Indispensable in waste management and increasingly appreciated in the face of the climate crisis, the recycling chain has spent the last few decades virtually unscathed by the digital revolution. This scenario began to change recently as startups identified business opportunities in the region.
However, the introduction of the technology does not exclude the large number of workers involved in the activity, which experts say is essential for the quality of recycling.
One such example is in Carapicuíba, in the São Paulo metropolitan area. There, on the sidewalk along the Córrego Cadaval waterfront, pedestrians can barely keep up with the hurrying cars crossing the street. However, there is one vehicle that appears on the horizon in slow steps from time to time.
These are carts that weigh a lot more than they should carry: cardboard, bottles and cans fill the loading area of the recyclables pickers. They come to unload part of the volume that they have collected on the streets of Greater São Paulo. However, Fate is not a junkyard, but a startup Green Mining.
A gas station has been in operation there since the end of 2021, which pays the collector at least six times as much for glass bottles a waste of abundant raw materials and therefore of less value in the recycling chain.
The Fábrica Price station, as it was called, is one of Green Mining’s projects. In another, the startup’s own employees scavenge for the materials in bars and restaurants in the area.
Matheus Magalhães, 27, has been in this role since 2018, but his primary role is to collect information about the waste that arrives at this point through autonomous collectors.
The data is entered into an application and stored on the blockchain, a system that became popular with the spread of cryptocurrencies. The tool is a kind of public book of the Internet, which is practically impossible to violate.
“Data cannot be modified. We guarantee that nobody will increase or decrease the data already collected,” says one of the company’s founders, Rodrigo Oliveira. “All dates are open. We post the amount of material that is collected directly on our website. There people can see how much was collected each day. If it was 1 kilo, 1 kilo will be displayed. If it was 1 ton, 1 ton appears.”
With subsidies from major packaging manufacturers, the glass that arrives there goes to packaging companies and is returned to the shelves, a process that increases the useful life of landfill, uses less energy and conserves natural resources.
Legal modernization opens up opportunities
The passage of the National Waste Policy Law in 2010 and the signing of the Sectoral Packaging Agreement in 2015 opened a flank for technology companies that began to act as the logistic arm of recycling for large corporations.
The law provides for reverse logistics, i.e. the return of the packaging after consumption. The agreement, reached between major companies and the government, called for a minimum 22% reduction in packaging going to landfill by 2018.
In this context, the presentation of invoices has become a common means of demonstrating recycling. Intermediaries buy these credits from one of the links in the chain (e.g. a coop) and sell them to companies who are accountable for their packaging.
It’s a similar system to the carbon credit market, explains Flávia Cunha, founder of Casa Causa, a center for circular economy solutions. However, the entrepreneur has reservations about using this method in Brazil.
“It’s almost a bargaining chip,” he says. “There’s no audit, you can’t see that flow. You only see the change in paper, you don’t see the change in recyclables. There is no traceability.”
Entrepreneur Dione Manetti called the simple commercialization of credit “paper monetization.”
“I appropriate an outcome that already exists in the chain, but I don’t invest in its base to expand its recovery capacity,” he says.
Pragma, his company, uses this resource and sells invoices purchased from the cooperatives to companies that need to prove reverse logistics. The papers go through a system that checks their validity at the federal tax office and checks the electronic signature.
The real difference, however, lies in the monitoring of the budget: the cooperative partner sets a price for the notes, but Pragma participates in the share plan.
“If I just pay the cooperative and don’t follow up and plan together, I risk that this money will be appropriated by a few people,” he says.
During the Covid19 pandemic, for example, the income of Cooperzagati cooperative members in Taboão da Serra in the greater São Paulo area was the top priority. “It was fundamental. We had nobody to sell to,” says Luana Oliveira, president of Pragma’s partner cooperative.
A lack of investment can make the process more expensive in the long term
The bet on increasing the capacity of the links in this chain is more than a matter of principle. With the updating of the recycling legislation, the demand for the services of the cooperatives tends to grow strongly.
“The market is starting to go down. If they don’t invest in the processing capacity, the value per ton gets very expensive,” says Manetti.
The entrepreneur is pessimistic about the startup initiatives that have come onto the market in recent years.
“Collectors alone will not be able to recover 100% of the waste. But we have to guarantee them their place in this market because they were the ones who invented it in Brazil. When nobody was talking about recycling, there were already thousands of families across the country that were making a living and surviving from it,” says Manetti.
