A Day in the Dumps - A post about a lot of garbage

I spent Friday morning in the dumps. The Muribeca Dump to be exact. Muribeca is the landfill that receives all of Recife's as well as one of its neighbouring city's garbage, approximately 3,000 tons a day of it. Close to 2,000 men, women, teenagers, and unfortunately children work in the dump rummaging through the waste picking out recyclable materials for sale. Watching the people sift their way through hundreds of bags of refuse is one of the hardest things. Fortunately, there were no children there yesterday morning as they tend to sneak in at night when they cannot be caught by the police that patrol the area.

Life in the landfill is difficult -- one study showed that in a ten-year period there was almost a 100 percent turnover in the pickers. Further research into what happened to the missing pickers revealed that a shockingly large percentage had died -- either through violence [the landfill is also a common hideout for thieves, bandits, and assassins] or through disease and sickness. Hopefully some were also able to move on to safer pursuits.

During our visit to the dump, a young Brazilian who works with the garbage pickers -- catadores in Portuguese -- asked us what word we used in English to describe the people who do this type of work. I had to confess that in Canada there are so few people who sift through garbage, that in fact we do not have a word to describe the workers, other than a literal description of the action.

What angers me is all the propaganda that exists in terms of Brazil's recycling ability. Articles in magazines will constantly laud Brazil's incredible success in recycling -- close to 100 percent of recyclable materials are actually recycled. In many areas -- pop cans for example -- Brazil, at a 92 percent recycle rate is one of the top recyclers in the world. What is missing from the articles is the fact that this success is due to neither systematic government efforts nor any conscientiousness on the part of the citizenry. Yes, some efforts do exist in terms of encouraging people to separate their garbage into organic and recyclable materials. However, these efforts are often few and far between and those who truly deserve the credit for the country's incredible recycling rate are without a doubt some of, or perhaps the, most marginalised workers that exist. Usually working without any kind of protective equipment -- gloves, mask, closed shoes -- these unsung "heros" of Brazil's success are people who receive nothing from Brazil in return.