Waste Pickers - Why Can't They Be More Productive

4. WASTE PICKERS: WHY CAN'T THEY BE MORE PRODUCTIVE? 4.1 Waste Pickers' Struggle in Capturing Value Added Although the cooperative business model improves their life and working conditions, waste pickers face a number of problems that membership‐based organizations cannot fully solve. As mentioned above, waste pickers who belong to a cooperative generally enjoy better living and working conditions than those who do not. This is because by working as a group, waste pickers are better able to achieve economies of scale. Since cooperatives can handle much more volume than the individual waste picker and are able to do so more efficiently, they usually enjoy better revenues. Although forming a cooperative is a good first step to move up the value chain, once the cooperative is formed there are additional constraints that limit its productivity. Constraints include problems of social and economic nature. To briefly summarize the constraints alluded to above, because waste pickers are usually poor and work with trash, they are discriminated and prevented from work in certain areas. Waste pickers usually received little or no education, thus they lack basic business management and business administration knowledge needed to run a small enterprise. Because in a cooperative the working capital comes from its members i.e. waste pickers, and given that the latter are generally poor, waste cooperatives operate with very little working capital. Not only do they work with limited capital but, given their poverty they also do not have access to credit. Poverty traps waste pickers in a vicious cycle from which is extremely hard to break free without external help. Waste pickers undergo exploitation from the recycling supply chain actors they are directly in contact with. Because waste pickers represent the base layer of the supply chain pyramid and rely on intermediaries to market their materials, they only capture a minimal part of the value added. As if that was not enough, municipal and national laws play a great role in empowering or dis‐ empowering waste pickers. Often laws depict waste picking as an illegal activity or deny waste 18 pickers access to waste. Even if waste pickers are recognized, they are excluded from the formal system because some high‐tech solution is preferred. Each of these constraints is discussed in more detail below. 4.2 Challenges Faced by Waste Pickers' as a Consequence of Poverty Because waste pickers are poor, they live in isolated and under‐served shelters, close to the work site. Working conditions are not much better than living conditions; scavenging is a very strenuous and risky job. The lack of any sort of state‐sponsored health and welfare protection schemes makes waste workers even more vulnerable to illnesses and diseases. Many waste pickers live on or nearby dump sites with the rest of their family. It is common practice that children and the elderly engage in waste picking (WIEGO 2012c). By working and thus not receiving an education, children reduce their possibility of breaking the poverty cycle. When working, waste pickers face several obstacles that hinder any type of lifestyle and productivity improvement. Scavenging is a dangerous job, where the constant risk of injuries, illnesses and harassment is elevated (Ruiz, et al. 2009). Ann Scheinberg (2011) provides a concise description of the working conditions of many waste pickers: “They face injuries from dogs, rats, and other vectors, combined with chemical and biological health risks due to contact with toxic substances, health care wastes, fecal matter, body parts, used syringes and other materials in the waste stream. In the best of situations, pickers report ergonomic problems due to the physically taxing nature of the work, and psychological and social disadvantages stemming from their low social status” (p. 49). Given the difficulties generated by their way of life, the fact that “workers in the informal sector do not enjoy the measures of protection afforded by the formal modern sector in terms of job security, decent working conditions, and old‐age pensions” complicates further waste pickers' life (Todaro and Smith 2010). Lack of pensions and health insurance affects waste pickers' decisions that 19 ultimately also affect productivity. Physical debilitation, lack of education and family responsibilities prevent workers from achieving all that they might. Waste pickers recognize the importance of welfare policies to the point that at the first Workshop for Waste Pickers, “health, social protection and well‐being” ranked at the top priorities to attain (WIEGO 2012a). In theory, much higher incomes via a stronger position in the market could solve many of these problems by enabling waste pickers to buy better housing and health care. In practice, waste pickers need both more market support and social services from the state. One encouraging development came in Brazil, where, after decades of struggles, then‐President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, approved and implemented laws that financed waste cooperatives, low‐income housing and education for members and their families (WIEGO 2012b). 4.3 Organizational Challenges The process of organizing workers is a slow one and brings many challenges (WIEGO 2012b). The process of building and sustaining these organizations is just as difficult (WIEGO 2012c). Common obstacles concern issues of internal democracy, leadership and organizational management (WIEGO 2012c). Once waste pickers establish a membership‐based organization (MBO) such as a cooperative, they need to ensure that it achieves its goals. Ideally, the process has to be participative and democratic, although realistically many cooperatives go down a winding path before they can become a sound and sustainable organization (WIEGO 2012c). Young cooperatives face a number of obstacles: free‐rider problems, leadership issues, transparency issues, lack of basic business and management skills. This is why for any cooperative in operation, continuous education of its members is fundamental (FAO 2008). With little formal education, members are often unable to resolve problems on their own, whether these involve bookkeeping, negotiation or using electronic machinery. An on‐going communication and education 20 program is critical to keeping members involved and committed to the coop (FAO 2008). The goal of continuous education and communication is to keep members active and motivated in cooperative work. “The need for external support becomes clear” (CWG 2003, 14). For example, in Mesquita, Brazil, women pioneers of the cooperative Coopcarmo received external help from Belgian and German NGOs, which trained them to build management capacity and environmental sustainability. Thanks to the qualitative resources provided by the NGOs, Coopcarmo was able to legally register as a waste cooperative and to gain official status. In addition, the NGOs supported efforts to improve the cooperative recycling and sorting processes for the following eight years (WIEGO 2009). 