Municipal economic viability payment for environmental services provided by cooperatives of recyclable material collectors

Abstract

The progressive increase in solid waste production that accompanies consumption is a threat to the environment and challenge to sustainable development. In Brazil, the economic activity of collecting solid waste represents one of the main means to enable maintenance and unnatural recovery of these wastes, in this sense, the creation of recyclable materials collector's cooperatives is encouraged by the National Solid Waste Policy. It is noteworthy that, despite being stimulated by legislation, it is still not a common practice to pay for these environmental services provided. That said, it is relevant to propose an analysis of the economic viability of this payment to support policy decisions and, with this, provide adequate payment for the service of waste picker cooperatives. Thus, this research aims to identify and analyze the economic viability in the payments for environmental services provided by recyclable materials cooperatives to selected municipalities. To this end, the following specific objectives are considered: a) Identify the structure, components, and other information of payment contracts by environmental service between municipal government and cooperative; b) Identify the volume and the types of materials collected, sorted and sold by cooperatives on a monthly and yearly basis; c) Identify the expenses of municipal governments to form and/or maintain the landfill. For this purpose, a bibliographic review and document analysis of primary data, in addition to collection via interviews using a semi-structured questionnaire. With this study, it is intended to provide information to characterize the importance for the environment and for the municipality to contract environmental services provided by cooperatives.(AU)