It has been several months since I have written on this blog, mainly because I have been in the middle of a transition in my professional life. In the fall of 2012, I decided to temporarily change course and return to the U.S. to pursue a career opportunity that would allow me to learn more about how to build and manage a social enterprise. While I learned a lot from my experience with INSEA, I decided that there was not a clear path forward for CATAUNIDOS and that I would be better served by taking a step back from the organization and focusing on my own professional development so that I could make a more significant contribution to the wastepicker movement in the future.
I applied to and was selected for the Venture for America program, a two-year fellowship for recent graduates to learn about entrepreneurship by helping to build and grow start-ups in struggling cities in the U.S. such as Detroit and New Orleans. (For a profile of the organization, see this recent piece in the New York Times). In a few weeks, I will be moving to Las Vegas to start work at the Downtown Project, a unique urban revitalization initiative coordinated by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, Inc. The Downtown Project is essentially looking to rebuild the Fremont East district of the city and create an engaging, community-focused urban environment that will become a breeding ground for creativity and entrepreneurship. It is doing this by focusing on real estate development, small business support, a tech fund, community events, charter schools, a health clinic, urban transport, and more. For a good synopsis of the project, see this article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I still do not know what my specific role will be in the project, but I do hope to continue to pursue my interest in waste management and there should be opportunities for me to do so in my new position.
Because I am no longer working with INSEA, I will not be posting regularly on this blog in the future. It will remain active for people to have access to my previous posts about the wastepicker movement and Brazilian economic development, but I will not be publishing here in the future. I do hope that this collection of my experience and insights will be useful for people looking for more information on these topics.
As a final note, I will say that Brazil as a whole, and the wastepicker movement in particular, seem to be standing at a crossroads. Brazil has just completed one of the most successful periods of economic expansion and widespread prosperity in its history. The country has developed significantly in the past 15 years, building a new middle class, creating world-class companies in aerospace, offshore oil, and agriculture, and solidifying democratic institutions based on pragmatic, centrist economic principles. Yet this period of success has clearly reached its end, and a growing public frustration with the lack of progress in other areas finally boiled over during the major street protests last month. Every day Brazilians struggle with poor quality public services in areas such as public transport, education, health care, and security. Impunity and corruption are still the norm among the political class, and a high cost of living combined with wasteful spending and poor quality products and services have led to increasing resentment amongst the public. I experienced this frustration when talking to people on a daily basis during my time in Brazil, but I never expected that public anger would escalate so quickly as it did during the protests. The society has clearly reached a turning point, and it will be up to a new generation of leaders to undertake the major reforms needed to keep Brazil's progress moving forward. As in France and Egypt, the weaknesses of Brazil's unwieldy state bureaucracy have become apparent to all national and international observers, and modernization of the public sector at all administrative levels will now be a serious topic of national discussion. For the last few years, the common thinking was that low unemployment and high wages would keep the public happy, and that the best action was staying the course. That thinking has now been upended and the political system seems to be entering its biggest period of flux since the advent of democracy. The national elections in 2014 now look more significant than ever.
This debate will have a profound impact on the wastepicker movement, as waste management represents one of the core public services of government and the debate about modernization of the sector is bound to become more intense. I mentioned in previous posts that the new regulatory regime surrounding waste management in Brazil provided a window of opportunity for the wastepickers that would be lost if they could not take advantage of it. However, progress toward implementing the law has been slow up to this point. Minas Gerais state, for example, looks unlikely to meet its goal of closing all open-air dumps by 2015. The recent protest movement may increase demands for governments to speed up progress on this issue, thereby increasing demands on the wastepickers.
I still believe in the possibility of the business model I proposed for wastepicker cooperatives to operate successfully in Brazil, and if this model is successful it could be implemented in other countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. There are other organizations out there doing similar work such as Ciudade Saludable in Peru and Waste Ventures in India, and I plan to keep my eye on both of them to determine the potential for growth in this sector moving forward. But there are still many questions to be answered about how developing countries will manage the transition to integrated solid waste management systems. Will these nations simply mimic the path of developed nations in the West, or will they adapt new models that emphasize opportunity for wastepickers and the usefulness of the recycling social safety net both in providing an income stream for marginalized individuals and in developing uniquely efficient reverse logistics systems for certain goods such as aluminum and cardboard? Urban policies in emerging economies are changing quickly as these countries rapidly urbanize and the tech revolution starts to create new opportunities for innovation in the public and private sectors. What that will mean for waste management remains unclear, but I do know that this often-overlooked industry that employs millions of workers across the world is ripe to be disrupted by new business models focused not just on traditional profit indicators, but on social and environmental indicators as well. I look forward to being part of that discussion in the coming years.
