Colombian Expectation vs Reality: Environment
I never thought of my self caring so much about sorting out my trash, from the plastic and paper packaging to the daily organic waste.
Both in Germany and Denmark their household system of trash sorting is clear, structured and almost every one is contributing to place their trash int he right place.
In Colombia we have a system of: Recyclable in one plastic bag, and non-recyclable in another bag. I felt that, this method is more efficient because as Trevor Noah explains in her show “The daily show”, it is worst to recycle wrong than to not recycle.
In Denmark they put a lot of effort on teaching the community what they should place in the different containers.
For instance each container has a name, for example for Paper: “Pap”, and a photo that explains visually which products are welcome in such place.
At home there is not a lot of training into recycling, but I can tell you it is a whole industry. I would say around a thousand of people, in Bogota only, recycle every day the trash each house delivers to the trash containers. These people are called: Recyclers,“Recicladores” in Spanish.
They move around city collecting the specific materials, there are the ones that are focused on paper and carton, others on metal and electronic parts, and others, the ones I find the most interesting, collect used, broken, almost in any condition electronic product.
All the material collected is sorted out by hand, and the reason why I think is more efficient is that these people know very well what is actually re-usable and what is not, because according to the amount of material they collect that can be recycled they get payed more.
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