4.4 Challenges Faced by Waste Pickers as a Collective: Lack of Technology and Capital The biggest obstacle in sustaining a cooperative is the lack of financial resources to expand the scope of waste cooperatives' business, i.e. adding value to the materials processed (WIEGO 2012c). Barriers to capital and technology lower the productivity and income of the informal sector (Todaro and Smith 2010). Traditionally, members of cooperatives must provide the capital, which is a challenge for those who have limited capital such as scavengers (A.Zeuli and Cropp n.d.). Financial credit is also unfeasible since the poor or unregistered business do not have the credentials to apply for loans (AVINA 2008). Adding value to recyclables comes from collecting, washing, sorting and re‐selling materials. In order to do that with a large volume of materials, more mechanization is needed. Examples of assets that would expand the scope of waste pickers' business are warehouses, machinery (shredder and compactor, conveyor belts, scales) and collection vehicles. Once those needs are satisfied, financial resources can be used to make investments in other fields relevant to the cooperative community, such as starting a school, garden or a greenhouse. 21 Machinery allows waste collection cooperatives to reach economies of scale and therefore increase productivity and value‐added. Often, not only is machinery lacking but so is adequate space to handle processing (WIEGO 2012b). Other times, the equipment is there but it is in bad shape. At ASMARE, a waste collector cooperative located in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, aged equipment that is falling apart affects productivity. Assessing the situation, an NGO staff member working with ASMARE noted that “productivity means everything, as what they make depends on what they sell” (WIEGO 2012b). 4.5 Waste Pickers Lie at the Bottom of the Recycling Supply Chain The recycling network is described as a pyramid where waste pickers constitute the bottom layer (AVINA 2008) (Oscar Fergutz 2011) (Wilson, Velis and Cheeseman 2006). At the top of the pyramid there are a handful of recycling companies that are connected directly with intermediaries. These can be formal companies who work with “vast networks of agents, including small middlemen, yard owners and large cartels associated with contractors” (Oscar Fergutz 2011, 602). Finally, at the bottom layer, there are waste pickers, who feed the entire supply chain with recyclable materials (AVINA 2008). Waste pickers have to rely on the middleman in order to reach the top of the pyramid because recycling companies are located geographically in remote areas that prevent direct market access by waste cooperatives (Oscar Fergutz 2011). Waste pickers lament exploitation by intermediaries; the latter impose harsh conditions on waste pickers because they are in a position to do so. Middlemen pay very low prices for the materials, and sometimes they pay with goods instead of money; others threaten to lower the price to force waste pickers to improve the quality of the material (WIEGO 2012b). Evidence shows that middlemen pay waste pickers far less than formal businesses for the same type of goods, as much as two‐thirds less than the formal sector receives. In addition there 22 seems to be a perverse solidarity between intermediaries, who capture the majority of the surplus generated. Out of the acquired value, waste pickers receive as little as 10% (Oscar Fergutz 2011). According to Fergutz (2008), the structure is the “result of recycling companies favoring suppliers with the capability to deliver, on a regular basis, adequate volumes of clean, pressed and bundled materials” (p.603). Generally speaking “the higher a secondary raw material is traded, the greater the added value it possesses. Informal recyclers tend to occupy, and are restricted to, the base of the secondary materials trade hierarchy and this significantly reduces their potential income” (Wilson, Velis and Cheeseman 2006, 800). Although cooperatives have more bargaining power than individual waste pickers, most cooperatives remain small players in this global market. Thus the challenge of raising cooperative income remains. 4.6 The Municipality: Ally or Enemy? The municipality has incredible potential for increasing the waste pickers' productivity (WIEGO 2012b). Waste collector cooperatives benefit the most when the municipality includes the informal sector in the city's solid waste management and offers support (WIEGO 2012b). In certain areas in Brazil, waste pickers “have developed formal agreements with cities and towns, establishing themselves as the official providers of recycling services in hundreds of municipalities” (WIEGO 2012b, 5). Being the official providers of recycling services implies that the municipality compensates waste cooperatives for the services provided, just as it would with a private waste company (Dias 2012). In other words, in these cases waste cooperatives’ revenue does not rely solely on the volume of material sold; it also counts on the wage paid by the municipality. A successful partnership is the one established between the waste pickers and city officials of Londrina, Brazil, which reached the highest recycling rates in the country. The implementation of a door‐to‐door collection system increases the quality of materials collected and reduces the waste 23 that is collected but cannot be recycled. Moreover, the collection at its source reinforces the bond between waste pickers and the community (Oscar Fergutz 2011). Unfortunately, very often either the municipality offers inconsistent and ambiguous support or it refuses to assist waste collectors at all (GAIA 2012). In Mexico, many municipalities have hostile relationships towards waste pickers, where waste picking has been repressed and declared illegal (Medina 2005). In some cases local authorities refuse to cooperate with the informal sector because “separation of recyclable items from mixed waste in the street, and the storage of separated items, can result in scattered waste and