Recycling According to a document titled Informal recycling sector in developing countries, from the World Bank’s Public-Private Partnership in Infrastructure Resource Centre (PPPIRC), about 1% of the urban population or 15 million people from developing countries make a living “salvaging recyclables from waste”. While the driving factor for this activity is primarily economic, the PPPRIC document says that it also carries with it the potential to generate jobs, alleviate poverty, create savings for municipalities, enhance industrial competitiveness, protect the environment and offer sustainability. To ensure more efficient recycling, three models are adopted to organise waste pickers: microenterprises, cooperatives, and public-private partnerships. Various initiatives to improve the earnings and living conditions of waste pickers are being hatched. Brazil is piloting an initiative to include waste pickers into the MSW systems via cooperatives, as well as taking up a national solid waste policy that recognises waste picking or castadores in the native parlance, as an occupation in the 2001 Brazilian Classification of Occupations. Succeeding laws also allow municipalities to contract waste picking organisations, without the bidding process, to provide selective waste collection services. Waste picking groups worldwide, in Latin America, South Africa, Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe and other regions, are also being recognised by their national policy-makers. Opportunities that would benefit waste pickers continue to open up. An Amsterdam-based group, Reflow, has pitched a recycling initiative of using collected wastes, specifically PET bottles, as 3D printing material. The group explained that initially working with PET bottles enables easier sourcing of materials. At the same time, PET’s chemical composition is more standardised globally than other plastic types like ABS, which may contain recycling contaminants. For a project based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Reflow hires waste pickers to collect PET bottles discarded by the curbside or from designated locations like restaurants, bars and hotels; and to bring them to its facilities.
Reflow collects discarded PET bottles and recycles them into 3D printing material
At the same time, Reflow encourages a sustainable recycling system by producing the filament also in the source country, as well as ploughing 25% of their profits back into waste picker communities. For Mexico’s waste pickers also known as pepenadores, global firm Danone’s water brand in Mexico, Bonafont, co-created a project with local partners Ashoka, a global social entrepreneurs association, and a non-governmental organisation, Mundo Sustentable, to help waste-pickers pick PET bottles from landfills of Mexicali city. This is recycled to rPET and, thus, Bonafont is able to secure its supply of rPET material. It is the first Danone company to have achieved a 100% rPET bottle. With the EUR100 million-Danone Ecosystem Fund, the company is able to make its Mexican value chain more sustainable and efficient. The project also created a new Segregation Centre that also provides life skills training for pepenadores so they recycle better, which means better earning than their average US$219 a month.
Danone's Bonafont engages the help of local pepenadores to secure its supply of rPET
Moreover, Danone adds: “Because the r-PET circulates in a closed loop, its price is much easier to control, meaning a steady income for the waste pickers. Bonafont’s productivity has increased, too, because of the good-quality rPET it receives, and the model has proven replicable, which means that the benefits can be scaled up.” In like manner, Danone has teamed up with Philadelphia-headquartered Nestlé Waters, and California-based startup, Origin Materials to form the NaturALL Bottle Alliance. The partners will develop and launch at commercial scale a PET plastic bottle made from 100% biobased materials. The project uses biomass feedstocks, such as previously used cardboard, sawdust and wood chips, and later on other biomaterials , such as rice hulls, straw and agricultural residue. Danone and Nestlé Waters are providing expertise and teams, as well as funding to help Origin Materials make this technology available to the entire food and beverage industry. According to the alliance’s press statement, this next-generation PET will be as light in weight, transparent, recyclable and protective of the product as today’s PET, while being better for the planet. MARCH / APRIL 2017
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