Technology modernizes recycling, but human work is indispensable, say experts

Indispensable in waste management and increasingly valued as the climate crisis knocks on the door, 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 area.

The introduction of technology, however, does not exclude the huge number of workers involved in the activity, essential for the quality of recycling, according to experts.

One of these examples is in Carapicuíba, in Greater São Paulo. There, on the sidewalk along the Córrego Cadaval waterfront, pedestrians can barely keep up with the hurried cars crossing the road. There is a vehicle, however, that from time to time appears on the horizon in slow steps.

These are carts that weigh much more than they should be carrying: cardboard, bottles and cans fill the back of the recyclable pickers’ carts. They come to unload part of the volume they collected on the streets of Greater São Paulo. Fate, however, is not a junkyard, but a startup—Green Mining.

Since the end of 2021, a station has been operating there that pays at least six times more to the collector for glass bottles — waste of abundant raw material and, therefore, of lower value in the recycling chain.

The Fábrica Price station, as it was named, is one of Green Mining’s projects. In another, the startup’s own employees look for the materials in bars and restaurants in the region.

Matheus Magalhães, 27, has been in this role since 2018, but his main task is to record information on the waste that arrives at the point through autonomous collectors.

The data is entered into an application and recorded on the blockchain, a system that became popular with the spread of cryptocurrencies. The tool is a kind of public book of the internet, practically impossible to be violated.

“No data can be changed. We guarantee that no one will increase or reduce what has already been collected” says one of the company’s founders, Rodrigo Oliveira. “All the data is open. We put the volume of material that is being collected directly on our website. There people can see how much was collected each day. If it was 1 kilo, 1 kilo will appear. If it was 1 ton, 1 ton will appear.”

With funding from large packaging producers, the glass that arrives there goes to packaging companies and returns to the shelves, a process that increases the useful life of landfills, uses less energy and saves natural resources.

Modernization of laws opens up opportunities

The approval of the law for the National Solid Waste Policy, in 2010, and the signing of the Sector Packaging Agreement, in 2015, opened a flank for technology companies, which began to act as a logistics arm of recycling for large companies.

The law provides for reverse logistics, that is, the return path of packaging after consumption. The agreement, made between large companies and the government, determined the reduction of at least 22% of packaging taken to landfills by 2018.

​In this context, the presentation of invoices has become a common expedient to prove recycling. Intermediary companies buy these credits from one of the links in the chain (a cooperative, for example), and sell them to companies that need to account for their packaging.

It is a system similar to the carbon credits market, explains Flávia Cunha, founder of Casa Causa, a hub of solutions for the circular economy. The entrepreneur, however, has reservations about the application of this method in Brazil.

“It’s almost a bargaining chip,” he says. “There’s no audit, you can’t see this flow happening. You only see the change of paper, you don’t see the change of recyclables. There’s no traceability.”

Entrepreneur Dione Manetti called the simple commercialization of credits “paper monetization”.

“I appropriate a result that already exists in the chain, but I don’t invest in its base to expand its recovery capacity”, he says.

Pragma, his company, makes use of this resource, selling invoices acquired with the cooperatives to companies that need to prove reverse logistics. The papers go through a system that checks their validity with the Federal Revenue and checks the electronic signature.

But the real difference, he says, is in monitoring the budget: the cooperative partner sets a price for the notes, but Pragma participates in the stock plan.

“If I simply pay the cooperative and do not follow up and plan together, I run the risk that this money will be appropriated by few people”, he says.

In the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, income was the priority of the cooperative members of Cooperzagati, in Taboão da Serra, in Greater São Paulo. “It was fundamental. We had no one to sell to”, says Luana Oliveira, president of Pragma’s partner cooperative.

Lack of investment can make the process more expensive in the long run

The bet on increasing the capacity of the links in this chain is more than a matter of principle. With the updating of legislation regarding recycling, the tendency is for the demand for the service provided by cooperatives to grow a lot.

“The market is starting to sink in. If they don’t invest in the recovery capacity, the value per ton will be very expensive”, says Manetti.

The entrepreneur is pessimistic about the initiatives of startups that have awakened to the market in recent years.