the untidy appearance of streets and open spaces” (Wilson, Velis and Cheeseman 2006). In other cases, given the tension created by numerous actors operating in the same business, cooperatives themselves do not coordinate demands on the government and do not develop joint projects (GAIA 2012). Government workers also often oppose the use of labor which neither adheres to minimum wage laws nor pays taxes. Moreover, when integration of the informal sector in solid waste management occurs, it occurs to various degrees and it normally fills small niches that neither the municipality nor the private sector occupies (CWG 2003). For example, the waste picker cooperatives are assigned to locations where narrow streets impede waste collection with municipal trucks. In La Pintana, Chile, the municipality promotes the work of waste collectors by encouraging citizens to donate recyclables to informal workers (GAIA 2012). Despite these efforts, the municipality has also blocked efforts by waste collectors to organize. In Guatemala, solid waste management innovation projects have been repeatedly shelved or abandoned when, during local elections, all authorities are replaced regardless their involvement in politics (Marshall and Farahbakhsh 2013). In Buenos Aires, the government treats cooperatives unequally, supporting some more than others (GAIA 2012). Even where supportive legislation is passed, laws are not necessarily implemented. For example, a truck that the municipality of Buenos Aires formally promised the cooperative Del Oeste via several agreements never arrived (GAIA 2012). 24 4.7 The Government: Ally or Enemy? The national government has the power to emit legal mandates to facilitate or obstruct the inclusion of waste pickers (WIEGO 2012b). The areas where the government should intervene are laws guaranteeing access to waste for waste pickers and social services for waste pickers. Promising examples of legislation and policies that favor the empowerment of waste pickers have taken place in Peru, Brazil and Colombia. In Peru, waste picking is regulated by law 29.419, a law passed in 2009 developed in collaboration with representatives of the movements of waste pickers. Brazil passed in 2010 the National Solid Waste Policy that recognizes waste pickers cooperatives as service providers and as a result “institutes a number of mechanisms to support cooperatives and municipalities that integrate informal waste workers into solid waste systems” (Dias, 2012). In Colombia, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of waste pickers “by granting them customary rights to access, sort and recycle reclaimable materials” (Dias, 2012). In a recent case, CiViSOL, a foundation that works to amend the cultural and legal norms of state and society, intervened before the Constitutional Court of Colombia on behalf of the waste‐pickers of the Navarro dump of Cali. In April 2009, the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled in favour of the wastepickers, guaranteeing their customary rights to access, sort and recycle waste and their legitimacy to compete in the waste recycling business. The court recognized the importance of waste‐pickers, granted them full protection, and recognized their environmental contribution” (UN‐HABITAT 2010, 162). Although these countries witnessed the approval of legislation empowering waste pickers, it is fundamental that these laws are implemented and respected at all policy levels. Nonetheless, many countries do not recognize waste picking as a job and have laws banning the activity and thus denying waste pickers access to waste. In Argentina, waste picking became legal only in 2002, after the economic crash of 2001 vastly increased the number of people relying on waste to as many as 100,000 (GAIA 2012). Many governments still do not have appropriate legal frameworks to address all aspects of 25 waste management services, let alone laws to address pickers' needs. For example, Nicaragua and Mexico lack legislation protecting waste pickers' rights. As a result a few hundred waste pickers living in the capital municipal landfill have protested against the replacement of the dump site with a recycling plant. Nicaraguan waste pickers of La Chureca (the municipal landfill) demanded to be considered stakeholders and take part to the decision‐making process. Similar demands were made by waste pickers of Bordo Poniente, the biggest municipal landfill of Mexico City, which will be replaced with a capital‐intensive project, featuring a power plant designed by a consortium of European waste management companies (REDLACRE 2012). Moreover, waste pickers are concerned with political corruption. They recognize that corruption occurs at all government levels and it is an additional cause for lower productivity (Marshall and Farahbakhsh 2013). Generally, corruption negatively affects the economic growth, twists the political system, weakens administration, and undermines the interests and welfare of the community (Marshall and Farahbakhsh 2013). Waste collectors feel crushed by corruption when they have to pay bribes in order to access waste or waste is stripped of its most valuable components, even in countries where they have legal access to waste. Another example of corruption occurs when the government appoints private companies in charge of the waste sector in exchange for financial or social capital (WIEGO 2012b). 4.8. Why Can't Waste Pickers Be More Productive? Conclusion What hinders progress among cooperatives? To recap, a variety of factors constrain productivity growth in waste picking cooperatives, including the skills of members, their difficulties in accessing credit and equipment, barriers put up by municipalities, and the legal policies of national institutions. The significance of these factors varies from cooperative to cooperative as the following cases of Green Grease and Luz del Futuro demonstrate. 