Fábio Calvetti
Reporter - Agência Brasil

São Paulo – To use sanitary landfills to generate energy, to decrease environmental pollution, and to obtain international resources to promote the social inclusion of "trash scavengers" [people who collect recycling material in streets/dumps/landfills and are responsible for 90% of the material used up by Brazilian recycling industry]. This possibility already used in other countries, was presented and discussed by representatives of 41 cities of the Southern and Southeastern regions of Brazil, who met Friday (29), in Guarulhos, São Paulo. The Workshop in Clean Development Mechanisms, promoted by the Ministries of Cities and Environment, aims at stimulating cities’ governments to create proposals for the reutilization of solid waste.

In 30 of the 200 most populated Brazilian municipalities, the two Ministries will sponsor studies for the technical and economic feasibility of generating energy from pollutant gases emitted in sanitary dumps and landfills. In addition to reducing damages to the environment, the project, if approved, will receive "carbon credits," which are foreign investments from wealthier countries.

The Kyoto Protocol foresees the carbon credits trading, through which countries that emit greenhouse gases can attain their emission reduction goals by investing on other countries’ reduction projects.

According to Bueno, "these resources must go, in the opinion of the Ministry of the Cities, to projects for the social inclusion of "trash scavengers" and that contribute, as well, for the local sustainable development. These are projects that improve life quality, job and income generation for populations living nearby sanitary landfills."

Studies will be financed by the Japanese government that donated US$973 thousand for the project.

Translation: Andréa Alves