The Waste Picker Tour of Medellin

Parag Gupta
Founder, Waste Ventures

This is a blog host by John Engler, one of our four Summer Fellows who have been supporting Waste Ventures throughout the summer of 2011. For an introduction of him as well as the other fellows, see our company blog.

The first co-op we visited is called CampoSanto, or Sacred Field. It was founded by a group of men with an amazing and terrible life story: orphaned as children by a tremendous landslide that killed 500 people, they grew up in under-funded state institutions until they were forced to enlist in paramilitary groups as teenagers. They fought in Colombia’s civil war for several years until they were demobilized in the early 2000′s and decided that they wanted to do something positive with their lives for people and planet. They founded the cooperative on the site of an old garbage dump that they reclaimed, planting flower gardens and building colorful sculptures where the fetid trash was once piled. They taught the community about the importance of protecting the environment, responsible waste management, and how to separate the waste stream. They began to collect the recycling door-to-door, and have started a pilot composting project. They make very little money from their business, but are committed to their ecological and social mission.

We then passed over to visit another waste picker group, CorAmbiente. Founded by ex-gang members with the purpose to reintegrate themselves socially and economically into their community, this group is providing door-to-door collection of recycling to 5000 residences in their barrio. Their charismatic leader is himself an ex-convict, having joined a gang at a very young age and later serving a ten-year sentence for homicide. He now speaks passionately about creating economic alternatives to the street gangs for young people and repaying his debt to his community and to society at large. The coop would like to expand to provide service to12,000 households (collecting ~50 tons of recycling per month that would otherwise go to landfill), but they do not have access to credit to invest in a truck and move to a larger facility, so that plan is currently on hold.

After visiting several more cooperatives, we finished the long day in the municipality of Copacabana, on the outskirts of the metropolitan area of Medellin. There we found the cooperative of RECICOP, a group of single moms who turned to waste picking when they were widowed by Colombia’s civil war. In the early years the women survived on less than US$1 per day, but their business has grown and they now earn about $8. Despite the tragedy and poverty that has marked their lives, the women received me warmly, telling jokes and stories and buying a round of ice cream cones.

As I reflected upon the day’s visits, I realized the truth of something a government official had told me in my first days in Colombia: that many wastepickers in the country were forced into the informal waste management sector when their lives were disrupted by violence and war. Thus, if Waste Ventures is able to bring its model to Colombia, it will not only be helping the poorest of the poor and promoting sane waste management, but will also be supporting the peace process in a war-torn land.