26 5. CASES1 5.1 Green Grease: Waste Vegetable Oil Recycling in Brazil Over the spring and summer 2012 I worked for the Green Grease project and to this day I am still involved, although to a lesser extent. Green Grease is a project started in 2009 by MIT students that targets waste pickers of the Saó Paulo periphery in Brazil who collect Waste Vegetable Oil (VWO). The project was born of two ambitions: to decrease water pollution from WVO contamination and to create a valuable use of oil for waste pickers. In Brazil, fried food has gained considerable popularity with a consequent increase in use of vegetable cooking oil (ICLEI 2009). A liter of oil can pollute up to 25,000 liters of water, causing significant environmental damage to waterways (ICLEI 2009). At the same time waste pickers consider waste oil a great resource because it potentially offers high value for little space and does not need to be sorted. Nonetheless the value of unfiltered WVO is low. In 2011, a Green Grease team designed and built a filtration system that eliminates food residues and water from WVO, thus adding value to the oil. In the very early stages of the project, the filtration system was piloted at one cooperative, where filtered WVO was used as fuel for the trucks of the cooperative. With time, the engine that MIT students converted to run on filtered WVO broke permanently, so waste pickers decided instead to sell the filtered oil to intermediaries for further processing. At the end of the chain the oil is transformed into biodiesel fuel. The sale of filtered WVO increases the income of waste pickers, which in turn creates incentives to divert more cooking oil from the waste stream. In the summer of 2012, I spent three weeks working with six cooperatives (COURES, CORA, CRUMA, COOPERALTO, COOPRECICLAVEL, ARES) at the periphery of Saó Paulo and installed filtration systems for seven local cooperatives. I had the chance to see what a waste cooperatives look like, 1 The content of this chapter reflects notes taken during fieldwork in July 2012 in Brazil, and in January 2013 in Nicaragua. 27 and I was able to discuss their management and administration with presidents of the cooperatives. The information was used to better understand the operations with the purpose of steering MIT's Green Grease project in new directions to better support the cooperatives. In addition to installing the filtration system, the team had two other objectives. The first was to collect useful information on the cooperatives and their partners to evaluate the possibility of a public awareness campaign to increase the visibility of the work of waste pickers and to attract more recyclables as well as waste oil. The second was to test the idea of building a network of cooperatives that would sell WVO together, replicating a model that is currently used to sell paper. If we obtained some useful information for the public awareness campaign, the idea of building an oil network failed immediately due to political friction between some cooperatives and the local labor union. 5.1.1. What Is Like to Work in a Cooperative Located Outside of Saó Paulo? In Brazil, the cooperatives I visited are well‐established. They can count on a relatively strong internal organization, working space, machinery, and trucks, as well as support from local and non‐ governmental entities. Some cooperatives are located in Saó Paulo while others are located in the Saó Paulo metropolitan area. The six cooperatives I visited include between 20 and 80 permanent members, with a variable number of workers who join temporarily. All cooperatives have established rules on how to run the cooperative, which are enforced by the elected board of directors. Meetings to make decisions and distribute wages are held regularly. Cooperatives engage with three main stakeholders: the households, the buyers and the local municipality. Some cooperatives are part of the National Movement of Brazilian Waste Pickers, with whom they closely interact. Other cooperatives prefer to be independent and not to be affiliated with any movement. Cooperatives, thanks to an agreement with the municipality, collect recyclables 28 from households and sell them to buyers. Financial resources come from the municipality itself, development banks or corporations like Petrobras, the seventh‐biggest energy company in the world. Cooperatives of Saó Paulo sell materials to different buyers. Although every material has its own supply chain, cooperatives mainly sell to the highest‐bidding intermediary. Some cooperatives are in contact with a large pool of potential buyers, which is beneficial in case of friction with one or more buyer. Other cooperatives do not have the option of ending the relationship with their buyers because they rely on very few of them. All cooperatives have big, open warehouses where they conduct their daily operations. Space inside warehouses is separated into zones: One zone is where trucks unload unsorted trash; another one hosts the conveyor belt where workers sort the trash and put it into big containers; another zone dedicated to storage of loose recyclables provides further subdivisions according to the material. There is also a zone where the machinery is kept, and another where the compacted recyclables sit waiting to be sold. Usually warehouses also have a couple of offices, a small kitchen, lavatories and showers. With regard to assets, these Brazilian cooperatives typically have a couple of compactors, a shredder, a conveyer belt and multiple trucks that are used for door‐to‐door collection. With regard to materials, these cooperatives collect and sell many recyclables: paper, cardboard, many types of plastic, Styrofoam, tetrapak, vegetable oil, metals, plastic bags and glass. Brazilian cooperatives usually enjoy the support of the municipality and the local labor union. The municipality helps in a variety of ways, often by paying for rent or utilities, paying for the fuel for trucks, or providing the work space. The extent of support varies across municipalities and cooperatives. The local labor union is called Rede Catasampa and functions as the local Saó Paulo chapter of Movimiento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Reciclaveis (MNCR), the Brazilian national union of catadores. The chapter, established in 2006, is comprised of fifteen recycling cooperatives and associations. The chapter's main objective is to improve the livelihoods of 29 catadores by implementing strategies that ultimately increase the revenue from recyclables and by training catadores on sustainable business practices. Additional support comes from the local development banks or NGOs. An important point is that certain cooperatives receive, from both the municipality and Rede Catasampa, more help than others due to political corruption. In contrast to low standards of living among many Latin American waste pickers, some Brazilian cooperative members own cars and almost all of them own cellphones. They all wear uniforms at work and some of them use safety measures such as gloves. However they still survive outside the mainstream of Saó Paulo's increasing affluent lifestyle: children lack schools, housing is inadequate and most are relatively poor. 5.1.2 The Successful Campaign of Cata Oleo One