Brazil generates almost 80 million tons of urban solid waste per year, an amount sufficient to fill 2,000 Maracanã stadiums with what we commonly call garbage.
This includes food and plant waste, cardboard, glass, plastic, metals, clothes and shoes, electrical and electronic products, lamps, and medicines.
Materials that utilized natural resources, labor, and energy to be produced and transported, and which mostly end up underground in sanitary landfills, after years, or just a few minutes, of use.
Disposal seems like an inescapable practicality. But the bagged waste that disappears from building staircases and sidewalks begins a long, invisible, and very expensive journey: collection, transportation, sorting, and landfilling.
In 2020, these direct costs consumed R$ 30.5 billion, mostly municipal public resources. In Brazil, only 4% of the collected waste is recycled, according to official data.
Additionally, the uncontrolled decomposition of waste emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for part of global warming.
The impact of all these waste management failures, combined with the environmental and climate costs of pollution, with the respective damages to biodiversity and human health, was on the order of R$ 97 billion ($ 18 billion) in 2020.
The data comes from a study by the consultancy S2F Partners with calculations from the GMWO2024 group, responsible for data analysis in the Global Waste Management Outlook 2024 report, released earlier this year by the United Nations Environment Program.