{"id":22601,"date":"2015-07-08T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-07-08T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=22601"},"modified":"2015-09-11T10:05:20","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T13:05:20","slug":"community-group-eco-network-tackles-environmental-issues-in-city-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=22601","title":{"rendered":"‘Eco Network’ Community Group Tackles Environmental Issues in City of God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas\"PT\"<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Waste management is a problem faced by virtually every favela in Rio de Janeiro. Most\u00a0communities\u00a0suffer inadequate or non-existent\u00a0waste collection services because public agencies miscount the local population and provide inadequate services, or because\u00a0waste collection can be challenging on narrow favela streets\u00a0if using traditional collection vehicles. These are the sorts of reasons given\u00a0by the municipal Waste Management Company,\u00a0Comlurb<\/a>,\u00a0to not respond to the waste management needs of many\u00a0communities. As a result, uncollected trash<\/a> can be a source of disease, pests, and low standards of living for residents.<\/p>\n

Lifelong resident and community activist Iara Oliveira<\/a>\u00a0remembers growing up in Cidade de Deus<\/a> (City of God, or CDD to its residents) when it had no waste collection services at all. She says the community “has always been completely abandoned in terms of public services,\u201d but residents learned how to fight for their rights to services. First, she says, they fought for\u00a0water. Then electricity. And eventually they demanded waste collection services. Today some parts of CDD receive waste pickup every day, but the community still does not have recyclable materials pickup services. This and concerns about the level of pollution in the river running through the community\u00a0have mobilized a group of passionate residents to improve environmental conditions through education, awareness, and encouraging residents to change their habits.<\/p>\n

Eco Rede<\/a> (Eco Network), coordinated by Oliveira, was formed in 2010 as a program within the the non-profit education organization\u00a0Alfazendo<\/a>. Alfazendo has been providing literacy classes, college prep courses, and other forms of education to members of the CDD community since 1998. The Eco Rede program uses the same participatory methodologies Alfazendo has developed, and focuses on finding collective solutions to the environmental problems faced by the community. Using the same methodology, another chapter of the organization opened in Complexo da Mar\u00e9<\/a>\u00a0and functions similarly.<\/p>\n

Eco\u00a0Rede has five objectives: environmental education, communication, continuing education, professionalization of catadores<\/a><\/i> (waste pickers who work\u00a0around the city collecting recyclable materials), <\/i>and local development. All are meant to improve the local environment, the levels of public health, and quality of life in Cidade de Deus.<\/p>\n

\"Eco<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of these goals are met by training young people to visit local schools to teach students about the environment, empowering them to change how they view their community. Each year, seven or eight students are selected and become members of a team that creates its own lesson plans and yearly goals. One of the main objectives of Alfazendo as well as Eco Rede is to encourage students to stay and contribute to improving their community, instead of moving away. This means asking them to value their community and protect it from further damage. As local university student and Eco Rede facilitator Lidiane Santos Barbosa explained, \u201cWe hear a lot about protecting the Amazon forest, why not try to preserve the place where you are living?\u201d<\/p>\n

Eco Rede also hopes that by teaching young children they will impact their families\u2019 lifestyles. In addition to providing multi-disciplinary training for students, Eco Rede also works with teachers to keep the conversation going after the training ends. Outside the classroom, Eco Rede planted five school gardens and raised awareness about recycling<\/a> by helping students make creative toys out of reused materials. One of the main goals of the school gardens is to demonstrate how students can have healthy diets.<\/p>\n

\"Eco<\/a>The organization\u2019s most visible objective is the professionalization of catadores<\/i>, who collect recyclable materials on the street and\u00a0sell them to\u00a0private companies. The team at Eco Rede considers\u00a0them an important link to recycling, since they fill the gap by sorting and collecting materials which would otherwise end up in the landfill. Despite their importance, catadores<\/em>\u00a0have been a historically isolated and disadvantaged social group<\/a>. As the individuals most intimately involved in waste management, the team at Eco Rede felt it important to engage with and empower them to continue to improve the environmental conditions in CCD in a safer and healthier\u00a0manner. Eco Rede\u00a0also hope\u00a0to change attitudes towards catadores<\/em>\u00a0by the general public.<\/p>\n

