Ecoponto "buy back" program addresses street litter while also providing subsistence income to vulnerable community members. Since 2020, when we took over an old ruin at the center of town and started buying recyclable material, collectors have handed over 112 tons of plastics and cans from the streets and earned over $10,000. While the material pays for itself in the recycling economy, site and staff costs are subsidized.
Litter is a world wide problem. Plastic packaging, casually tossed onto streets, ends up in rivers and finds its way into our oceans turning into microplastics and infecting marine life including the fish we eat. In Vilankulo, litter-filled streets threaten the local tourism-based economy. Many struggling citizens have no income to buy their daily bread. Plastic bottles (PET) and tin cans bring value to the poorest when we support the "circular economy" value stream.
This projects makes the "circular economy" functional for Vilankulo. Casual waste pickers collect PET, HDP and PP plastics as well as aluminum cans from far and wide across town. When they bring them to our center, we purchase them for a value, putting coins in their hands which are mostly used to buy food. After weighing and paying, we separate and process the material and sell it to recyclers who use it as a raw material for fabricating new goods such as sturdy benches.
Michael Reagan, former Environmental Protection Agency of the U.S. government under President Joe Biden visited our center in January 2024 and praised the program for it's dual impact on environmental sustainability and social protection. It has been shown that litter decreases on clean streets and that people with a purpose and food source live a longer higher quality life than those who struggle with hunger.
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