The
closure of Latin
America's biggest rubbish dump in 2012 was widely applauded. But little more than two years on, many of the
rubbish-pickers who worked there are sorry it's gone, and poorer without it. Continue...
More
than 2,000 self-styled "treasure hunters" used to trawl the mountains
of rubbish at Gramacho, a dump overlooked by Rio de Janeiro's iconic Christ the
Redeemer statue.
Sifting
through tonnes of waste, the rubbish-pickers - or catadores - searched for recyclable
materials they could sell, and sometimes they literally struck gold.
One day
Cleonice Bento glimpsed something particularly shiny among the rotten food and plastic bottles.
"I
found a Portuguese gold necklace, sold it and built a two-storey house,"
she recalls. She even had enough money left over to take a holiday from
rubbish-picking for another month.
Geraldo Oliveira, a 63-year-old
known as Brizola, uncovered a treasure trove of a different kind.
Nestled
inside a tube among the rubbish he found $12,000 (£8,000). And then $9,000
(£6,000) more.
"I
was scared," he remembers. "So I got a $100 note, buried the rest,
and went to a money changer to check it was a true note - and it was!
"The
dump was a mother, she provided everything."
Cleonice and Geraldo were
just two of the thousands of catadores who lost their jobs overnight in 2012, when Gramacho dump was closed down in the weeks
before a UN environmental summit in Rio.
The move was welcomed by
environmentalists, politicians and even the majority of the catadores who,
despite the fears about the future, agreed the work was dangerous and inhumane.
Today
the gate to the old landfill is locked. The methane gas produced from 35 years
of waste now supplies green energy to a nearby oil refinery.
The
pickers were not abandoned completely. They received compensation and the
promise of a new recycling facility next to the old site.
The
Polo de Reciclagem de Gramacho is the first of its kind in Brazil, employing
former rubbish-pickers who now work in better conditions with regular hours and
pay.
"We now have a
canteen, a bathroom and a kitchen. We have more comfort and safety," says
62-year-old Cleonice.
But the former catadores earn
only a fraction of what many earned on the dump. Cleonice says she now makes
500 reais (£125, $190) a month, a third of what she used to make.
"Despite
the working conditions, the dump was a gold mine," says Dione Manetti, a
consultant who has worked with rubbish-pickers across Brazil for 20 years.
Sometimes
Gramacho rubbish pickers could make 4,000 reais (£1,000, $1,500) a month, he
says.
"At
the moment we are happy," says Rosinete dos Santos, an ex-catadora who is
now financial co-ordinator of the new recycling facility. "But if a new
dump opened at the end of the road everyone would be out of here and up to the
dump in a flash."
No-one
pretends the dump was paradise - it's common for the rubbish-pickers to have
mixed, sometimes contradictory feelings.
Serious accidents, illnesses
and even deaths were common. And outside the dump the catadores faced stigma
and discrimination within Brazilian society.
"It
wasn't difficult to deal with the rubbish. It was difficult not to become
rubbish," says Gloria Cristina dos Santos, who is now the recycling
facility's coordinator.
"I
never told anyone at school I came from the dump. I couldn't make friends
because I was so ashamed and for a long time I could not look at myself at the
mirror."
Gloria began working there when
she was 11. "Back then all the hospital waste was mixed in with the
domestic rubbish, so there was a lot of blood, foetuses, dead bodies,
animals," she recalls. "It was very dangerous."
Once
she stepped on a needle and couldn't work for six months. Then at 15 she was
buried under a mountain of rubbish, only surviving after her friends dug her
out.
A year later Gloria became
pregnant. After struggling with post-natal depression, she tried to commit
suicide.
But the
same dump that was causing her such sorrow and despair brought her salvation -
in the form of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Over
the years Gloria had carefully curated a small library of books salvaged from
the dump. And she credits a passage in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for
teaching her how to love her daughter.
"I
didn't have any treatment - it was the books that helped me. They saved
me," she says. "That was my way of living other lives, of travelling.
I was a compulsive reader, I would read four or five books a week, and in the
midst of that hard life I was high on books!"
Gloria's
brother Tiao dos Santos, who had worked on the dump since he was eight years
old, also found inspiration in literary waste - from Renaissance Italy in his
case.
"I
got [The Prince by] Machiavelli out of the slime, took it home, dried it behind
the fridge and ironed it," he recalls.
"And
I learned all the skills of The Prince - I didn't read Machiavelli as a
Renaissance writer, I read him as a modern one. The game of interests, politics
and malevolence was one I knew how to play."
Tiao eventually became a leader
of the catadores, founding the first rubbish pickers' association in Brazil 10
years ago and later starring in the Oscar-nominated documentary film Waste
Land.
Machiavelli
did the rounds. Tiao shared his copy of The Prince with his two closest
friends, hoping they too would be inspired and help him fight for better
working conditions for the catadores.
"We
were a reading group," says Jose Carlos Lopes, known as Zumbi, a
rubbish-picker for almost 30 years from the age of nine. "Machiavelli
inspired me by his leadership and comradeship across the centuries. He taught
me how to be a leader, how to lead from the front."
And it was the catadores'
activism that secured the government's guarantee to provide a new recycling
facility for ex-catadores to work in.
The
plant that stands there is the fulfilment of a dream - but only in part.
For a
start there's not enough material to be recycled.
Whereas
before the rubbish-pickers could sift through the dump and filter out sellable
goods, the new recycling plant relies on companies willing to donate cardboard,
paper, aluminium, glass or plastic.
Meanwhile
10,000 tonnes of mixed domestic rubbish are sent to a new dump every day. But
there the rubbish is sealed with soil and covered in grass - no catadores are
allowed in.
The lack of waste to recycle
has caused expansion plans to be put on hold.
Original
blueprints for 12 warehouses employing 500 rubbish pickers are still a long way
from being realised.
Currently
there are just two warehouses and only 50 people are employed.
That's
50 out of the 2,000 who once worked on the dump. The rest have had to find
other ways of supporting themselves.
"It's frustrating but
it doesn't minimise the size of our achievement," Gloria says. "We
managed to make the government see us and be accountable."
She too experiences nostalgia
for the old days, though.
"We
suffered a lot but we were a family," says Gloria. "We felt we
belonged to the dump and we helped each other.
"No-one
will tell you that he misses working there but everyone says they miss the
companionship we had, because ultimately we felt it was us, catadores, against
the rest of the world."
Recreating
that same atmosphere as before is part of her vision for the new recycling
plant.
"We
want to recover that essence. I really believe we will do it. It is my aim in
life, my dream," she says.
Brizola was the last catador to
leave the dump.
"I
stayed up to the very end. I had to see the ending. And I really miss it. It
was not only because of the money but because of friendship."
In a
small drawer next to his television, he safely keeps a small plastic bag with
something precious inside.
"There
it is in my hand. Earth from the dump. It carries love… and
when I die it will be buried with me."
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