of the main goals for the trip was to scope out the possibility of designing and planning a public‐awareness campaign for waste cooperatives collecting oil. The purpose of the campaign was to increase the visibility of waste cooperatives as well as to increase WVO donations. Our model was Cata Oleo, a successful public awareness campaign implemented by CORA, the waste cooperative in the city of Arujá. CORA's campaign was launched in 2010 with the support of the Environmental Secretary of the municipality, and targeted schools. Essentially, the campaign targeted schools and used children as a way to spread awareness of oil collection to their families. Thirty‐six schools became collection points where school children would bring WVO from home. Thanks to Cata Oleo CORA’s WVO collection doubled, from 800 liters to around 1600. Because it was very successful and WVO collection increased so much, the Cata Oleo campaign was featured in the local media. One factor in particular contributed to the success of the campaign: the partnership with the municipality. Thanks to the local municipality, the cooperative received technical support such as graphics, designs, prints and materials. This partnership also opened school doors to CORA to 30 engage directly with local students. This enabled the cooperative to lecture children about the importance of recycling WVO. In 2010, besides the public awareness campaign, the first MIT‐designed filtration system was also piloted at CORA. The cooperative used to receive between 30 and 50 cents of Reais per liter of unfiltered oil but with the new technology, they were able to negotiate as much as 90 cents of Reais per liter of filtered oil. Thanks to the positive combination of the public awareness campaign with the filtration system, oil became 10‐20% of the total income of catadores. 5.1.2.1 Is There the Basis for a Public Awareness Campaign? Despite the positive experience of the Cata Oleo campaign at CORA, it became clear at the beginning that a one‐size‐fit‐all public awareness campaign was not possible to design and implement for four main reasons. First, cooperatives' capacity is limited by space. Second, different cooperatives do not have the same probability of forming successful partnerships with the municipality. Third, cooperatives want to prevent partnerships with third parties such as corporate sponsors if all the visibility will go to the third party. Fourth, a public awareness campaign needs to be mindful of competition. First, I discovered that the single most important inhibitor to cooperatives expansion is the lack of space. At least half of the cooperatives interviewed lamented that operations could not be expanded because of limitation in space. Often materials sit around to wait for the appropriate time to be sold to the highest bidder. For example, it is better to sell the paper around Christmas time because of the high demand (and high price) for gift wrapping. The cooperative COOPERALTO implemented a public awareness campaign to increase collection of various materials but had to stop it because they could not take in any more material. With a bigger space, cooperatives could hire more workers and provide jobs for more people. 31 Second, cooperatives enjoy different degrees of partnership with their respective municipalities. Out of the six cooperatives, one has already partnered with the local government, three have a good probability that the municipality would approve and support an awareness campaign, while the remaining two have a low probability of receiving help from the municipality. For example, COOPRECICLAVEL, the cooperative located in Guarulhos, not only has a good relationship with the municipality but also has a partnership with two hundred public schools. Additionally, it has a partnership with Acai, a private company that treats the city water. Acai donates WVO and other materials to the cooperative. In contrast, others do not have a good relationship with the municipality, thus they receive little support from it, such as CRUMA and COURES. So, these waste cooperatives are excluded from all decision making processes that involve waste and are not recognized as stakeholders in waste matters. The third obstacle to the design of a public awareness campaign is that in the past, on similar occasions when the cooperative partnered with a private company, the latter received all the visibility. For example, the cooperative CRUMA, located in the town of Poá', partnered with Tetra Pak, the Swedish multinational food packaging and processing company, on a campaign where the cooperative distributed Tetra Pak products to the community. The problem was that the products did not contain any sort of information about the cooperative, thus drawing away attention from CRUMA while enhancing the environmental reputation of the multinational company. As a result, CRUMA stated that it will no longer enter partnerships where the partners gain more attention than the cooperative. Similarly, when CORA implemented Cata Oleo, the company Bioauto received advertising in exchange for minor infrastructural help. At CORA, cooperative members felt the exchange was not really fair. 32 Fourth, cooperatives of catadores are not the only party interested in WVO and other recyclables. The market is also crowded with individual catadores working independently on the streets and middleman companies that are interested in collecting the oil to re‐sell it to biodiesel processors or to entities even higher in the oil supply chain. Often middleman companies offer cleaning products to restaurants and businesses in exchange for the oil. Waste picking cooperatives cannot afford to offer any form of compensation in exchange for oil. In a different case of competition, the president of COOPERALTO, the cooperative located in the town of Biritiba‐Mirim, mentioned the fact that a one‐size‐fit‐all campaign would have not worked in his town due to the cultural tradition of the local people using WVO to make soap. He explained that neighbors work together to use oil to make soap and then sell it together. In his mind, a successful campaign to increase WVO collection should focus on the environmental damage caused by soap‐making with WVO, and the health risks for the skin when using WVO‐base soap. This strategy might have aided COOPERALTO, but at the expense of improving another potentially sustainable activity. Because of these four reasons (lack of space, unknown support by the municipality, risk of lack of visibility if third parties are involved, and competition) no agreement was made over a big campaign to be implemented in the towns of the six cooperatives. 