Recycling, Brazilian Style

According to official statistics, Brazil achieves a recycling rate somewhere in the 85-90 percent range. Unfortunately, this is not due to any massive level of citizen-based conscientiousness. And for those who are conscientious, in most cases the systems just aren't in place to support these habits. Rather, Brazil's enormous success in recycling is due to folks like these who spend their days sorting through garbage, either on the streets or in the dumps, picking out recyclable materials and selling them to companies that will process and resell or reuse them. Recife has its fair share of garbage pickers -- or catadores, as they are called in Portuguese.

What breaks my heart even more than seeing people poke through other people's festering and leaking trash, is that many of the catadores do not even have the most basic of equipment -- meaning hand and feet protection. While closed shoes would obviously be the best option for this type of work, many of Recife's recyclers do not even own a pair of flip-flops and instead walk around barefoot. When a job does not even allow the luxury to purchase a pair of rubber sandals for R$5.00 (CAN$2.50), you know that things are not going well.

There are efforts in Recife and across the country to organize the catadores into cooperatives and to work with the government for recognition and better working conditions. Last week we visited a catadores' cooperative which is trying to do just that. Simple and basic, the association has a small warehouse with a termite-ridden roof, which allows the catadores to deposit and organise their wares for resale. These two fellows are the ones who run the in-house side of the cooperative -- weighing, sorting, and liasing with the buyers. It was a really good visit, although somewhat difficult given the complexity of problems that the catadores face and the equally elusive complexity of solutions.