Chapter 8
From Garbage to Gold—Peru
Every time I go to a waste dump, whether it is in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, or India, my heart breaks when I see human beings like you and me, who are working, many accompanied by their children, in deplorable risky conditions. Their working and living conditions encourage me to work tirelessly and try to change this situation. I envision a world where millions of waste pickers become part of the formal waste management system with strong support of the public/private sector and civil society.
—Albina Ruiz
IT WAS 1986. A PETITE, DARK-HAIRED TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD spitfire of a woman stood up before an angry, raucous crowd of more than six hundred men at a Union of Municipal Workers meeting on the outskirts of Lima a few months after she'd been hired as the first female director of the municipality. The union workers were about to demand her resignation. Hardly a surprise, as much to the annoyance of the union workers, the woman who angered them had just spent the first few months in her position trying to weed out the corruption that surrounded public garbage collections, and she was about to design a new system for trash collection that would extend into the poorest sections of Lima.
Albina Ruiz was, by her own account, almost obsessed with the trash that seemed to overwhelm Lima. Since moving there she had been shocked and dismayed at the condition of the streets. The heaps of rubbish in many parts of the city were so massive that they stopped growing vertically and were now spreading horizontally like algae, covering anything in their path. Garbage was all around, so people tossed trash everywhere—in the streets, rivers, and vacant lots, creating a perpetually nasty environment that many residents found dispiriting. The downward spiral was palpable everywhere she looked.
No one was picking up the garbage in these parts of the city because the poor couldn't pay and the city believed (as one municipal official told me) that poor people liked to be dirty.
Trying to change the existing collection system and develop a new one gave Albina a huge problem with the union, which liked things just the way they were and had no incentive to change anything. It was no coincidence that the first item on the union meeting agenda was asking for Albina's resignation. But when the vote came up, no one was prepared to see her stand up and say, “If there is someone else in the hall who is more able to run this municipality than me I will gladly give them my position.” The entire room fell silent. Everyone was so dumbfounded that they stood for a long few moments without saying a word, and hardly taking a collective breath. No one stood up to claim the position, and the voting item was permanently removed from the agenda.
Only one year prior to the meeting, Albina had received her engineering degree, and her outspokenness and passionate belief that Peru could control its garbage problem garnered the attention of the mayor of the nearby municipality of El Agustino. Luckily he was not one of the Lima mayors who had inaugurated the “public improvement program” to build ramps from the streets to the river so people could dump their garbage directly into the water! Fortunately, this mayor was able to understand Albina's vision of using garbage as a medium for addressing a deeper issue that plagued his municipality.
Albina realized that garbage represented people. For every piece of discarded material there is a person behind it and in front of it. Where many see trash as a problem, she saw an opportunity. An opportunity to give jobs, an opportunity to improve the environment, an opportunity to improve public health, an opportunity to create more social entrepreneurs, along with political and business entrepreneurs. She believed that each sector of society could not accomplish its own roles effectively without depending on the others. Her vision soared way above all the mounds of garbage put together:
We depend on the business sector and we also depend on the State. We need enterprising businessmen and women (which there are more and more of) and we also need enterprising civil servants and enterprising public authorities who are also thinking how they can fulfill their role as a civil authority and be political in diverse and creative ways. And I think that when those three sectors come together then we are really talking about shaping our city, changing the world, and being different.
Albina's words are even more visionary when you consider that she was born—and lived up until high school graduation—in the Peruvian jungle. Her words are even more amazing when you consider that she was a farmers' daughter who not only finished high school but was inspired to become an engineer. It was Peru's luck that there was no university for her to study engineering in the rainforest, so she had to move to Lima to fulfill her educational goals.
She came to Lima excited to experience big city life, but much to her disappointment when she got there all she could focus on was the mountains of smelly and insect-infected garbage piled in the streets. Nowhere had she seen garbage like that, for in the jungle everything that was discarded by one person was useful in some way to someone or something else. Moreover, the garbage issue was inescapable—when she moved to Lima in 1983 the city only picked up one-third of the more than 3,500 metric tons of daily garbage, resulting in trash being strewn over the other two-thirds of Lima. In the poorest areas, the ones the city ignored and where private garbage associations did not even bother to intervene, some streets looked like open-sky dumps and the air was foul and unbreathable. To Albina the situation was a huge disappointment, not at all how she had envisioned big city life to be. From where she lived, Lima looked and smelled like one big garbage pit.
