Saneamento No Rio

Collection - Rio de Janeiro

In Rio de Janeiro City, the residential waste and the public waste represent the biggest percentage of the local waste.

Total solid Waste = 1,62 kg per capita day

Residential Waste = 0,79 kg per capita day

Public Waste = 0,52 kg per capita day

A municipal company named COMLURB (Municipal Urban Cleaning Company), the largest organization of public sanitation in Latin America, is responsible for this process. Its services consist of collecting solid waste, non-hazardous characteristics, from single-family or multifamily housing. The residential collection is performed on alternate days, Monday to Saturday, in two shifts, including holidays, such as Christmas. Residents should place trash on the sidewalk next to the curb on the day and time set by Comlurb. Ideally, the garbage collection is arranged one hour before the collection.

The waste final destination is the Central Waste Treatment (CTR–Rio) in Seropédica, RJ. The Central is a grant from COMLURB and, besides Rio de Janeiro City it also serves the municipalities of Itaguaí, Seropédica and Mangalore. The operation works with seven transfer stations where the solid waste is transferred from the several vehicles to a large vehicle to be directed to CTR-Rio.

Brazil is a developing country and the trash is still one huge Brazilian socio-environmental problem. The collection of recyclable materials is performed in only 41 of the 160 districts of the city and the amount of recyclables recovered by the collection system and the recycling cooperatives reached 7,797 tons in the whole year of 2011. This is equivalent to only 4 g per person per day. Thereby, there is an extension program, which objective is to extend services to all 160 districts of the city, promoting social and productive inclusion of up to 1,500 recyclable material and ensuring the reuse of 5% of the materials potentially present in recyclable household waste.

Units of waste disposal in uncontrolled conditions are present in the city. The collector of recyclable material is an urban worker who collects recyclable solid waste, such as cardboard, aluminum, glass and others. Nowadays, they are the subjects of numerous social inclusion policies. Adults and children, who work with the separation and marketing of recyclable materials in municipal waste, have extremely precarious work conditions, subjected to different kinds of contamination and disease. Moreover, the quality of the material collected in these conditions is not recommended, which is demonstrated by the very low prices at the market. These workers are excluded from most of the wealth that the recycling market moves and produces, however they contribute to a significantly portion of the city collection.