Brazil’s Santa Catarina Aims for Zero Urban Waste Landfills

A recycling and composting center near Cimvi landfill serves 19 municipalities in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

In 2014, Santa Catarina became the first and only state in Brazil free of open-air garbage dumps. Now, 14 of its municipalities are seeking to also eliminate landfills and utilize nearly all urban solid waste.

The Intermunicipal Consortium of the Middle Itajaí Valley (Cimvi) expects to process more than 90% of the garbage through recycling, biodigestion, and composting — surpassing the 65% benchmark reached by Nordic countries in Europe, emphasized its executive director, Fernando Tomaselli.

“We have 36 landfills in the state, only three public; the rest are private, and there is little interest in changing the system, because whoever controls the landfill also dominates the garbage collection service,” said Tomaselli.

“It is a utopia,” said Yuri Schmitke, executive president of the Brazilian Association of Energy from Waste (Abren). “The unrealistic goal compromises the project,” he warned. Several European countries, Japan, and South Korea have already eliminated sanitary landfills — the areas for the final disposal of solid waste — but use incineration to generate energy from non-recyclable garbage, he added.

Cimvi rules out that alternative. Its goal is to expand recycling and the circular economy of waste to an unprecedented level. “Our obsession is to take advantage of everything, to prove that garbage does not exist,” said Tomaselli.

But recycling has limits. Europe, after many attempts and advances, recycles on average 25% of waste, with Germany at an exceptional 32%. Additionally, 19% of waste still goes to landfills, according to Abren, which held its sixth annual congress in Florianopolis, Santa Catarina’s capital, on June 5 and 6.

Cimvi was created in 1998 with only five participating municipalities to jointly manage various issues, but not yet garbage. It reached its current composition of 14 municipalities in 2017 after taking over sanitary landfill management in 2016, previously overseen by water and sewage authorities.

Its headquarters is in Timbo, a town of 46,099 people according to the 2022 census. The 14 municipalities had 283,594 residents that year, with Indaial being the most populous at 71,549.

Landfill and Recycling

The landfill receives garbage from five partner cities, in addition to the 14 consortium members, totaling between 5,000 and 7,000 tons per month. Environmental education campaigns in schools, businesses, and public spaces have gradually expanded selective waste collection.

Yellow sacks have been popularized, where residents place recyclable waste to be collected by municipalities and taken to the Waste Assessment Center (CVR I) at Cimvi headquarters on Timbo’s outskirts.

“Today, we recover 20 to 22% of recyclable waste, against a Brazilian average of 2%. We want to reach 27%,” Tomaselli told IPS.

“We receive an average of 60 tons a day, 24 hours a day, three shifts a week, Monday to Sunday,” said Rosane Valério, president of the Medio Vale Cooperative, which sorts and sends waste to purchasing companies at CVR I, where 87 recyclers are employed.

The cooperative operates another unit processing waste from two nearby cities, Ituporanga and Aurora, with a combined population of 33,300.

“Of the material received, we still discard 30% that comes mixed or dirty with food remains, sometimes blood that attracts mosquitoes, glass, and dangerous objects such as syringes and medicines, which make recycling very difficult,” explained Valério.

Thermoplastic

She lamented the lack of awareness about proper disposal among the population. Still, half of the discarded 30% can be used to produce thermoplastic, a hard material like concrete, used to make benches, sidewalks, pavements, and walls.

The cooperative runs a pilot plant producing thermoplastic plates, though the products are not yet sold externally. “The municipalities are the initial market for thermoplastic and compost products,” said Tomaselli.

Abren’s president, Schmitke, remains skeptical. He argued that demand in consortium municipalities is limited and that the population distrusts products made from garbage.

However, thermoplastic has existed for four decades, and new equipment facilitates its production at 160 degrees Celsius, with half the plastic input coming from plastics mixed with textiles, countered Cimvi’s director.

The use of local waste will advance with the inauguration of CVR II, expected in early 2026, which will use much of the organic waste for biogas and biofertilizer production. Another portion will go to composting.

“The goal is to use 100% or 98% of the waste,” said Tomaselli, adding that alternatives must be found for “common garbage,” which currently lacks recycling methods.

Bottlenecks

One challenge is selective collection, which needs improvement. “In Milan, Italy, five types of garbage are separated at the source: food, plastics, paper, metals, and glass. Here, it’s harder because everything is mixed together,” said Tomaselli.

Thus, Cimvi prioritizes environmental education through campaigns such as “Vale reciclar” and sustainable tourism, which highlights the beauty of the so-called European Valley, which includes municipalities beyond the 14 consortium members.

Girasol Park was created for this purpose — a tourist complex that includes the landfill, Cimvi facilities, and surrounding forest with walking trails, said Jaqueline Wagenknetht, environmental education advisor.

Design and poetry contests among local students promote the valley, known as European because of its many immigrants, especially Germans, Italians, and Poles.

The park’s name, Sunflower, symbolizes sustainability, representing a source of oil and biofuel, the advisor explained.

Cimvi also benefits from São Bento do Sul’s experience, a municipality with 83,277 people located 120 kilometers north of Timbo, which runs a similar program aiming to utilize 100% of its waste.

A dehydration process for organic waste allows better use of materials, explained Jacó Phoren, consultant for 100lixo, a company involved in the project, during his speech at the Abren congress on June 6.

Fostering new companies that generate waste solutions is another focus of Cimvi, said Tomaselli.

In Curitibanos, a city 185 kilometers southwest of Timbo with 40,045 people, Inventus Ambiental claims to have invented equipment to facilitate garbage separation for better energy recovery or recycling, reducing landfill waste.

Its pilot project will launch soon, using 90-degree heat to treat organic material, said Dirnei Ferri, company director.

Santa Catarina has already eliminated open dumps, although it is unclear if all have been fully cleaned. Now, the challenge is to “break the landfill trench,” said Tomaselli.

“We have 36 landfills in the state, only three public; the rest are private, and there is little interest in changing the system, because whoever controls the landfill also dominates the garbage collection service,” he concluded.