This sense of incongruity never left her, so when she was about to graduate as an engineer she decided to focus one of her course assignments on measuring the efficiency of garbage truck pickups and developed a plan for optimization of pickup routes. While her classmates were analyzing supermarkets and banks, she was all about garbage. Always in the back of her mind she was trying to answer her one big question: Why wasn't the garbage getting picked up where I lived? The obvious answer, realized as a result of her now-completed course assignment, was that the city trucks were physically too big to go around the piles of garbage in the streets and to travel up the narrow, hilly roads that skirted the downtown where the largest proportion of the poor lived. It was then that it struck her—a new system needed to be developed.
When she could literally and figuratively see beyond the garbage she noticed the huge number of people who lived off of it—the garbage pickers and recyclers. There were the porcicultores, who fed pigs from the organic discards; the cochineros, who collected iron scraps and bottles; and the assorted recyclers who opened the bags of trash and hauled away cardboard, paper, plastic, and anything else that they could use. These people had descriptive names but little dignity and almost no income, and they were living very hazardous lives in disease-infested surroundings. These people would be the ones Albina would organize into an association of recyclers, an association that encouraged a culture of paid garbage collection in the poorest sections of the city, helped cultivate a household practice of garbage separation into recyclables, and inculcated a philosophy of garbage as a usable asset—which preceded a decrease in the practice of dumping garbage everywhere. These were the people Albina inspired to be changemakers—people who would help themselves, their families, and their neighbors, and turn the garbage of Lima into gold.
Albina set about designing and building a new type of small tricycle truck that could fit through the narrow, hilly streets and around the garbage that blocked the roads. She started to envision a system interweaving community tricycle collection trucks, garbage collectors, and waste recycling, partnered with a public campaign that would convince people to wait for the trucks to throw their garbage out. This dream would all be predicated on a small monthly household payment that the residents of the slums would pay for the services. But new systems that replace or circumvent the old ones necessarily involve changes, and change always creates obstacles that need to be surmounted; obstacles causing friction, belligerence, envy, jealously—even violence. But Albina already intuitively knew that her role would always involve some greater or smaller level of risk to herself as the person who attempts to create the changes in the first place. She was prepared to take that risk.
For more than twenty-five years Albina has been working in waste management, and since early this century, she has been the founder and director of Ciudad Saludable, an NGO that is building a community-based solid waste management system and playing an increasingly important role in improving sanitation and health conditions not only in Lima but around Peru and other areas of Latin America. The centerpiece of her strategy is an inclusive and highly networked system of community-organized and effectively linked collection, recycling, and disposal activities. Included are related initiatives to control illegal dumping and eliminate illegal dump sites. Her primary tool is employment, and she uses it by organizing the recyclers into income-generating micro-enterprises, a strategy built into every stage of the waste management cycle.
These micro-enterprises are structured into quasi-independent and self-sustaining organizations that assure both the efficiency of the overall operation and widespread community participation in the planning, execution, evaluation, and fine-tuning of the endeavor. From her initial effort to coordinate an illegal underground economy of slum-dwelling garbage pickers into an association of recyclers, she has consistently added each successive piece into her mental blueprint in order to make system change possible. She worked to promote the first law on solid wastes that addressed recycling and reusing as well as recognizing the recyclers as a legitimate part of the process and, after twenty years of persistence, witnessed the passage of that law by an act of Peru's Congress. Like a mother hen, she nurtured the establishment of hundreds of trash and recycling micro-enterprises after she initiated a credit fund for recyclers so they could set up services in their communities and use the money to buy, use, and make products from the recycled materials.
Albina has developed an innovative chain of employment and income-generating micro-enterprises, enabling an entire new classification of changemakers to emerge. These changemakers themselves become community micro-entrepreneurs—who start small businesses that take charge of collecting and processing the garbage. They take advantage of the microloans Ciudad Saludable makes available to them and in turn hire others as employees to work alongside, expanding the employment pool and creating virtuous cycles of change that positively impact their families, friends, neighbors, community, and city.
