A load of rubbish!

By Richard Pavlic

Some call it rubbish. Others call it trash. However, to a group of young people in Brazil, it is a valuable opportunity to earn a living.

Eighteen young men and women between the ages of 16 and 24 belong to the CAMAPET Trash Recycling Co-operative in the city of Salvador, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Bahia. Their job is to collect, sort and compact trash for sale to recycling companies. The work is dirty and hard but that is the choice these youngsters have made.

CAMAPET recruits students mainly from secondary schools in the slum neighbourhoods of the port area of Salvador. Members must either be in secondary school or some form of further education. They work for CAMAPET at times when they are not studying. Before beginning trash processing, they attend a three-month course covering the co-operative movement, pollution and the importance of cleaning up the environment.

Joilson Santos, CAMAPET's articulate 19-year-old president, says that he and his colleagues do their work because above all it provides them with a job and badly needed income.

Beginning

CAMAPET began in 1999 following research by the Centro de Arte e Meio Ambiente (Centre of Art and Environment - CAMA) in the port area neighbourhoods of Salvador. The research was part of a city programme to clean up the local environment and promote tourism. It showed that the greatest negative impact on the area was caused by the growing amount of trash, and unemployment.

CAMA decided to create a recycling co-operative, and to its own acronym added "PET" (from polyethylene terephthalate), which are the general initials used in many countries to identify recyclable items.

Initially, the CAMAPET pickers collected trash door-to-door in the port area. Later, they went into nearby neighbourhoods and asked churches, other community organisations and owners of apartment buildings to provide space for trash collection bins. The co-operative also buys trash from four smaller co-operatives that do not have a compactor. Today, the CAMAPET members process and sell around 20 to 30 tons of material each month.

Such a large amount of trash involves a lot of work and, despite the heat and humidity of Salvador, the workers must wear coveralls, rubber gloves and boots for safety. What frustrates members most, though, is not their working conditions, but rather the lack of recycling companies in Salvador and Bahia to buy the co-operative’s processed trash. Consequently, the price CAMAPET gets for its compacted material is relatively low because there is only one PET recycling company in Salvador, who, anyway, cannot take all the material CAMAPET could supply. Surplus trash, therefore, is transported to recycling plants in São Paulo, many miles away.

Young owners

The members of the CAMAPET co-operative are, in effect, the owners of the enterprise because they work for and manage themselves. At the same time, they are learning how to manage a business interactively and democratically, while contributing to the public good. Members make up CAMAPET’s assembly, which elects the officers and members of different committees, which includes one that deals with ethics.

The work of CAMAPET also has a wider social and economic impact than just the collection of trash. Because of the members' contact with the public and the public trash collection points, the amount of recyclable trash CAMAPET is able to collect is on the rise. CAMAPET sees this as proof of a growing environmental awareness in the neighbourhoods where it works. Members are now also invited to speak at schools about why they collect trash, and how it helps them earn money and at the same time clean up the city. Some of the members also teach children how to make toys from trash.

All the trash pickers use their income to help pay their school or college expenses. Some, like the president and Jeane Castro dos Santos, who is a member of the ethics committee, are now even taking university preparatory courses that the large majority of families in the neighbourhoods where CAMAPET’s members live could not possibly afford.

ECLOF involvement

CAMAPET has had two loans from ECLOF Brazil. It used a first loan of R$5,000 (US$2,300) to buy trash from the informal collectors who scoured the streets of Salvador for recyclable trash during the 2004 carnival. The co-operative then used a second loan of R$10,000 to purchase a larger compactor in order to compact its own trash and that which it buys from four other smaller collecting co-operatives.

Joilson Santos says that he sees CAMAPET one day grouping together even more informal trash co-operatives and offering young people in Salvador the employment opportunities and conditions that the present set up cannot supply.

Alexandre dos Santos Campos, aged 21, takes his turn compacting cardboard.

 

Jeane Castro dos Santos, aged 19, 'models' a handbag made of recyclable material (note the fashionable safety boots!).