Collectors are first in the chain to get their hands on the waste to avoid burying it, targeting more than 26 million tons of recyclables a year in the country, according to an estimate by Abrelpe (Brazilian Association of Public Cleaning and Special disposal companies). ).
The MNCR (National Movement of Recyclable Material Collectors) estimates that there are 800,000 collectors in Brazil. The 2021 Recycling Yearbook has mapped 9,754 of these professionals across 358 recyclables organizations. It is estimated that 54% are women and 76.1% are black.
In 2020, the 326,700 tons recovered by waste collection organizations had the potential to reduce 153,321 tons of CO₂, according to the Recycling Yearbook.
In the Periperi district, just over an hour by public transport from Pelourinho, a postcard from downtown Salvador, Genivaldo Ribeiro has supported his family for ten years with the income he earns from recycling.
He is one of the founders of Cooperguary, which grew out of an attempt to clean up the river that flows through the community.
“The environment affects everything in our lives. We see the rain destroying the plantations, affecting nutrition and making everything more expensive,” says Tico, as he is known.
Paying the cooperative members for their work increases the collection volume
At the cooperative’s headquarters, where Tico is director, the pressed materials pile up to the cracks in the roof, which together with the huge front gate provide enough light for the 20 members to dismantle the items coming in from the trucks.
Each in their own stall, they work at the same pace: in the center of the shed, one of the recyclers is separating the blue plastic from the cover from the cardboard binders that must have been useful in a binder, while another is dismantling old electronics to look for that most valuable material recycling: copper.
However, there are two employees who have changed their routine in the past two months. Tuesday through Saturday, Ane Silva and Gilberto Santos swap their route to neighboring Cooperguary for a shed in Rio Vermelho, a bohemian neighborhood in Salvador.
There, they take tricycles and ride around the neighborhood to collect recyclables from homes and restaurants that have signed up for Bahia startup Solos’ Roda program.
With funding from large companies, the startup enters into temporary partnerships with cooperatives. One of the terms of the contract is the provision of two members of the cooperative for the preparation of the route.
This is Cooperguary’s second time participating in the project. In the first phase, when the pandemic was in an acute phase, aid was essential for the cooperative’s survival, according to Tico, who saw competition increase with the economic crisis.
“Here in Salvador we’ve seen far fewer people collecting material. What we’re seeing now is not the natural collector who collects every day, but the spontaneous one. He’s unemployed, struggling and collecting to make a living going home It has a direct impact on the work of the cooperative,” he says.
The financing strategy fulfills what Tico demands at every opportunity: remuneration for the work of cooperatives. Tired of mobilizing a truck and staff to reach a destination and only get a glass box. The payment ensures that the work is remunerated. “Everything is for profit there,” he says.
If you want to donate your rubbish, you have your data on a website and schedule a collection day. Based on this information, the startup programs a route and notifies the pickers via WhatsApp.
“Technology is an Achilles’ heel for us today. We understand that it is fundamental to not only ensure more efficient operations, but also to have more reliable data tracking,” says Saville Alves, founder of the company.
But the investment must be high.
Technology could enable an “Uber of recyclers”.
“Geolocation, like Uber and iFood, is super expensive. We can’t place it today,” says Alves. “It seems like something simple because it happens in our daily life, but only the big ones can do it in real time.”
In an ideal world, he says, the coop member would be registered in an application where appointments would come in based on location — an Uber of recyclers. The aim is to have such a system in two to three years.
For the project coordinator of the NGO Sustentar, Jacqueline Rutkowski, the invasion of technology into the sector is interesting because it increases the number of solutions for waste management.
“Often when public order isn’t in place, these applications make it easier to send waste for recycling,” he says. However, according to the engineer, automation has its limits, especially with large machines.
“It’s harder to have equipment that’s capable of separating the myriad of recyclable materials we have today from trash,” she explains. Blowing machines can separate paper, for example. Magnets select ferrous materials. But plastic is virtually impossible without human activity.
“Where waste collectors work, you can benefit from a greater variety of recyclables,” he says. “In that sense, the social technology they’ve developed is much more efficient.”
This report was created with the grant for journalistic production on the subject of inclusive recycling from Fundação Gabo and Latitud R