The first step was counting and registering catadores<\/em>\u00a0so as\u00a0to work with them later on. Then\u00a0Eco Rede provided training to 48 of the catadores<\/em>,\u00a0on their rights and how to gain access to public services. Following this step,\u00a0the network taught\u00a0residents to sort recyclable materials into separate bags and set them aside on the curb. As Oliveira explained, separating recyclable materials can\u00a0achieve more than one goal. When households set their separated materials outside their homes, catadores<\/em> no longer have\u00a0to dig through wet, mixed waste. Their working conditions improve dramatically, while individual households only have to make small changes in their habits. This has been a convincing argument in CDD, walking down the street one can see bags of separated materials waiting outside homes for catadores<\/em> to pick up.<\/p>\n

More formally, Eco Rede has built\u00a014 \u201cEco Points\u201d around Cidade de Deus for people to drop off recyclable materials for the catadores<\/em> to collect. By doing this, attitudes have begun to change towards them. Schools that once refused to let catadores<\/em>\u00a0go through their trash are now welcoming them into their classrooms to discuss recycling. Oliveira hopes to someday have an Eco Point on every major street corner, and in every public space and school in the community.<\/p>\n

In other neighborhoods, catadores<\/em> have organized into cooperatives to gain more bargaining power in sales and to provide a safe space to sort waste. This has yet to happen in CDD, which is why it is one of Eco Rede\u2019s long-term goals to find the necessary funding to create a space for a cooperative.<\/p>\n

\"Eco
From left to right, members of the Eco Rede team: Miriam de Jesus Fernandes, Lidiane Santos Barbosa, Iara Oliveira, Carlos Alberto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Improving the environment in Cidade de Deus is part of the much larger goal for local development. Oliveira said her dream for the community is for its young people to invest in staying there. She said:\u00a0\u201cYoung people are using\u00a0their energies outside the community, instead of inside it\u2026 they have been educated to want to leave it.\u201d She hopes that with Alfazendo and Eco Rede more young people will remain and help the community in which they grew up.<\/p>\n

For more information on\u00a0Eco Rede, you can visit their Facebook page<\/a> or Alfazendo\u2019s page<\/a>. \u00a0You can also see their video on environmental education in schools here<\/a>.\u00a0If you would like to help them achieve their goals with Eco Points, in-school education, or creating a cooperative for catadores<\/em>, consider donating your time or resources by reaching out to the Eco Rede on their Facebook page<\/a>.
\n\"Eco<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas Waste management is a problem faced by virtually every favela in Rio de Janeiro. Most\u00a0communities\u00a0suffer inadequate or non-existent\u00a0waste collection services because public agencies miscount the local population and provide inadequate services, […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":22782,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1288,1290,1271,1503,329,452,1329],"tags":[532,231,484,756,258,364,474,385,223,1292,388,471,1140,21],"writer":[1595],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22601","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-highlight","8":"category-civilsociety","9":"category-favelaqualities","10":"category-opportunities-to-support-favelas","11":"category-solutions","12":"category-rio20","13":"category-by-international-observers","14":"tag-catadores","15":"tag-city-of-god","16":"tag-comlurb-waste-collection","17":"tag-community-organizing","18":"tag-community-solution","19":"tag-community-based-organization-cbo","20":"tag-environment","21":"tag-environmental-education","22":"tag-favela-as-a-model","23":"tag-organizing","24":"tag-recycling","25":"tag-sustainability","26":"tag-waste-management","27":"tag-west-zone","28":"writer-christine-wilkes"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22601"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=22601"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=22601"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=22601"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=22601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}