Posts tagged environment
Sustainable Glass
Jan 28th
Climbing one of the many slopes of Morro da Pedreira in Costa Barros in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, you might not guess you’d find a father up here with a great talent for folk art and a passion for recycling and the environment. The material this man has chosen for his beautiful work is glass.
Often carelessly thrown away, glass becomes one of the villains in this season’s all-too-common flooding. Glass takes hundreds of years to biodegrade, which is why it is commonly recycled, or at least should be.
The artist Alex Sandro, or “Cabeludo” as he’s known in the community More >
The Story of Dona Rita
Sep 24th
For 12 years, Dona Rita Maria Barbosa, 56, kept an organic garden supplying her local community in Colônia Juliano Moreira (in Jacarepaguá, West Zone) with fresh fruit and vegetables and teaching schoolchildren about agroecology. Last month she was evicted from her home and the garden destroyed to make way for a garbage collection point. Over coffee in her new house, where the walls are unstable and there is no garden space for her to plant, she tells her story:
How long have you lived in Colônia?
I’ve lived in Colônia since November 1st, 1990. I came from a hill in Praça Seca More >
Warning: Creating default object from empty value in /homepages/21/d325976276/htdocs/RioOnWatchFinal/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 663
Warning: Creating default object from empty value in /homepages/21/d325976276/htdocs/RioOnWatchFinal/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 663
Warning: Creating default object from empty value in /homepages/21/d325976276/htdocs/RioOnWatchFinal/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 663
Light demolishes Verdejar’s headquarters
Aug 9th
On Monday morning, representatives from Rio’s electricity supplier, Light, arrived unannounced at the headquarters of socio-environmental NGO Verdejar with a judicial notice for immediate eviction to clear the land for a new substation. Members of the 15-year-old non-profit were taken completely by surprise and could only watch as Light, who arrived accompanied by military police, a moving truck and several workers with sledgehammers, demolished their headquarters.
Located at the foot of the Serra da Misericórdia, the largest patch of Atlantic Rainforest in Rio’s North Zone, Verdejar have worked to protect the area from illegal occupation in the past, managed to reforest significant More >
Sitiê: From Dump to Eco-Park in Vidigal
Jul 5th
Dull concrete, broken equipment and sparse vegetation compose Vidigal‘s official “Ecological Park.” Like many residents, Felipe Paiva of Cidade Unida (“United City”) wasn’t impressed. His voice carried more than a hint of irony as he detailed its construction: “The Prefeitura (City Hall) tore down some buildings to clear out this square, left the trees around the edges, and called it an ecological park.” An unfinished swing set framed the scene in tired themes of half-hearted government investment that define too many favela communities. But Felipe continued on a brighter note: “Down there, residents built a proper ecological park for ourselves.”
After our More >
Warning: Creating default object from empty value in /homepages/21/d325976276/htdocs/RioOnWatchFinal/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 663
Waste Land Pickers Struggle from Landfill Closure
Jun 21st
As the closing of Rio’s giant Jardim Gramacho landfill is presented at Rio+20 as an example of substituting an untreated open facility for a modern waste treatment plant, the community that worked there as the city’s recycling force for the last three decades face an uncertain future.
The largest garbage dump in Latin America, the metropolitan landfill of Jardim Gramacho received Rio’s daily 9,000 tons of trash up until its closure on June 3rd. Catapulted into the international limelight by the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary Waste Land, the landfill’s 1,700 registered recyclable material collectors – catadores in Portuguese – are receiving a lump sum More >