5.1.3 The Paper Network The idea to form a network of cooperatives to sell oil together to one buyer was inspired by the current network of cooperatives that sell paper. Selling material together means better prices and increased revenue for the cooperatives. Before forming the network, cooperatives used to sell paper for R$ 0.1/Kg to the middleman. When cooperatives started selling paper together, they received five times the previous price, i.e. R$ 0.5/Kg. Paper coming from all the cooperatives participating in the network is stored at CRUMA 33 before it was sold. This is a temporary solution while the central location is being identified. CRUMA was chosen because it is the single cooperative with the most storage space. The network was formed and supervised by Rede Catasampa, the local labor union. Rede Catasampa would provide the rules and some support to the network in exchange for visibility. Despite the dramatic increase in price, the successful paper network has incurred a few problems. One is a space management and logistical issue. CRUMA intends to sell the paper at higher quality by sorting the paper according to colors and materials. There is insufficient space and funding to purchase the machine that would sort the paper. Another issue is the access to market information for paper. The president of CRUMA, is in charge of the negotiating process to sell the paper and he would like to expand his knowledge regarding additional potential buyers and some more detailed market information regarding the price of paper. Finally, because the paper network is so administratively centralized, only the cooperatives closest to CRUMA participate in the network. The task of bringing paper to CRUMA imposes prohibitively high costs on outlying cooperatives. 5.1.3.1 Is There the Basis to Form a WVO Network? When we presented the idea of a WVO network, similar to the paper network that was already in place, representatives of the cooperatives were not enthusiastic and raised many good points. At first the issues seemed to be exclusively logistical. When it comes to WVO, the quantity varies quite a bit from month to month depending on how much is donated to and/or collected by the cooperatives. The price of WVO not only varies over time as a result of market forces but also varies greatly geographically: Cooperatives located relatively close to one another are offered different prices for the same product (unfiltered oil in this case). This is a result of many variables: volume, negotiating skills, and transportation arrangements (whether WVO is picked up by the buyer or dropped off by the cooperative). 34 How is it possible to form a network if cooperatives collect different quantities of oil? How does the revenue get split? Where should the oil be stored? Is it economically viable to transport the oil to a centralized location instead of having the buyer come and pick it up? Who will be in charge of negotiations? How will transparency in bookkeeping be ensured? Who will the oil be sold to if currently cooperatives have different buyers? Should the oil be used as fuel for the trucks of the cooperatives? They were all good points that needed attention. When the conversation moved to the long‐ term vision of the network, things started falling apart. The stumbling block was the hesitancy towards the participation of Rede Catasampa, the local labor union affiliated with the National Movement of Brazilian Waste Pickers. A few cooperatives agreed to identify the network with the local labor union to commercialize the oil while other cooperatives firmly refused to participate in the network if the labor union became in charge of it. It clearly became a political problem: Some cooperatives believed in the genuine support and work of Rede Catasampa, while other cooperatives challenged its lack of transparency and consistency. Some cooperatives also accused R‐ C of favoring certain cooperatives over others, with monetary compensation and assets donation. Although a WVO network with the six cooperatives did not occur, Green Grease will try to build a WVO network with fewer cooperatives, geographically close. 5.1.4 Outcomes of the Experience Although the plan to create a network was disbanded, during the rest of its time in Saó Paulo, our team visited the six cooperatives and installed filtration systems to those who requested it. During the visits we learned more about the functioning and specific situation of each cooperative; we came across some good and creative practices. For example, many cooperatives set up collection points for WVO as well as for other materials at schools or supermarkets. In other cooperatives, it is now common practice to have 35 trucks play a jingle to invite household residents to bring recyclables outside. Another cooperative collects oil also from the kitchen of fire stations. Another interesting finding is that at the cooperative COOPRECICLAVEL, a change in wage calculation boosted productivity by 40% in two months. Instead of the wages being hourly, as they have been for the past nine years, COOPRECICLAVEL made pay based on how much material is processed at the end of the month. Workers are working harder and an evaluation made two months after the policy change showed the significant improvement in productivity. The hope of catadores is to increase collection of materials, especially WVO. One day they hope to have enough volume to skip the middleman and sell directly to the processing companies. In other words they would like to be more productive in order to move up the value chain. 