One man's rubbish is another's bread and butter

Here's a paradox for you. Of the 167,000 tonnes of rubbish produced by Brazilians every day, only two percent is collected selectively for recycling by local authorities. Yet Brazil has some of the most impressive recycling figures in the world for some materials: according to industry figures, 77 percent of used cardboard was recycled in 2006, and a whacking 96 percent of aluminium cans.

The clue to the paradox lies in a comment from Brazil's own government statistical office. "The high levels of recycling are more associated with the value of raw materials and the high levels of poverty and unemployment, than with education and environmental consciousness," it acknowledged.

In other words, these remarkable statistics are due largely to the fact that there are enough desperately poor people prepared to spend their entire working lives sifting through unseparated rubbish to pull out the recyclable items, and get a small share of their economic value to help feed their families. This will come to no surprise to anyone who has been to a Brazilian city - or indeed just about any developing country - and seen the human scavengers patrolling the streets and rubbish dumps, often pulling carts piled impossibly high with salvageable waste.

Collectors
In Brazil, these people are known as catadores, or literally collectors. There are thought to be some 300,000 of them. And now, as recycling becomes a higher priority for public authorities and the private sector, they are demanding recognition for the public service they've been providing for free for decades.

I followed one catador, Claudinei Zorante, on his beat around a central district of São Paulo famous for its cheap electronics stores. Pushing his large handcart weighing 130 kg unladen, he showed me the waste discarded by one of the stores - bits of metal, paper and plastic all mixed together. "Where I take the material from is where I get food to bring home to my family. I do the collection, take out the clean material, get the money from that, so I can put food on the table," explains Claudinei, a 39-year-old father of three.

Cooperatives
The place he takes the material to is a sprawling, grim area underneath a motorway viaduct, where some 2,000 catadores work - some individually, some organised into cooperatives. They separate the waste into different materials, have it weighed and collect their earnings, sometimes from middlemen who pay a pittance compared with what they will receive from recycling companies.

Although there have been attempts by the municipal government to work with the organised catadores, it is an uneasy relationship - just last month, this area was the scene of ugly clashes with police as the authorities came to clean up the area and the catadores accused them of taking away material that they had collected and depriving them of their livelihoods.

Admittedly the area is unpleasant - I dodged a couple of dead rats as I walked through it. But according to another catador, Sergio Bispo, the problem would not arise if the catadores were given proper spaces in which to work: "If we spent a month on strike, the country would stop - I think the world would stop. Because the municipal governments in the big cities don't do selective collection, they wouldn't cope. It's us catadores who do it, with our handcarts, carrying stuff on our backs, on our heads, in bags. So the country would stop if we went on strike, one day it will happen, but not yet."

Modern system
A short distance away, in an enclosed shed, I see an example of how catadores can be included in more modern recycling systems while working in more decent conditions. In a project supported by the oil giant Petrobras, members of a co-operative separate or ‘triage' the material collected on carts, and it is then baled into blocks that can be sold directly to industry, cutting out the middlemen.

It is the kind of project being promoted by the Instituto Ethos, an organisation promoting corporate social responsibility. It argues that both the public and private sector have an obligation to include the catadores in recycling contracts.

The coordinator of the project, John Butcher says: "The main responsibility for recycling is from the government. But they can do it in a way to include catadores as service providers for the municipality. They provide a public service that is not paid. They understand, and we understand, that they should be paid for the service."

THIS ARTICLE, TOGETHER WITH AN AUDIO REPORT, WAS PUBLISHED BY THE STATE WE'RE IN, RADIO NETHERLANDS INTERNATIONAL.