Brazil can earn US$ 202.1bln with cooperativism in 2027, says OCB

BRASILIA – Brazil has the capacity to have revenues of R$ 1 trillion [about US$ 202.1 billion] with cooperativism and reach 30 million members in 2027, according to the president of the Organisation of Brazilian Cooperatives [ OCB ], Márcio Lopes de Freitas. This represents twice the amount earned in 2021, from R$ 525 billion, according to the most recent directory by OCB, released in 2022.

Still, according to the survey, the country has 4,880 recycling cooperatives, of which 2,535 have been in the market for over 20 years, and 18.9 million members.

Recycling is one of the seven Rs of Circular Economy [Rethink, Refuse, Reduce, Repurpose, Reuse, Recycle and Recover]. The Solid Waste Overview, from the Brazilian Association of Public Cleaning and Special Waste Companies [Abrelpe], points out that Brazil produced 27.7mln tonnes of recyclable waste in 2021, mainly plastics, paper and cardboard, glass, metals and multilayer packaging.

However, just over a quarter of Brazilian cities, 27 percent or about 1,500 municipalities, don’t even have selective waste collection, impacting the final destination of waste and the extraction of natural resources.

Officially established last year, the National Solid Waste Plan [Planares] presents ambitious goals for the next 20 years. The proposal is to recycle more than 100 thousand tons of urban solid waste per day in 2040, almost half of what is generated in the country, with recycling, composting, biodigestion, and energy recovery. This involves a great process of social and business mobilisation. The OCB yearbook shows that today cooperativism is mostly represented by the participation of individuals, 87 percent, compared to only 13 percent of companies.

This army of cooperative members ensures significant advances for the economy, public treasury and society as a whole. The OCB yearbook points out that, in 2021 alone, recycling cooperatives injected more than R$17bln in taxes in the public coffers and were responsible for another R$ 18bln entering the economy, amounts related to the payment of salaries and other benefits for employees. In addition, 493,000 people were directly employed in Brazil.

The Circular Movement’s pedagogical coordinator and PhD in Education and Sustainability, Edson Grandisoli, says that the engagement of people, companies and governments with recycling has occurred in a sensitive way. “The number of cooperatives has grown and, more and more, they play fundamental roles in the areas of the environment, public health, economy and inclusion,” he says.

Despite the victories, Grandisoli believes that there is still much to be done, since a very small percentage of solid waste is effectively recycled. According to Abrelpe, the national recycling rate is only 4%, below countries with a similar degree of economic development, such as Chile, Argentina, South Africa and Turkey, which have an average of 16 percent recycling, according to International Solid Waste Association [ISWA]. In Germany, the recycling rates reach 67 percent.

The Circular Movement coordinator says recycling is vital to the economy. “One of the Circular Movement’s major objectives is to bring to the knowledge of the general public experiences of success and the important work of cooperatives and partner companies is fundamental in order to stimulate even more the construction of a new way of thinking and acting,” he comments.

Social valuation

The director of the Capela do Socorro Selective Collection Cooperative [Coopercaps], Telines Basilio do Nascimento Júnior, aka Carioca, believes that Brazil still has a long way to go to make recycling inclusive and socially successful. “Today we still live in a scenario of enormous social exclusion, lack of appreciation of the end of the chain. Few continue to earn a lot and many, especially waste pickers, earning so little,” he says.

Carioca says that an efficient recycling system involves the socioeconomic inclusion of waste pickers, visibility, professional development, the right to decent work, housing, health and education. He comments that women represent almost 70 percent of the workforce in the sector and need to have the right to day care. “We hope that in the coming years we will have more to celebrate, we can be dignified and increasingly proud of our work,” he says.

According to the Coopercaps director, there are prospects for improvement in the sector with decree 11,413, which establishes the reverse logistics credit certificate, the structuring certificate and the future mass credit certificate; and 11,414, which recreates the Pro-Picker Program, called the Diogo de Santana Program, and creates the inter ministerial committee for the socioeconomic inclusion of waste pickers. “We hope that, in practice, these actions will be as good and effective as in theory,” he claims.

In addition to valuing waste pickers, including hiring companies that offer urban environmental services to municipalities, Carioca defends more accessible credits to improve the infrastructure of cooperative sheds and the urgency of offering waste pickers conditions that allow them to end human traction work, when the transport of waste is done by the worker himself/herself.

According to the director, Brazil still has around 2,300 open-air dumps, which need to be shut down, with the inclusion and reintegration of waste pickers who work in these sites. He claims that recycling in Brazil has been moving slowly over the years, and that the country will not be able to increase recycling rates if there is no planning in the short, medium and long term.

In the short term, Carioca  states that the involvement of the whole society is necessary, with shared responsibility. “It is necessary to sensitize the manufacturer, the distributor, the public authorities and the consumer so that we can change our habits,” he claims.

In the medium and long term, he mentions the obligation to offer environmental education in schools, the development of public policies for the Circular Economy, incentives for recycling industries, the end of double taxation of post-consumer packaging, recognition of the collectors’ workforce, reduction of INSS for cooperatives, inclusive tax reform valuing the chain of recyclable materials.

What is the circular economy?

The Circular Economy proposes a new look at our way of producing, consuming, and disposing, in order to optimise the planet’s resources and generate less and less waste. In other words, an alternative model to the Linear Economy – to extract, produce, use and discard – which has proved to be increasingly unsustainable throughout history.

In the Circular Economy, the goal is to keep materials in circulation longer by reusing them until nothing becomes waste! For this model to become a reality, we all have a role to play. It is a true collaborative circle, which feeds itself, and helps to regenerate the planet and our relations.

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