Here’s a lovely recycling story from all the way over in Brazil, sent to us by Tom.

In 1971, Jaime Lerner became mayor of Curitiba, the capital of the southeastern state of Brazil. He was by profession an architect. Quite typical for the region, the urban population had mushroomed from 120,000 people in 1942 to over a million when Jaime became mayor. By 1997, the population had reached 2.3 million. Again, quite typically, the majority of these people lived in “favelas,” the shanty towns made out of cardboard and corrugated metal.

One of Jaime Lerner’s first big headaches was garbage. The town garbage collection trucks could not even get into the favelas because there were no streets suitable for them. As a consequence, the garbage just piled up, rodents got into it and all kinds of diseases broke out. A mountain sized mess!

Because they did not have the money to apply “normal” solutions, such as bulldozing the area to build streets, Lerner’s team invented another way. Large metallic bins were placed on the streets at the edge of the favelas. The bins had big labels on them which said: glass, paper, plastics, biodegradable material and so on. They were also color coded for those who couldn’t read. Anyone who brought down a garbage bag full of presorted garbage was given a bus token. For the biodegradable materials they were given a plastic chit exchangeable for a food parcel of seasonal fresh fruit and vegetables. A school-based garbage collection program also supplied the poorer students with notebooks. Soon the neighborhoods were picked clean by tens of thousands of kids, who learned quickly to distinguish even different types of plastic. The parents use the tokens to take the bus downtown, where the jobs are.”

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