From Local Ideas to Lasting Solutions
Sonia Quispe makes handicrafts and purses from the recyclable materials generated by Ciudad Saludable. She is the manager of Ecomanos, a micro-enterprise where she employs six women who transform recyclable material into wallets, purses, picture frames, and other items that are sold in high-end stores. She also leads workshops on handicraft production in schools.
Ciudad Saludable and Albina Ruiz have transformed my life from a waste picker, who used to collect organic material to feed pigs, to an entrepreneur who can support her family and even send one of my children to college. The children in my workshop in school actually address me as “teacher.” My life has changed radically and I am aware that I have become a role model to others.
Today Albina oversees collection and recycling projects in twenty cities across Peru, employs more than 150 people, and serves over 3 million residents. Ciudad Saludable's approach to waste management is so successful that she has been asked to come up with a national plan for Peru, while other Latin American countries have expressed interest in emulating her method. She has developed and built an incredible organization that came from an unlikely beginning. She chose to enlist the outcasts of the community—those who sift through garbage dumps daily in order to find something to live on—and provide them official employment, health care, and clean work uniforms. She organized recycling and waste collection, negotiated trades, worked with banks and businesspeople to build sustainability into her model, and partnered with the city in many of these endeavors.
Now she is building an even bigger client base for the recyclers by helping urban pig and goat farmers increase their effectiveness so they can become economically viable. In turn, they will increase their use of discarded organic matter and create yet another new market for the recyclers. By all measures, Ciudad Saludable has achieved enormous success. By working in teams, rubbish collectors gather more waste each day, make more trades, and make a better living. With the merit and importance of sustainability in the community recognized by people around them, the collectors and recyclers now carry themselves with pride and consider themselves micro-business owners or employees. Helping people regain and retain their human dignity is a gamechanger and dignity is something that is usually passed on to others. It is close to infectious. These are the ways lives get transformed and in turn they transform others around them. Says Nelly Ticse, a former waste picker and now member of the RUPA Association of Recyclers in San Juan de Miraflores District:
Before, I was not able to speak up or look into the eyes when talking to someone because I was embarrassed and afraid of people who used to insult and call us demeaning names. However, after Ciudad Saludable transformed my job from a waste picker to a recycler, now I know that what I do is worth it and that we add value to society, the environment, and even the economy of Peru. Today, I speak up loudly and I make sure people respect my work. I am not afraid to speak with the mayor of my city, the senators in the Congress, and journalists because I learned to convey my ideas and the recyclers' dreams. Now people have a lot of respect for our work.
As Peru Changes, So Can the World
As for the future, Albina will continue moving forward. Her vision is to make sure that Peru is no longer a huge garbage can, but rather that Peru becomes a clean country, a sound country, a healthy country. Her plans, however, are far bigger than Peru and extend to Latin America, India, and Africa.
In Peru we have demonstrated that we can have a law. In Peru, we have demonstrated that the president of the Republic has received the recyclers in the government palace. That the minister of environment has meetings with them, and that the vice minister sits with them every week to work on regulations. We have demonstrated this. If we have done this in Peru then we can do it in any other country—wherever there is a need and wherever there are people who are as concerned with others as they are with themselves. Wherever there are people who pride themselves in being changemakers. Because in reality the people know that they can change.
Albina's daughter, Paloma, who also works at Ciudad Saludable as director of education, bears testament to the spirit that Albina is instilling in everyone who surrounds her:
I think of the people I grew up with, one is a single mom, the other married to a delinquent. Why am I different? It is the living example of my parents. With education, with love, with all this pride in yourself and your family, life can be completely different. I have asked myself if I am ready to make these sacrifices that call for service to make a change in the world. I look at my parents and see the love they have for changing things for others and see that they made it themselves. I know I can too. It is a very lovely thing.
In the end, one wonders if Albina's ultimate vision is to bring the wisdom of her childhood education in the jungle to the rest of the world. Value everything, use all, know that something of no value to you has value to someone or something else, leave no footprint, involve the entire village, consider your relationship to everyone and everything.
Maybe we could use a little more jungle within us all.