Recovering Resources - Recycling Citizenship

Rapid urban growth induces global environmental change, particularly when it comes to production, consumption and the generation of waste. Cities worldwide produce much more garbage and other waste than they can manage: consequently solid waste is transported over long distances, transferred to other regions or simply not collected at all. In most South American cities, 20-50 percent of household waste is not collected. This growing mass of waste has direct impacts on human well being, bringing about serious threats to health but also land use conflicts as governments decide on new locations for sanitary landfills or incinerators often beside poor neighbourhoods.Environmental awareness and social mobilisation is a growing issue in Latin America. This book discusses how cooperative recycling practices have been increasingly used as a strategy to contest both the waste problem and urban poverty. Selective waste collection and sorting materials out of the garbage stream has become a widespread survival strategy for the economically excluded population. While severe and chronic occupational health problems and risks are very common among the recycling workers, thousands of people exclusively depend on accessing these resources.By examining experiences from Brazil and other Latin American countries, this book questions what can be done to improve the environment and livelihoods for these excluded citizens, examines the specific health and risk implications and looks at the many innovative recycling co-ops and associations which have recently emerged, creating an exciting new form of solidarity economy. In doing so, on the one hand, it uncovers the landscapes of despair populated by the urban marginalized, while on the other hand, the landscapes of hope, where solidarity and collaboration make a pathway to a better way of life.