Where many people see waste, Dona Josefa, from Pernambuco, sees a way to generate income and preserve the environment

In the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro, in the Favela Pedra do Sapo in Complexo do Alemão, 67-year-old Dona Josefa Maria da Conceição Santos collects recyclables in a methodical manner. She collaborates with several organisations dedicated to protecting the environment, including CEM-Serra da Misericórdia Integration Centre, Verdejar, Raízes em Movimento, and Favela Sustentável.

This charming woman from Pernambuco has an admirable attitude for her age as she walks up and down the hill collecting materials that locals already leave separately. If she finds materials on the streets, which often happens, she takes the chance to collect them as well.

Dona Josefa claims to have a fresh perspective on everything that is thrown away in the trash, and through her work, she educates the neighbourhood about the value of sorting and recycling household waste, even frying oil.

Community activist

Always thinking about recycling and income generation, Dona Josefa got involved with this practise in Recife, Pernambuco, where she came from about 15 years ago. There, she wanted to set up a recycling cooperative with a group of women because, as today, at that time, jobs and income were already scarce.

Since she didn’t want to “pick up” in the trash, she went door to door asking neighbours to sort and store recyclables. Together with friends, she gathered these materials and put them together in the backyard of her home. She then sold them and equally distributed the profits among the group.

Today, Dona Josefa’s purpose is to show residents of the Pedra do Sapo community and surrounding areas that not all garbage is to be thrown in the trash and that it is possible to generate income through the separation and recycling of discarded materials. She wants to do a different kind of work because she is not in favour of people having to dig through the garbage to see if there is anything usable. That’s why she goes from door to door.

A few months ago, Dona Josefa had rented a plot of land on the hill in the community, where she planned to gather a large group of people, including children, young people, and adults, to collect clean material and store it on that plot. The idea was to sell this material and share what was collected among the collection participants, after paying expenses, as if it were a cooperative. This worked for a while, but now she no longer has that space; she lost it for various reasons.

“First I used to pick up the material outside my house, then I started collecting it from the plot of land as well, and now I’m back gathering it in my house again, making things a little more difficult,” says Dona Josefa.

She explains that there was a time when she was able to support a children’s handicraft workshop in the neighbourhood only by selling PET bottles, and she makes it clear that even sewage material can be used if processing conditions are right.

In conjunction with AS-PTA—Family Agriculture and Agroecology—it managed to take a biodigester installation workshop to the community. The first one was installed in her house, but her desire is for the practise to spread throughout the community. “At first, the fuel in this biodigestor is horse feces, but it can be fueled with other materials; the objective is to generate cooking gas, but a large concentration of waste is necessary,” she says.

In addition to having an Ecopoint set up outside her own house, Dona Josefa also produces plant seedlings and sells them through the CEM network—the Centro de Integração da Serra da Misericórdia, located in Penha, in the North Zone of Rio. She plants the seedlings and sells them as a group in conjunction with SOS Agricultura, a project created by CEM.

Dona Josefa talks about planting seedlings: “In the beginning, CEM set up a nursery in my house; they gave us inputs and all the materials to conduct the planting through an income-generation project.” The promotion is done through social networks, and, when there is a sale, they get in touch and pick up the seedlings. In case of the project participants do not have them, CEM contacts other women involved in the same cause. “They send us the sales list, the name of the person who will supply the seedlings, and we identify each one of them before passing them on to the customers.”

Dona Josefa’s other activity is collecting leftover cooking oil

“Cariocas are very fond of fried foods, and it got me thinking about the used oil.” Where does it go to? It will certainly be discarded in the environment, and I wonder what goes through the minds of most pastry shop owners and cafeteria owners in general who dump used oil down drains. If I had the time and conditions, I would go to the shops to collect all this oil; that is also income generation, and it serves as the main raw material for making soap. In 2020, with other women, we carried out a large production of custom soap for AS-PTA. “The soaps produced helped compose the food handouts distributed during the pandemic, and we had an extra income,” says Dona Josefa.

For her, the challenges are many, but the biggest one is making people aware that they must treat the materials they discard in a different way, separating them by type.

Neuza Nascimento: Is the community involved in this work in order to help?

Dona Josefa: I made an exchange proposal that is working: each resident who brings me a certain amount of recyclable material gets a food handout. There are people who gather it and come to deliver it to me; for others, I have to ask someone to pick it up.

Neuza Nascimento: And how do you get the food handouts?

Dona Josefa: I articulate with the people, and with some institutions, such as Fiocruz, Verdejar, I get them as donations. I’m always looking for strategies.

Dona Josefa, whenever she has resources, organises workshops for bread and soap production, making musical instruments from recyclable materials, and agroecology workshops for women and children. When classes were suspended in 2020, she called the kids and formed a group to collect pet bottles and other types of plastic because they didn’t have much else to do. By selling this material and teaching what she learned at CUFA (Central Única de Favelas), where she was trained as an artisan, she was able to establish a handicraft workshop. Over time, the neighbours joined the action and began to gather pet bottles at home.

Neuza Nascimento: Do you intend for Ecoponto to become a cooperative?

Dona Josefa: Just in quotes, because I think that if I create a cooperative, I’ll get a headache. My desire is for people to get together to achieve the same goal. For me, getting here is already a great victory. We are planting a seed that takes time to sprout, and when it does, it will bear fruit for everyone involved. Too bad I lost the rented land. I don’t know how long I can do what I do, but as long as I have the strength, I’ll keep going.
Through Prêmio Lixo Zero, Dona Josefa was named “Cidadã de Atitude do Favela Sustentável (Citizen of Attitude),” in 2020.

Did you like Dona Josefa’s work and would like to help?
Their needs are:

• Donations of personalised t-shirts with recycling messages;
• Partnership with a print shop that prints pamphlets, to reach a larger number of people through publicity;
• Donation of gloves and ecobags

Dona Josefa makes an appeal to the city of Rio

“We need a dumpster, as we have none nearby, and people end up throwing rubbish anywhere.” CONLURB – The Urban Cleaning Company carries out the collection, but only in the lower part of the community; they do not go up anymore, and the result is that when it rains, the garbage goes down, leaving the streets impassable.
You can contact Dona Josefa through the channels below:

Instagram

Facebook

+55 (21) 9 8552-2046 (Also via WhatsApp)

A little more about Dona Josefa on Youtube