On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, Blanca Pulupa Analuisa and her family arrive home around two in the morning, after traveling for half an hour in the back of a truck, enduring the cold that seeps into their bodies despite their clothing. woolen. They travel like this because they have to hold the sacks full of plastic bottles, paper and cardboard that they have collected during the day, and also because they do not have money to rent another vehicle that will take them to one of the valleys of Quito, the Ecuadorian capital, where they live. When they are not traveling with the garbage, they dedicate themselves to cleaning, classifying and selling everything they have collected to earn a monthly salary of between 100 and 120 dollars (93 and 111 euros), an amount that is not even close to the minimum wage in Ecuador. established at 450 dollars (416 euros).
The Pulupa Analuisa family has been scavenging for 20 years, a task in which Blanca, her mother, her daughters, her husband and her brother participate. It all started when Blanca’s mother became a widow and her only option was to go to the city dumps. “They looked at us with bad eyes, we were little,” recalls the woman, who is now 44 years old and struggles to dignify her work.
Part of the history of this family is explained in the application received, launched in 2018 to allow recyclers and neighbors to interact. Thanks to it, garbage collectors can be located on a map of the city and thus citizens can contact them and deliver the material by hand. Behind the initiative are three women: Paula Guerra, Lorena Gallardo and Claudia Andrade, convinced that grassroots recyclers must be integrated into the solid waste management system of cities and paid a salary.
Reciveci was able to start operating thanks to an initial contribution of 600 dollars (555 euros) from the Chilean NGO Smart Citizenship. A crowdfunding campaign allowed them to raise 7,000 more (6,477 euros). “It was a citizen proposal built with the dreams of many people who did not know each other, but who had an objective: we wanted grassroots recyclers to be visible,” explains Guerra. With the creation of the app, the initiative continued to grow.
The application registers 18,000 downloads and has mapped 1,600 recyclers in 11 locations in the country
In 2022, the project received 100,000 dollars (93,000 euros) for being one of the 36 startups recognized by the American program Accelerator 100+. That allowed them to expand to other cities in Ecuador. Now the application has 18,000 users and has mapped 1,600 recyclers in 11 locations in the country. In addition to detailing the lives of recyclers like Blanca, they have implemented a program that allows them to trace the path of waste and sell this information to companies that need indicators on environmental responsibility. This idea has also led them to the Dominican Republic and Peru. In the first country they are running a pilot project with a brewery that wants to know precisely how many glass bottles are recovered through neighborhood stores.
Goal: a fixed salary
“Recyclers do the homework for citizens who do not separate waste, for businesses that do not inform about the products they sell, for industries that produce containers and packaging and that do not assume any responsibility for contamination,” says Federico Parra, specialist in Social and Solidarity Economy for Latin America WIEGO (a global research network to improve the conditions of workers in the informal economy). “But, above all, the recyclers do the homework for the Government, since they manage a significant percentage of waste that would otherwise end up reducing the useful life of sanitary landfills or open-air dumps.”
In Latin America and the Caribbean, 231 million tons of Municipal Solid Waste are generated per year. This is equivalent to 0.99 kilos per person per day, according to figures from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which estimates that only 5% of this waste is recycled. The institution estimates that in the region there are two million people who work in the collection and classification of recyclable material, responsible for up to 50% of the recovery of recycled material.
Lucía Fernández, general secretary of the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, which brings together half a million workers from 34 countries, says that they have been working for 20 years to make the group visible. “Recyclers are the ones who have been cleaning up the mess for the big companies, and although these workers have already been established internationally, at climate change conferences and other forums, there is still work,” she says.
We have to know the schedules and routes of the garbage trucks to be able to go faster, put our hand in the garbage and take out what we need very quickly
White, recycler
The Reciveci app has also helped the Pulupa Analuisa family legalize their recyclers association two years ago. They called it Smile, and their dream is that one day they get paid to take out of the garbage everything that can have a second life. At the moment they have to compete for the garbage on the streets with other recyclers, Ecuadorians and foreigners, a large part of them Venezuelans, who also seek to survive by selling it. Plastic bottles are the most precious, because for about 30 bottles (one kilo) you pay 50 or 60 cents (0.46 to 0.55 euros). “Sometimes our already classified garbage is stolen, it’s a problem, that’s why we go with our husbands or pay the driver of the truck a little more to help us keep an eye on it,” says the recycler. In addition, they have to be faster than the municipal collection services, which start to do their work when night falls. “We have to know the schedules and routes of the garbage trucks to get what we need very quickly,” she explains.
Reciveci has also managed to establish charging for users who want an exclusive collection service, that is, at a certain time and frequency. Some residential complexes and companies have subscribed to this premium service and the recyclers who attend it earn 2.5 dollars per hour (approximately 2.29 euros). It is not much and it does not happen that often, but it is the first time that these women and their families have received a fixed salary for their work.
“Pigs, garbage eater”
The application is part of a much larger process that began at the International Meeting of Trade Recyclers organized in Colombia in 2008. From there the National Network of Waste Pickers of Ecuador (Renarec), with eight initial associations. Renarec’s goal is to take the same steps that their peers in Bogotá have taken, who are already paid for their work. He Zero Waste program, created during the mayoralty of Gustavo Petro (2012-2015), allowed recyclers to participate in the tender for the city’s cleaning service. In the region, apart from Colombia, only Brazil has made significant progress in recognizing and remunerating recyclers.
In Ecuador, for now, the greatest achievement of the waste pickers’ organization is having shed the shame that impregnated their work. “Before they called us all over the place. They called us pigs garbage eater, they thought we were some alcoholics who scavenged and were very ashamed. Even our relatives discriminated against us and asked us why we were not looking for a decent job”, explains Elvia Pisuña, current president of Renarec.
Elvia, her husband, her daughter and her sister are part of the Quitumbe association, the name of the neighborhood where they live in Quito. This 52-year-old woman started scavenging in landfills at the age of 14. “Our grandparents were the ones who started looking in the trash for something that would work for them,” she recalls.
First they worked in the ravines to the south of the city, where garbage was dumped, but in the year 2000 they were rehabilitated and the recyclers moved to other areas. Currently, the twenty members of Quitumbe collect other more valued materials, such as scrap metal, and their earnings at the end of the month, after paying for transportation and the rent for the place where they store the classified garbage, ranges between 200 and 250 dollars ( 183 and 229 euros) per person. “Now we want to fight for a payment for the service we provide,” concludes the recycler.
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