This regional report is the product of the joint efforts of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Inter-American Association of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering (AIDIS). The report assesses solid waste management in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in the year 2010, and is the result of a year-long research and information analysis project supported by governmental agencies, NGOs, and universities from several countries of the region.
Environmental awareness and social mobilization is a growing issue in Latin America. This book discusses how co-operative 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, it uncovers the landscapes of despair populated by the urban marginalized, but also the landscapes of hope, where solidarity and collaboration make a pathway to a better way of life.
The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly impacted Latin America, the continent with the highest number of cases and Covid-related deaths. Strict confinement conditions at the beginning of the pandemic put to a halt recycling activities and augmented the consumption of plastic as a barrier to stop the spread of the virus. In Latin America the lack of data to understand the waste management dynamics difficult the adjustment of waste management strategies to cope with the Covid-19. As a novel contribution to the waste management data gap for Latin America, this study uses a virtual and participatory methodology that collects and generates information on household solid waste generation and composition. We present the results obtained between June and November 2021 in six countries in the Latin America region, with a total of 503 participants. Participants indicated that the pandemic motivated them to initiate or increase waste reduction (41%), waste separation (40%) and waste recovery (33%) activities. 43% of participants perceived and increase on their total volume of waste; however, the quantitative data showed a decrease on household waste generation in Peru (-31%), Honduras (-25%) and Venezuela (-82%). No changes in waste composition were observed. Despite the limited sample size, this data provides a much-needed approximation of household waste generation and composition in a pandemic situation during 2021.
