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Community orchard in Ribeirão, a neighbourhood in Florianopolis, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. There are more than 150 such orchards in the city, which serve as a final destination for the compost produced from their organic waste. Credit: Mario Osava / IPSFLORIANOPOLIS, Brazil, Jun 26 (IPS) - Living with her neighbours, getting to know them and chatting with them is what Lucila Neves enjoys most in the community orchard of Portal de Ribeirão, a neighbourhood in the south of Florianopolis, considered the most sustainable of Brazil's 27 state capitals.
The biodegradable packaging entrepreneur chose to live in the capital of the southern state of Santa Catarina, where she came from Ribeirão Preto, 950 kilometres to the north.
She is one of the people who voluntarily take care of the huge variety of vegetables, medicinal plants and fruit trees planted on about 1000 square metres.
The neighbourhood’s residents accepted the planting started 15 months ago, because it cleaned up the area where a private company used to compost organic waste for the municipality, without the necessary care.
Gone are the mice, mosquitoes, cockroaches and the bad smell that had infested the place, said biologist Bruna do Nascimento Koti, a primary school teacher and permanent volunteer in the garden, where she was together with Neves on the day IPS visited the space.
Now the state-owned Capital Improvement Company (Comcap) also makes clean compost there, with organic waste collected by the population in closed plastic buckets distributed by the Florianopolis city government.
In addition to providing inexpensive and healthy vegetables without agrochemicals, the orchard promotes conviviality, with a Thursday tea gathering and sometimes collective cultivation on Saturdays, Koti said.
Bruna do Nascimento Koti is one of the volunteers who tends the garden at Portal de Ribeirão, in the south of the Brazilian city of Florianopolis, where community life is promoted and healthy food is provided to neighbours and volunteer gardeners. Credit: Mario Osava / IPSThe Florianopolis municipality has chosen composting and recycling as the main alternatives for managing the solid waste generated by the city's 537 000 people, to which many tourists and seasonal residents are added during the southern summer.
It is estimated that of the 700 tonnes of daily waste, 43% is dry recyclable waste and 35% organic waste, the use of which is to be increased in order to reduce the proportion of waste destined for landfill. There is 22% of non-recyclable waste left over.
Currently only 13% of the total is recycled, while the remaining 87% goes to the landfill in the neighbouring municipality of Biguaçu, 45 kilometres from Florianopolis, which receives waste from 23 cities, Karina de Souza, director of solid waste at the Florianopolis Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development, told IPS.
But official statistics point to significant progress. Food waste used in composting increased more than four times, from 1175 tonnes in 2020 to 5126 tonnes in 2024, according to Souza's records.
Green organics, as waste from tree pruning and other vegetation is called, more than doubled during that period. Glass also increased by a factor of 2.5 and materials that arrive mixed and go through separation before recycling almost quadrupled.
The ‘Zero Waste’ programme adopted by the mayor's office in 2018 sets a target of recycling 60% of dry waste and 90% of organic waste by 2030, a goal that seems far off.
Waste already separated for recycling, in this case glass. Tyres, plastics and cardboard are other materials collected for recycling at the Waste Recovery Centre near the city centre of Florianopolis in southern Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPSWaste has value
The Comcap Waste Recovery Centre, located in the Itacorubi neighbourhood, near the city centre and next to the Botanical Garden, is at the heart of the municipal policy to solve the waste challenge.
It concentrates the city's large composting yard, a central facility for separating recyclable waste and another for transferring disposable waste and compacting it into larger trucks for transport to the landfill.
It also includes a Waste Museum, especially for environmental education, and an ecopoint where residents deposit their recyclable waste, such as wood, electronics, paper, plastics and glass.
There are nine ecopoints distributed throughout the city, which receive around 11 000 tonnes of recyclable waste per year for sorting and handling.