5.2 Luz del Futuro: Waste pickers in Bluefields in Nicaragua In January 2013, I had the privilege of working with a very young all‐women waste cooperative located in Bluefields, a town on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The purpose of the trip was to assess the situation of the cooperative and to identify key steps to support its development. The original population of the Atlantic Coast is constituted by indigenous people and ethnic communities with multilingual characteristics. A third of the population lives in urban areas while the remaining two thirds lives in rural areas. The rate of illiteracy among the population 10 years old or older is 43%, but it rural areas it increases to 55%, and it is even higher among the female population. In comparison, the illiteracy rate for the whole country of Nicaragua is just 24%. Three fourths of the population of the coast lives in a situation of poverty or extreme poverty (FADCANIC 2013). The plan for the trip was threefold. Our first objective was to assess the situation after a change in the municipal leadership, following the elections of three months before. Our second objective was to raise funds for a public awareness campaign by striking a deal with Blue Energy, a 36 local NGO funded by USAID and other European entities. The third and last goal was to propose and get approval of a door‐to‐door collection system, where women of the cooperative would collect recyclables directly from households instead of from the dump site. The plan was just a piece of the bigger puzzle that in the long‐term will be put together in eastern Nicaragua. The ambitious idea is to design a comprehensive waste recycling management system for three Nicaraguan towns located on the Caribbean Coast, including Bluefields. The single inhibitor to the economic viability of individual towns' waste systems is the disproportionately high cost of shipping out recyclables. All material is currently sent to Managua, the capital of Nicaragua located near the Pacific coast; from Managua materials are sent to recycling plants abroad, even to China. The Inter‐American Development Bank (IDB) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) have recently approved funding to create an alternative waste route that excludes Managua and creates incentives to recycling waste by lowering transportation costs. The cooperative Luz del Futuro was born in January 2012, not without struggles. Nicaragua is the second‐poorest country of the Americas after Haiti, where the main driver of waste management efforts is public health. People pay little or no attention to waste collection despite the presence of a municipal collection system; it is normal to throw garbage on the street or in the sea just as it is normal to burn trash in the backyard. The situation improves slightly in touristy areas. The women of the cooperative Luz del Futuro make their livelihoods by collecting and selling metals and plastic from the municipal sanitary landfill of Bluefields. The cooperative has twenty members and is currently not accepting any more workers because revenues are so low. Most of the members have very little schooling, average three to four years, with the most educated worker having completed middle school. We recognized immediately that the cooperative is not as organized, not as evolved, and lacks the member commitment that is found in the Brazilian cooperatives. As a result, my teammates’ work focused exclusively on the organizational strength and education of the cooperative. However, 37 in the end, we were able to achieve a partnership with Blue Energy for the public awareness campaign and we were also able to expand a partnership with the municipality to pilot a door‐to‐ door collection system in a new neighborhood that currently lacks service, a first necessary step to introduce segregation at the source. 5.2.1 Challenging Living Conditions When working in the field in Nicaragua, I observed close‐up the challenging living and working conditions of women waste pickers in Bluefields. The women, or Las Mujeres as we were urged to call them, live in wooden shacks in a very poor neighborhood at the edge of the town. The main road that winds through the houses and leads to the landfill is not paved and is shared by kids as well as dogs. Very few vehicles venture in this area due to the road conditions, especially when it rains. Even taxis charge a higher fare to make up for the bumpier and longer trip. In this part of town, houses do not have running water and only have open‐air latrines. Few houses have stoves for cooking or purifying water. Moreover, cracks in the wood allow bugs and other small animals to come in. For example, I visited the house of Margarita, the president of the cooperative, a few times. The entrance had no door and people were just coming in and out as they pleased. Besides the armchair where she sat, the common area had wooden chairs and a table. A patch of fabric divided the living room from the bedrooms. The only thing that made it a home was a couple of pictures of the family pinned to the wooden walls. No man was in the picture and, even though all women of the cooperative had children, we never saw men in these homes during the time we spent there. The landfill where the women work is located on a hill a couple of miles from town. The road is too steep of an uphill and the distance is too far for the women to walk there. To go to work they rely on the garbage truck that goes to the landfill twice a day. The fact that women do not have their 38 own independent transportation makes them less productive. They actually complain that the truck is late and does not respect the schedule. Sometimes they miss work because the truck does not come by. 5.2.2 Challenging Working Conditions At a time before the cooperative was formed, women picked trash at a dump located in the middle of their neighborhood. They worked together with children and pigs and the place was also known to be infested with boa constrictors. Since the municipality invested in a sanitary landfill, waste is covered with dirt at the end of every day. This occurred at about the same time the cooperative formed. Upon formation, the cooperative banned children under 18 from the new site. Because the landfill is located at the top of a hill, it has the benefit of a gorgeous view over the forest and some wind that takes away the smell. The women work in the tropical sun, sharing the landfill with birds, dogs and rats. The cooperative operates with little machinery, no safety measures, some support from the municipality and little support from external entities. The women use a long stick with what looks like a hook at the end to take out valuable recyclables from trash. They only collect plastic and metals, including aluminum cans. It is not economically viable to collect and sell other materials such as paper and glass due to low volume and high cost of transportation to Managua, the capital located near the opposite coast of the country. Women pick up recyclables and hand wash plastic bottles without safety equipment. Some women waste pickers refused to process plastic material for fear of cuts and infections, and confined themselves to collecting recyclables with sticks. The collected plastic is loaded onto a truck that is then unloaded in a nearby open space owned by the municipality, to be washed, sorted and compacted. Thanks to an agreement with the municipality, the women in charge of plastic can borrow the compactor from the local government. Because