🎼 Over 200 years ago, the father of chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier, noted: “In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”. This is an undisputed truth, known to many civilizations, as in ancient China. Where impermanence and the constant transformation of nature were common sense.
Times change, but the laws of nature remain the same. Today, humanity, with 7 billion people across the globe and diverse technologies at its disposal, transforms the world at an unprecedented speed and scale. We buy, use - often only once - and throw it away.
But on Earth there is no throw away. Everything we discard is still here. Trash.
Trash. And more trash. How to deal with all this?
Or rather, can we not turn this into wealth? Today we are going to talk about the trash economy. The wealth that is in the trash.
Did you know that Brazilians generate, on average, one kilogram of waste per day? And that half of the waste generated is organic? that survive only by changing the garbage.
To find out how Brazil takes care of your trash… trash. Leftover food became compost in the garden of this retired. In Curitiba, trash is worth more than money.
The garbage being collected in the capital may be causing serious environmental problems. 🎼 Of all waste generated in cities, at least 50% of the waste is of organic origin. Leftover food.
In other words, if we separate the dry from the wet, we are already solving at least half of the waste problem. And this half we will talk about here. We can make like Gabriela, who turns food scraps into compost, inside her own home.
How? With this worm farm here. A worm farm is a box system.
It is a type of composter that uses earthworms to digest organic matter. It usually has three boxes. One is the box for collecting the liquid, which is the collection box.
And the other two are the digesters, which is where the earthworms will digest organic matter. There have to be at least two, so we take turns using them. So while you're filling one, the other is at rest.
Finished filling, exchange and begins to fill the second. So, while you are filling the second, the first is at rest. And to fill just put the food, vegetables peels, fruit, vegetables, cover with the sawdust or other dry matter you prefer, and keep doing it until it fills the box.
After two to three months, this mixture will be composted, digested by the worms and become a compost that is the worm humus. So, you can treat the waste, create the worms and have a very good fertilizer for the plants at the end. Edible plants.
These are species that have evolved with man for thousands of years. Our ancestors chose the best seeds, crop after crop, to have plants like these from Gabriela's house. 🎼 It's amazing you notice that after about 15 days you treated a plant with that compost, you see the difference in plant.
So, you begin to want to produce more. Get more interested in the final product of the earthworm. Every organic waste that I generate in my house, if I want to compost it, I start to better select the type of food I'm choosing.
So, I started buying more organic, I started buying more fruits and fresh vegetables, because it's the ideal food to put in the composer too. So it's almost like you have a moment to prepare the food for yourself, and then prepare the food for the earthworms too. Then, you feed yourself, prepare the earthworms food there for compost to flow better, too.
So, this changes the logic of how we eat and cook at home. But this pile of food together, doesn't it… stink? Because this is the biggest fear of people: 'I'll put the earthworm indoors, it will smell bad.
' And it's totally different from the smell that has an organic residue on your sink or in the trash. It smells like slurry. The worm farm, no.
It is normal to have these doubts at first, but then you get used to it. And so, you start to see that it's super simple to maintain. So, we can solve half of the waste problem and still produce top-quality manure, all in our own home!
But still there are people who do not want to have this job. Like, Luana, who doesn't like these little jellyfish that live underground. Earthworm, especially.
. . doesn't happen, I wouldn't do it at home.
That's why she decided to hire an organic waste collection service. It's been a while since I've been rethinking my choices, the decisions I make, when it's time to buy an outfit, it's time to buy my food. And when I saw the Projeto Compostar video it was amazing, it was kind of magical.
How awesome! How did I never think of my trash? How I never thought of that?
Most of us never stop to think about these things that are so much part of our daily lives! And separating is as easy an act as throwing it all in the ordinary trash, it's just having a specific bucket for the organic ones. The bucket is on the side of the sink.
Then, whenever I'm going to cut some fruit, vegetables, there are the leftovers in the sink, we will wash dishes, I already get it and throw it in the bucket. Like I would take and would throw it in a trash bin. So, I throw it in the bucket.
On the agreed days, the Projeto Compostar staff goes to her house, picks up the waste and leaves a bag of compost or a seedling. That simple! And that even encouraged me to grow my little garden and have plants in my house.
So, it was awesome! This is Lucas, one of the founders of the Projeto Compostar. In the first week we deliver the bucket along with a compostable bag.
This little bag is made of cassava, so it can participate in the composting process with organic waste. Thereafter, on the appointed day, we go to the person's address and collect the bag with the organic waste inside and forwards this material for composting. Imagine how crazy it was if all the disposable packaging, bags, cups, trays and others, were all made of compostable materials.