“The collectors alone will not be able to recover 100% of the waste. But we must guarantee their space in this market, because they were the ones who invented it in Brazil. When nobody talked about recycling, there were already thousands of families in the country that lived and survived from it”, says Manetti.

Collectors are the first in the chain to get their hands on the waste to prevent it from being buried, destination of more than 26 million tons of recyclables per year in the country, according to an estimate by Abrelpe (Brazilian Association of Public Cleaning and Special Waste Companies). ).

The MNCR (National Movement of Recyclable Material Collectors) estimates that there are 800,000 collectors in Brazil. The 2021 Recycling Yearbook mapped 9,754 of these professionals in 358 recyclable materials organizations. The estimate is that 54% are women and 76.1% are black.

In 2020, the 326,700 tons recovered by waste pickers organizations had the potential to reduce 153,321 tons of CO₂, according to the Recycling Yearbook.

In the neighborhood of Periperi, 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 was born out of an attempt to clean the river that runs through the community.

“The environment influences everything in our lives. We are seeing how the rain is destroying the plantations, which will impact food and make everything more expensive”, says Tico, as he is known.

Payment for cooperative members’ work increases collection volume

At the cooperative’s headquarters, where Tico is the director, the pressed materials are piled up towards the cracks in the roof, which, with the huge front gate, provide enough light for the 20 members to mine the objects that arrive from the trucks.

Each in their own stall, they work at the same pace: in the middle of the shed, one of the recyclers separates the blue plastic from the cover from the cardboard binders that must have been useful in a file, while another dismantles old electronics to look for the most valued material. recycling: copper.

There are two employees, however, who have changed their routine in the last two months. From Tuesday to Saturday, Ane Silva and Gilberto Santos exchange their route to neighboring Cooperguary for a shed in Rio Vermelho, a bohemian neighborhood in Salvador.

There, they take tricycles and go around the neighborhood collecting recyclables at homes and restaurants that have signed up for the Roda program, from Bahia startup Solos.

With funding from large companies, the startup enters into temporary partnerships with cooperatives. One of the conditions of the contract is to provide two cooperative members to make the route.

It is the second time that Cooperguary participates in the project. In the first, when the pandemic was in an acute phase, the help was important for the very survival of the cooperative, according to Tico, who saw competition increase with the economic crisis.

“Here in Salvador, we saw a lot less people collecting material. What we are seeing now is not the natural collector, who collects every day, but the spontaneous one. He is unemployed, experiencing difficulties, and is collecting to take his livelihood home. This has a direct impact on the work of the cooperative”, he says.

The financing strategy meets what Tico claims at any opportunity: remuneration for the work of cooperatives. He is tired of mobilizing a truck and collaborators to reach a destination and only get a glass box. With the payment, the remuneration of the work is guaranteed. “There, all material is profit”, he says.

Anyone interested in donating their waste must register their data on a website and schedule a day for collection. 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, not only to guarantee a more efficient operation, but also to have a more reliable data tracking”, says Saville Alves, founder of the company.

But the investment needs to be high.

Technology could enable an ‘Uber of recyclers’

“Geolocation, like Uber and iFood, is super expensive. Today we can’t place it”, says Alves. “It seems like something simple, because it’s in our daily lives, but only the big ones can do it in real time.”

In an ideal world, he says, the cooperative member would be registered in an application where appointments would arrive depending on where they were – an Uber of recyclers. The goal is to have such a system in two or three years.

For the project coordinator of the NGO Sustentar, Jacqueline Rutkowski, the invasion of technology in the sector is interesting because it increases the number of solutions for the disposal of waste.

“Often, when you don’t have the public policy in place, these applications make it easier to send waste for recycling”, he says. But automation has its limits, according to the engineer, especially when it comes to large machinery.

“It is more difficult to have equipment that is capable of separating the myriad of recyclable materials that we have today from the garbage”, she explains. Blowing machines, for example, can separate paper. Magnets select ferrous materials. But plastic is virtually impossible without human activity.

“Where waste pickers work, you can take advantage of a better variety of recyclables,” he says. “In that sense, the social technology they develop is much more efficient.”

This report was made with the grant for journalistic production on inclusive recycling from Fundação Gabo and Latitud R