Video

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The_Catador_Connection (1).mp4

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Maria Pintiuță - https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-pintiuta63548a315/

Jose Antonio Mannucci Schroeder - www.linkedin.com/in/jose-antonio-mannucci-schroeder

Nifemi Ore - **linkedin.com/in/nifemi-ore-20585321b**

Declan Malone - www.linkedin.com/in/declan-malone

Summary Section

Problem summary[<150 words]

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São Paulo’s plastic waste makes 16% of the 19,400 daily tons of trash sent to landfills.

Meanwhile, new Brazilian regulations require large companies to include 22% recycled plastic in their packaging. To comply, they must purchase recycled material at industrial scale. However, the system is failing. Residents discard plastic mixed with organic waste. Recovering it depends almost entirely on waste pickers—informal workers who examine contaminated garbage by hand. Because this supply chain is fragmented and lacks infrastructure, it creates a bottleneck. Companies cannot secure the recycled plastic, resulting in using virgin plastic and more pollution.

Key stakeholders:

1. Waste Pickers: They perform the toughest labor, recovering 90% of recyclables, yet lack basic protections, safety, and fair wages.
2. Corporations: They urgently need a large, dependable supply of recycled plastic to meet legal mandates.
3. Government: It bears the financial and environmental burden of overcrowded landfills and flooding caused by street waste.

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Solution Summary

We are introducing a Deposit Return System (in Brazilian Portuguese, Sistema de Depósito e Retorno, or SDR) where citizens pay a small deposit on drinks that come in plastic bottles and get that money back when they return the packaging. This type of system already exists in São Paulo, however it is not yet at a large scale and it is primarily located in subway stations, rewarding citizens with points that can be exchanged for tickets. A financial incentive is proven to work better globally in order to motivate people. However, if we just copy-paste the European model and drop highly automated machines into wealthy supermarkets, everyday citizens will claim all the cleanest, most valuable plastic. This would financially devastate the catadores, who currently rely on collecting that exact plastic to survive. ****The way we want to implement this, the citizen gets their cash incentive, which motivates toward action, but the technology and infrastructure are operated by, and financially benefit, the waste pickers.

• The Citizen Incentive: Everyday citizens return their bottles to Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs) or neighborhood drop-off points, instantly receiving their deposit back (e.g., via transit card credits or receipts to use in supermarkets). This guarantees high public participation.
• Catadores as Hub Operators: Instead of only placing RVMs in large supermarkets, as it is common in Europe, we establish neighborhood Ecopontos (micro-hubs) managed by catador cooperatives. When a citizen returns a bottle to a cooperative hub, the citizen gets their deposit, but the cooperative receives a corporate-funded "handling fee" for processing that bottle (the exact same fee a supermarket would get).
• The "Bulk Premium": Millions of bottles will still be littered by people who don't care about the deposit. When catadores clean these off the streets and bring them in bulk to the hubs, they receive the unclaimed deposit plus a commercial premium, ensuring their street-level work is highly profitable.
• Exclusive Logistics Contracts: Catador cooperatives are officially contracted to act as the reverse logistics fleet. They are paid to empty the automated RVMs across the city and transport the plastic to the recycling plants.

Practical Humility Clause