This waste, also collected from other sources, is transferred to warehouses where glass, packaging cartons, corrugated paper, plastics and tyres are collected separately for recycling. But they arrive mixed with rubbish and have to go through human separation and sorting, called triage.
This is the area of the Association of Collectors of Recyclable Material, which, hired by Comcap, separates the waste for the buyers, generally the recycling industry.
Of the 75 members, about 40% are immigrants, mostly Venezuelans, but also Peruvians, Haitians and Colombians, according to Volmir dos Santos, the association's president, during IPS' visit to the facility.
Founded in 1999, the group was initially made up of street waste collectors. With the advance of municipal management, selective collection in residences, industries and commerce, in addition to the ecopoints, they became ‘triadores’, those who separate, classify and sell the waste ready for recycling.
“We suffered prejudice, discrimination and shame, now we gain respect,” Dos Santos celebrated.
Two young Venezuelans who immigrated to Brazil and found employment at the Waste Valorisation Centre in Florianopolis. Haitian and Peruvian migrants also work at the facility. Credit: Mario Osava / IPSNo incineration of waste
But the broad movement of recycling workers, from various associations and cooperatives, seeks to influence municipal plans. It opposes, for example, the burning of non-recyclable waste for energy generation, an alternative that is growing among industrial countries.
There are at least 3035 solid waste combustion plants in the world, known as Waste-to-Energy, said Yuri Schmitke, president of the Brazilian Association of Energy from Waste (Abren), which brings together 28 companies in the sector.
It is the way to achieve the goal of ‘zero waste’ or the elimination of landfills, since recycling has limits –there is always a percentage that cannot be reused and incineration replaces fossil fuels, he argued.
Countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Nordic European nations have managed to use 100% of their waste, he said, by eliminating these landfills or final solid waste deposits.
Restrictions and allegations of environmental and even sanitary damage have been dispelled in several European countries, Japan and Korea, with the implementation of these plants even in central parts of large cities, without such negative effects, he pointed out.
Paris already has three of them in its so-called extended city centre, where the population density reaches 15 000 people per square kilometre, he said.
“Incineration puts an end to the cycle, it excludes recycling definitively, and Brazil is very different from Europe, it has already had failed experiences,” countered Dorival Rodrigues dos Santos, president of the Federation of Associations and Cooperatives of Waste Pickers of Santa Catarina, which claims to represent 28,000 workers.
It calls for a broad debate between technicians and collectors on the subject, given that this alternative is beginning to gain followers in Brazil. The municipality of Joinville, with 616 000 inhabitants and 170 kilometres from Florianopolis, has plans to install a plant to generate electricity by burning waste.
Florianopolis is looking to send non-recyclable waste to the cement industry, which is interested in using it as fuel instead of fossil fuels, said De Souza, Florianopolis' director of solid waste.
Aparecida Napoleão leads a waste collection movement in her building, an example of the benefits of separating and recycling different materials in the southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis. Credit: Mario Osava / IPSRecycling first
“We defend the primacy of recycling over incineration. The goal is to improve recycling, we have not exhausted the advances,” according to Karolina Zimmermann, the engineer who works with the collectors.
Progress in recycling depends not only on new technologies, such as those that separate mixed or even melted materials, dyes and chemical elements in plastics or paperboard. The environmental education of consumers in order to separate waste is key to increase reuse.
Aparecida Napoleão is an example of how recycling monitoring has taken hold. In her building of 126 luxury flats, she spearheads a movement to separate all waste, from the small glass containers she sends to artisanal jelly producers to special papers that can be turned into notebooks, plastics and even bottle caps.
A retired social worker from the Florianopolis municipality, she has organised a chain of shelves and bins on the ground floor of the building for dozens of different types of materials. She tries to guide her neighbours, but recognises that even so, there are always those who put rubbish in the wrong place.
“It's a lot of work, you have to be patient, explain, ask repeatedly until they understand the importance of separation,” she says.
© Inter Press Service (2025) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service
