotes environmental education, the director of the city's Environmental Department, Sonia Lima, told Tierramérica.
The first step was to recognize the catadores as providers of a public service, because they served to collect a quarter of all local waste, said Lima.
The stigma affecting these workers is reflected in the names they are given in the different Latin American countries: 'pepenadores' in Mexico, 'basuriegos' (garbagers) in Colombia, 'hurgadores' (pokers) in Uruguay and 'excavadores' (excavators) in Venezuela.
Such discrimination made it difficult for "garbage children" to remain in school, as they were often humiliated for entering the classroom with dirty clothes and shoes, Lima explained. It was necessary to provide special training to teachers, and provide clothing, food and tutoring for these boys and girls.
Under the city's program, 12 adolescents work making gift boxes, cards and notebooks with recycled paper, an effort known as Araçarí. Elder Batista de Oliveira, 17, enjoys this "art, a lovely work," while he dreams of getting a steady job and even of going to law school.
Waste and Citizenship provided 209 "eco-centers" throughout the city, which are four color-coded receptacles in which residents separate out their paper, plastic, glass and metal waste. The materials are then transported by waste companies to the warehouses of two ecology centers, where it is packaged or shredded for recycling.
One of these centers employs 27 former catadores, united in what they have dubbed the Lightning Association. At the other, 26 workers who left behind the Alvarenga dump organized the Re-Working Association.
"Our lives improved. Here we work protected from the sun and rain, with gloves and safety equipment, a kitchen and restroom," said Geralda Cándido, 43 years old, 13 of them lived in the dump with her four children.
"My mother talks about a garbage avalanche that killed two people" at the dump, recalled Andrea da Cruz Oliveira, who spent 16 of her 24 years in Alvarenga.
"I never went to school," she acknowledges, but she does not take advantage of the opportunity to read and write through "this marvelous project", because she says she has to take care of her three young children.
Although the two centers have the capacity for 80 workers, the volume of waste collected at the eco-centers, apartment buildings and companies is not enough to ensure an income for new employees, Cándido explained.
The innovative aspect of this initiative is that it links the public sector, society in general, and the business community, said Elizabeth Grimberg, of the Polis Institute, which coordinated the strategic planning of this program and studied the potential for integrated solid waste management, with the support of the Secretariat for Environmental Management and Canada's International Development Research Center
The program seeks to promote social responsibility among the business community, going beyond direct aid, Grimberg said.
* Mario Osava is an IPS correspondent.
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