If we replaced all single-use plastics with materials made from cassava, yam, sugar cane and so many other materials that we haven't researched yet? 🎼 If this has been mixed here it doesn't work, you spoil a huge waste reuse chain. Because organic mixed with plastic mixed with anything else, you make it impossible to recycle all other materials and the organic itself.
So, with small attitudes like that we can solve more than half of what we produce from home waste. And homes are just small waste generators. That's why they also collect at restaurants, events and every kind of big generator.
There are really many places, generating a lot of waste. In addition to the Projeto Compostar, several local companies are emerging that aim to give the right destination for organic waste. This is the case of Destino Correto, from Hugo Since I knew about composting, both from internet research and from college, I wanted to see it happening in my city, in my neighborhood, where I live.
And I was waiting a long time to see it happen, then one day it gave to me a snap: 'Dude, it won't happen if you don't. ' I went there and created. The human being and his creative and entrepreneurial capacity.
When combined with the understanding of society and its demands for quality of life, several problems are solved at the same time. 🎼 Studies in organizations such as the IPEA show that the organic waste, when it goes into compost, it has the potential to generate four times more employment than if it were directed to the dump. Jobs.
That is a Brazil problem. It is 13 million of unemployed right now. Imagine that crazy.
. . if all the waste were properly composted in each community.
It would be thousands of jobs created. And perennial jobs, because we will always eat and generate organic waste. It would be good if the more government encouraged this kind of activity, right?
And when we say about the government, too, would be primarily interesting, it was the first, by example, encouraged all this economic chain of composting, decentralized management of organic waste. da gestão descentralizada dos resíduos orgânicos. They're kidding back there, right?
While we were recording, a dog passed behind the camera and decided to poop. The owner even tried to pull him, but it was too late. The poop was already on its way.
What generated a beautiful reflection: This dog's poop there could go to compost. It is the co-composting. Co-composting is the composting of feces widespread in the US and Europe, but it doesn't happen on a large scale here in the country yet.
And the government already has a National Solid Waste Policy, which, as stated on the website of the Ministry of Environment: 'It is very current and contains important instruments to enable the country to make the necessary progress in addressing the main environmental, social and economic problems arising from the inadequate management of solid waste. ' But we have to enforce the law, right? Some customers already understand the National Solid Waste Policy, already understand the law of the big generators.
And despite not having a wide supervision, which in fact obliges the market to adhere to to this legislation, many go ahead. Take a leading position, enforcing a law that is not being charged yet. These are people like Flavia.
Concerned about the waste disposal of her bar and restaurant, she decided to hire the services of Destino Correto. So we came to see that it is a path of no return, when you turn green, when you get in the way of sustainability, you want to do more and more. Pinella stops sending 600 kilos of organic waste every month to the landfill.
Thanks to these attitudes, landfills will have a much longer service life. From the moment we implemented this in the bar, we started to replicate and show people that this can be done. The collaborators, the customers, they started to get more interested and do it too.
After all the collections of the day are over, Hugo takes the waste to where the magic happens. So all this organic waste goes to the Romero Melo composting yard, which is at the Saída Sul here from Brasilia, in Águas Claras. This is Romero.
He works here! Where today about a ton of organic waste arrives every single day. But the yard capacity is 10 tons a day.
A lot! If we can divert this from the landfill it is a significant gain for the environment. Here we have a receiving bay where the person discharges his waste.
After the discharge, almost immediately, it is already mixed with the dry part, which is carbon. From there, we take one of the rows, we have nine rows. Each is stocked once a day.
And this residue goes to the row, there it goes through a process of monitoring temperature and humidity. For the whole process to be certified. We are very concerned about the environment here.
The windrows are protected with geotextile blankets to protect the soil, drainage system, hydraulic lines, storage tank. The compost that is produced here in our yard, it is absorbed by the activity itself. Here we work with the production of ornamental plants, fruit trees, reforestation projects, degraded area recovery and even gardening activities.
As they say: nothing is lost, everything is composted here. Composting seems simple, and it really is, but it requires technical and knowledge. The implementation of the yard came following the rules of CONAMA, through an agronomist also, which is Antonio Storel, who gave us all the advice, from project to implementation.
This is Antonio. He is the technical responsible for several composting projects in Brazil, such as Pátio da Lapa and Composta São Paulo Composting goes something like this: it is a continuity of agriculture and cooking. Only returning the food to earth.
