Desafios da implantação da coleta seletiva no âmbito dos planos regionalizados: um estudo de caso.

Abstract

The production growth of carton, paper, plastic packaging, metal, styrofoamm, among others, has raised concerns about the environmental, social and economic risks that exist in the inadequate disposal of these materials. Thus, selective solidary collection emerges as a solid waste management mechanism capable of minimizing these risks, in addition to increasing the income of the collectors through the formation of association and cooperative of collectors of recyclable materials. The objective of this study is to analyze the challenges of implementing selective waste collection in the state of Ceará under the Regional Plan for Selective Collection (PRCS) of the Western region of Ceará. Several activities were carried out, such as: technical meetings in the municipalities; legal and accounting training to create a cooperative or an association of collectors of recyclable materials; interviews and application of questionnaires with collectors and municipal managers; and visits to the municipalities, dumps and city halls. These activities allowed us to observe that the greatest obstacles to implement selective solidary collection in the studied region are distributed in three areas: social (wastefulness of collectors, illiteracy, conflicts among collectors, lack of support from merchants, and municipal managers uninterested in enforcing the current legislation, or unwilling to police and support selective collection actions); economic (lack of financial and economic resources to invest in the purchase of both Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and equipments for the structuring of a screening shed, and lack of support for a council-funded collection agency and for services inspection) and environmental (soil and water pollution in the dumps and nearby, air pollution from waste burning, irregular accumulation of solid waste on the streets, sidewalks and vacant lots of the municipalities).