of gender discrimination, women are not allowed to operate the compactor, which is 39 currently operated by a male municipal worker. The municipality can take away the right to use machinery at any time. Women hope one day that the cooperative will own the machinery necessary to process materials. The women sell the plastic to the municipality for a fixed price of three Cordobas –or 12 cents in the US –per kilogram, regardless of the type of plastic. Then the municipality transports the plastic to Managua. The plastic goes first to El Rama by barge and from Rama it is transported in trucks to Managua. A staff member of the municipality personally follows the journey of the plastic to negotiate the final price in Managua. From Managua, the plastic is shipped to China. The revenue received in Managua by the municipality from one kilogram of plastic ranges from 3‐7 Cordobas (12‐30 cents of US$), depending on several factors. If the plastic is thick, it has been washed, the paper label has been removed from bottles, there is no grease and it is not burned, the plastic will sell for the highest price. Otherwise the price is lower depending on the quality of the plastic. Almost all of the revenue received by the municipality from plastic is barely sufficient to cover transportation, staff wages and electricity. Transportation is the greatest cost in the plastic supply chain. An alternative transportation route might be critical to success. The cooperative receives some in‐ kind support from the municipality, through the Ministry of the Environment in the form of transportation and land for storage. It does not receive any other external support. The municipality of Bluefields had never worked with recyclables before and officials explained to us how it is still a learning process to work with the waste cooperative. The municipality recognizes the value the cooperative brings by working with waste: It is hard to work with garbage and they believe it is important to take advantage of women's willingness to work with trash. In November 2012 municipal elections took place in Bluefields and a turnover of leadership occurred. For a while it was uncertain whether the new mayor and vice‐mayor would support the project the same way the previous mayor did. Towards the end of our stay the new leadership 40 granted its collaboration with our project. Nonetheless, at the time of my departure it was still unclear whether the environmental council member was going to be replaced. The council member in charge of environmental services at the time of our visit was very supportive of Luz del Futuro and he has always been a fundamental contact at the municipality. He has followed the cooperative since its unofficial formation and has a good relationship with the president of the cooperative and its members. The environmental council member was one of the first supporters of a deeper integration between the cooperative and the formal sector of waste management. The partnership between the municipality of Bluefields and the women cooperative is about to go one step further. In January 2013, the municipality agreed to identify a neighborhood to pilot a door‐to‐door collection performed by the cooperative. Moreover, the local NGO Blue Energy will fund a public awareness campaign to promote separation of wet and dry waste and to educate the community on how to sort recyclables. This recent agreement has the potential to dramatically improve the environmental services offered by the cooperative and promote a cleaner community. 5.2.3 Issues The women of Luz del Futuro are extremely poor, and most of them need a second job in order to support the family. These women are the breadwinners of the family and from their perspective the greatest accomplishment of the cooperative has been the banning of children from dump site. Being a young cooperative, Luz del Futuro has yet to learn the power of synergy resulting from teamwork. Before they formed the cooperative they worked individually, fighting over every single tin can. Now that they work together the situation is better, although the women still need to learn to work as a team. They are all very grateful to be part of a cooperative and collaborate with the municipality. They recognize the benefit of working together rather than being each other’s 41 competitor. However, they all agree that they make little money and there is a real need to identify new methods to improve their livelihoods. At the official registration of the cooperative, the president of the cooperative received a handbook that contains the fundamental principles and articles of cooperativism and of all stages of the life of a cooperative. Unfortunately that there is only one copy and the fact that the booklet is text‐heavy discouraged its circulation among members. The women of Luz del Futuro lament their lack of administrative and managerial skills. The women would like to collect trash not only in the dumpsite but also from city streets and households. There are also issues about the distribution of wages, the distribution of work, and the monitoring of work. Many women feel that some members work harder than others, or that others consistently miss work. When the male supervisor is present, women work harder than when he is absent. There is inconsistent bookkeeping, ineffectiveness in running meetings and poor communication within the group. The leadership is strongly exercised by the president with little room for power dissemination and transparency. Technically there is supposed to be an executive board but its members either forgot they are a part of it or do not know what power to exercise. Even if long‐term ideas and plans are brought up in meetings, such as the opening of a bank account or starting a greenhouse, the women do not know how to pursue them. 5.2.4 Conclusion My experience in Bluefields gave me a completely different perspective on waste pickers than the one I gained in Brazil. I experienced how building and nurturing a new cooperative is time‐ and energy‐consuming, especially in one of the poorest areas of the Americas. Our work with the cooperative focused heavily on how to run meetings, designing the first logo for the cooperative, and writing the constitution of the cooperative, as well as stating rights and 42 responsibilities of cooperative members, and identifying a good neighborhood to pilot the door‐to‐ door collection. The purpose of these efforts was to strengthen the internal organization of the cooperative and to help identify ways to add value to materials to have a better livelihood. 43