We cook for the land. When we do agriculture, we take nutrients from the earth. Composting is the way we return this food to the soil and the animals that live in the soil, which will turn the compost into food for plants.
Bacteria, fungus, worm, armadillo, these are all part of the soil food chain. When we restore this living matter for the soil, we solve not only the problem of productivity soil, we solve the climate also The garbage when goes to dump or pro landfill mixed, releases huge amounts of methane, which is a substance that affects 20 times more than carbon dioxide in the greenhouse. and this is happening worldwide.
Toxic waste mountains producing a gas that, along with cars, thermoelectric and pum cows we eat are warming the earth. Therefore, it is so important the awareness of each one of us for the separation of our waste between dry, which will be recycled, organic, which will be composted and the small portion of non-recyclable or undifferentiated, that goes to the landfill. We learned that, for a lifetime this will be normal.
This simple technique, which is similar to cooking. It must be in the general domain. So it needs to be taught at school for the kids.
This is Rhuan. Through the Nosso Jardim project, he takes composting as a daily and pedagogical practice for schools. Whenever we start a school, we always start with this composting process, because it is our compost that we will make our garden.
Each week a class is responsible for collecting the waste from the whole school. So every day four children move from room to room collecting organic waste. This all goes to the school worm farm.
We always say that we have the magic worm box. Because the worm is a magical being! We put the garbage there, and the worm does the work for us to turn that organic waste into compost.
And the compost produced there will feed the little plants in the garden, what complement the children's lunch. The cycles close and many teachers take advantage of the garden elements to study math, portuguese, science and arts. They are simple and cheap attitudes that transform the reality of schools and especially of children, who are 39% obese or overweight nowadays.
When we started here, the snack was chips, soda and such. And so, they started to want to eat more fruit, because we said it was good and because they wanted to feed the worms, too. Sometimes they come up and say: 'hey, today I brought bananas and I don't know what for the snack!
' Many children sometimes did not eat lettuce, did not eat other things and now here in the garden they start eating. Because they plant, they reap, the see, and then they take away that prejudice, right? Because here we are doing a long term job.
We are trying to plant the seed in the hearts of children so that when they become adults they can do this themselves. Imagine, we live in Brasilia, right? You see lots of vacant lots, lots of places that people might be occupying and even using that waste to make their own garden, community gardens.
This is Dahiana. She is one of the participants in the Guará community garden, which was once a wasteland and today it is so. We already had everything here: corn, carrots, tomatoes, beets, vegetables in general, almost all: mustard, chard, chard.
We've already planted a little bit of everything. A key element for the health of the garden is compost, which is produced right there. It's the closing of a cycle We are also responsible for what we generate, so we feel responsible for closing the cycle inside the garden.
If you generate organic matter here, what is generated here, you have to go back to the garden as a benefit. Urban gardens are spaces that, in addition to producing food for the body, feed the soul. They are places of community fraternization, that children, youth, adults and elders come together for a common purpose.
If we really planted in idle public spaces, I'm sure we would make a good contribution to eliminating misery in the world. And not only misery, but also all related public health problems to the trash. And who knows, one day, eliminate all the trash.
Here in Brazil, we still have almost three thousand irregular dumps or landfills and we are far from intelligent waste management. If it was up to these folks who spoke here, everything would be quite different. The ideal waste management in the world would be all separate, where there was no… garbage.
A zero waste world, okay? Because then everything will be recyclable and everything will be compostable. There would be composting plants per neighborhood, because I think every person doing it in their own home would not be as efficient as if everyone could come together and do it in their neighborhood.
I think there are to be stations a lot more and much smaller size, which actually reduces the investment that is needed to do that. It is a need, in fact, to decentralize all waste management a bit more, especially in large cities. It should be public.
I think everyone should do it. It should not be restricted to a portion of the population that can afford the costs. I think everyone should be able to do that.
If we want to create this market, if we understand that we can no longer, as a society, continue to send organic waste to the landfill, why not fund the operation for a while? Composting companies with lines of credit, recourse to lost funds, tax relief. This also involves a reduction in logistics costs waste transportation, waste treatment.
So you are also saving government money by composting. We regenerate nature. We heal the planet.
Everyone wins. Public management, entrepreneurs, all citizens. It is a cheap and extremely efficient solution that turns problems into wealth.
We just have to put it into practice in every city in Brazil. And to end this audiovisual experience, we would like to leave the following message: We're not talking about something crazy. It's not a dumb idea.
We are talking about a practical thing, a concrete thing. That will affect everyone. That's it.
So, let's compost? Why not?
