Brazil’s Most Sustainable City Finds Value in its Garbage
HAVANA TIMES – Enjoying the company of her neighbors, getting to know them, and chatting with them is what Lucia Neves likes best about the communal garden at Portal de Ribeirao, a neighborhood in the south of Florianopolis, known as the most sustainable of the 57 state capitals that make up Brazil.
Neves, who owns a biodegradable packaging company, chose to relocate to this capital of the southeastern state of Santa Catarina from her previous residence in Ribeirao Preto, some 590 miles further north. She’s one of the people who voluntarily care for the immense variety of vegetables, medicinal plants and fruit trees planted in an area of 1000 square meters ( just under a quarter of an acre).
The residents of the neighborhood happily accepted the planting that began 15 months ago, as it served to clean up an area where a private company had been composting organic waste for the mayor’s office, but without the necessary care.
The mice, mosquitos, cockroaches, and foul smells that had infested the area have disappeared, assured biologist Bruna de Nascimento Koti, a teacher and permanent volunteer in the garden. Like Neves, she was there when the IPS reporters arrived to view the site.
The State Company for Capital Improvements (Comcap) also maintains a clean compost site there, using the organic waste that the population collects in closed plastic buckets that the Florianopolis mayor’s office distributes.
In addition to providing cheap and healthy vegetables grown without chemicals, the garden promotes mingling, with a tea every Thursday and collective cultivation events on some Saturdays, Koti explained.
The Florianopolis city government chose composting and recycling as their main alternatives for processing the solid waste generated by the city’s 537,000 inhabitants, plus many tourists and temporary residents who come during the southern hemisphere’s summer.
It’s estimated that of the 700 tons of garbage produced daily, 43% is dry recyclable waste, and 35% is organic waste. They local government is looking for ways to take increased advantage of the latter, to reduce the part that ends up in the managed landfills. The other 22% of the garbage produced consists of non-recyclable waste products.
Currently, they’re only “getting value from”- in other words recycling – 13% of the total, meaning the remaining 87% is still being sent to the landfill in the neighboring town of Biguaçu, some 28 miles from Florianopolis. That municipality receives the garbage from 23 cities, stated Karina de Souza, solid waste director of the Florianopolis Environmental and Sustainable Development Agency.
However, the official data points to some important advances in the Florianopolis plan. The amount of food waste that is composed increased fourfold according to Sousa’s registers – from 1,175 tons in 2020, to 5,126 tons in 2024.
The quantity of green organics collected, as they call the clippings from trimmed trees and other vegetation, more than doubled during that period. Recycled glass also increased by 250%, and the material that arrives mixed and is separated later for recycling nearly quadrupled.
The Mayor’s office adopted the program dubbed ‘Zero Garbage” in 2018, with the goal of being able to capture 60% of the dry waste and 90% of the organics by 2030, a goal that still appears distant.
Garbage has value
Comcap’s Waste Recovery Center, located in the Itacorubi neighborhood near the city center and right beside the Botanical Garden, is the heart of the municipal effort to solve the challenge posed by garbage. The site holds the city’s large compost yard, plus a center for separating out the recyclables, and another for transferring the disposable waste and compacting it in larger trucks to be taken to the landfill.
It also incudes a Garbage Museum, aimed especially at environmental education, and an eco-point where the residents deposit recyclable items like wood, electric appliances, paper, plastic and glass. There are nine eco-points distributed throughout the city. Together, they receive around 11,000 tons annually of recyclable waste to be classified and processed. Waste products from the eco-points and other sources are moved to warehouses where glass, packing boxes, corrugated paper, plastics and tires are stored separately for recycling. These arrive mixed with garbage and must pass through a triage process of separation and classification.
In the area of the Association of Collectors of Recyclable Materials, a contract with Comcap calls for the waste materials to be separated and turned over to buyers, usually from the same industry that recycles them.
Of the 75 members of this Association, nearly 40% are immigrants. The majority are Venezuelans, but there are also Peruvians, Haitians and Colombians, stated Volmir dos Santos, president of the Association during the IPS visit to the installation.
Founded in 1999, the group was originally made up of garbage collectors on the streets. With the progress of the municipal program and the selective collection in the homes, factories, and businesses, as well as the eco-points, a lot of the collectors became triage workers who separate, classify and sell the waste products that are ready for recycling.
“We used to suffer prejudice, discrimination and shame, but we’ve now earned respect,” Dos Santos celebrated.
Debate over burning the garbage
A broad-based movement of recycling workers from a number of associations and cooperatives also wants to influence the municipal plans. For example, they oppose incinerating the garbage that can’t be recycled in order to generate energy, a growing practice among the industrialized countries.
There are already at least 3,035 solid waste combustion centers in the world, known as Waste-to-Energy, stressed Yuri Schmitke, president of the Brazilian Association of Waste Energetics, that brings together 28 businesses from this sector.
It’s the way to reach the goal of “zero garbage,” and the elimination of the landfills, since recycling has limits and there’s always going to be a percentage that can’t be reused. Incinerating this garbage can substitute for burning fossil fuels, Schmitke argued.
Countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and the Nordic European nations have succeeded in using 100% of the garbage, he asserted, eliminating those landfills or final deposits of solid waste.
Restrictions and fears of environmental and even health damage were dispelled in several European countries, plus Japan and Korea, he pointed out, after the implementation of these plants in some central areas of large cities, without such negative effects ever being manifested. Paris already has three of them in its so-called expanded center, where the population density reaches 15,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, Yuri Schmitke explained.
“Incineration puts an end to the cycle, and it definitively excludes recycling. Brazil is very different from Europe; and has already had failed experiences,” countered Dorival Rodrigues dos Santos, president of the Santa Catarina Federation of [Waste] Collectors’ Associations and Cooperatives, which says it represents 28,000 workers.
The members call for a broad debate on the topic between technicians and collectors, given announcements that this garbage alternative is beginning to win followers in Brazil. The town of Joinville, some 106 miles from Florianopolis with a population of 616,000, has plans to install a center for generating electricity from the incineration of garbage.
Florianopolis currently seeks to dispatch the non-recyclable waste to the cement industry, which is interested in using it as fuel instead of the fossil fuels, De Souza, the Florianopolis solid waste director, informed.
Recycling first
“We defend the superiority of recycling over incineration. The objective is to improve recycling, and we have not exhausted the advances,” stated Karolina Zimmermann, the engineer who works with the collectors.
Progress in recycling depends not only on new technologies, such as those that separate materials that have been mixed or even melted together, and the recycling of dyes and chemical elements in plastics or paperboard. The environmental education of consumers to separate their waste is fundamental to increase reuse.
Aparecida Napoleão is an example of how recycling has taken root. She leads a movement for the detailed separation of all waste in her building of 126 luxury apartments – from small glass containers, which 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 City Hall, Aparecida has organized a series of shelves and containers for dozens of types of materials on the first floor of the building. She tries to orient her neighbors, but recognizes that despite all efforts, there are always those who put trash in the wrong place. “It’s ant-work; you have to be patient, explain, ask repeatedly, until they understand the importance of separation,” she declared.
First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.