In Latin America, where recycling rates remain below 10%, grassroots circular solutions are slowly beginning to scale — thanks to growing legitimacy, education, organization and protections for informal waste workers, who remain the backbone of the region’s collection and recycling infrastructure.
As the saying goes, necessity breeds invention. In Latin America — where
UNEP
reports
recycling rates generally remain below 10 percent — this adage is reflected by a
fertile ground of bespoke solutions driven by waste
pickers,
who are on the frontline of the transition to a circular
economy.
Their ingenuity and steadfast determination can be enhanced through strategic
partnerships that offer efficiencies, providing benefits that also support local
communities.
“We need to capitalize on these efforts,” Carolina
Mantilla tells
Sustainable Brands®. As Sustainability and Recycling Director for
Dow’s Plastics and Speciality Packaging business in Latin
America, she has been working to find ways of unlocking the region’s waste
management challenges since 2018.
A 21-year veteran of Dow, Bogotá-based Mantilla is upbeat about the
opportunities to not only transform the way industries think about and use
plastic packaging, but to decarbonize local economies.
“In Latin America, we have a significant challenge,” she says. “More than 40
percent of the solid waste that is generated in the region is not properly dealt
with.”
But with more cities and governments implementing policies and legislation
designed to address the impact of plastic waste in particular, changes are
coming:
-
In Brazil, packaging companies must implement a reverse-logistics system
for general packaging — which requires them to invest in waste-management
cooperatives,
sign contracts with retailers to establish voluntary waste-collection
points, and make efforts to help consumers return packaging.
-
In Colombia, packers, fillers and importers of packaged products are
required to submit waste-management plans to the government; and producers
must also meet reuse targets for waste packaging.
-
In Chile, new packaging extended producer responsibility
laws
will help establish an obligatory recycling rate producers and recyclers
must meet.
“We will need more smart policies to help us scale what we are doing and the
solutions we’re proposing,” Mantilla says.
The region will also need the efforts of its four million informal waste workers
who, historically, have been left behind and face barriers such as societal and
worker discrimination, heightened health risks and more.
“We see an opportunity to work with these
communities
and put them at the center of any circular strategy,” Mantilla asserts.
“Communities must be seen as business partners; we need them to be successful in
this transformation.”
While many waste pickers and workers are part of organized cooperatives in Latin
America, they are still largely part of the informal economy — creating
challenges to scale their sorting and collection work into a transparent value
chain and formal, global economy.
“For most of these people, their family incomes fully depend on waste management
and the possibility to use waste as a valuable
product.
And a full transition to a circular economy could potentially unlock $4.5
trillion
worldwide
— a great part of that potential lies in Latin America,” Mantilla explains.
In 2019, Dow teamed
up
with Brazilian company Boomera and the NGO
Fundación Avina to help waste pickers boost efficiency and productivity. The
initiative, known as Recycling for a Change,
involved five cooperatives across São Paulo and focused on improving
waste-management infrastructure and providing training to increase process
efficiency. It worked: In its first year, the program saw waste pickers increase
sales (by volume) by 37 percent — boosting revenues by 35 percent, compared to
the year before.
In Colombia, a similar project aimed to increase waste picker revenues in the
tourist hotspot of
Palomino.
Working with Carvajal Empaques, the Traso
Collective and the Innovation Lab, Dow’s Riviera Project saw 16
recyclers from the waste-pickers organization Fundarapa collect more than
100 tons of usable waste in its first year (equivalent to 36 percent of the
total generated).
“By giving waste pickers the training and guidelines, we can improve their
capacity, their equipment, their efficiency and their methods in a way that
creates a new culture. Now, we aim to expand this to other cooperatives in other
cities and countries,” Mantilla said.
While waste pickers understand the value of the waste they are collecting, there
is now a need to create regional demand for packaging materials made from
recycled content — which will, in turn, increase the value of the waste being
collected. Dow’s response in the region is
REVOLOOP™ — a resin made from
recycled plastic that is selling well across Latin America and beyond. Working
with Boomera in Brazil,
Enka
in Colombia, and the Association of Argentine
Cooperatives in Argentina, the new
material is a result of technology which enables high-quality, post-consumer
recycled content (PCR) to be incorporated into everyday plastic packaging —
firmly closing the loop on plastic waste while supporting the livelihoods of
waste-picking communities.
Growing up in Bogotá, Mantilla shares that she was often mortified by her
mother’s obsession with reusing, recycling, and making sure food wasn’t wasted
at dinner time. Now, she recognizes how crucial educating people of all ages is
in bringing about the necessary changes required for a circular economy. It’s
the reason Dow has been supporting Circular
Movement — a multilingual educational platform
developed by Atina, designed to give people tips and advice on making sure
nothing is allowed to go to waste.
“We have more than 40 partners; and after two years, we’ve impacted more than
500,000 people across Latin America, so we’re really excited,” she says. “This
is critical. We can do a lot of things with technology; but as consumers, we
need to change our behavior.”
Mantilla also knows how important legislation will be in maintaining circular
momentum across the region. Looking to
Europe
for inspiration, she predicts most Latin American countries will have robust
policies around plastic circularity by 2030.
“We look a lot at what is happening in Europe; but it is important to understand
the challenges we face in Latin America, where we don’t have the same waste
infrastructure. But policies are going to help us scale these solutions, to
increase demand, and to ensure that investors are comfortable to put capital
into this
space.”
Published Oct 13, 2022 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST
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