What makes one plastic container different from another? To the untrained eye, nothing. But the catadores who make up the informal economy of waste pickers in Brazil are far from untrained.
In a capacious concrete warehouse on a steamy summer’s morning in Atremar, a nearly two-decade-old recycling cooperative in the city of Três Pontas in the coffee-growing state of Minas Gerais, roughly a dozen catadores await one of two daily deliveries. The truck, piled high with industrial-strength sacks bursting at their seams, plays a cheerful ditty extolling the virtues of recycling as it backs up into an entryway that opens into the interior. An eclectic bounty of soda cans, margarine tubs, shampoo bottles, pizza boxes and magazines tumbles down a ramp onto a massive table that comfortably fits four people on each of its three unblocked sides.
Pulling on gloves to protect against sharp edges, each man and woman sets to work combing through everything. A glass jar is tossed into a bin, a motor oil jug flies into another. Bottle caps are unscrewed and plastic bags balled up. Items that are in salvageable nick—some unbroken Christmas ornaments, a book someone decided wasn’t worth keeping, a toaster that’s easily repaired—are set aside for the little on-site shop. There’s no time to be squeamish about spills or, in a room cooled only by a phalanx of wall-mounted fans, catch one’s breath. Veteran catadores can do this work blindfolded, determining how something should be sorted by touch into as many as 23 categories. At times they resemble restless oversized spiders because surely no human with only two hands can move with so much speed and dexterity.
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Whoever says this is unskilled work is either ignorant or lying.
Around here, clear bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, like the ones labeled Coca-Cola, are “gold,” as Evelini Castro, a hearty woman with a booming voice and an abiding love for Paul McCartney, bellows in English several times. Colored or opaque bottles—7-Up, Sprite—not so much. Tetrapaks, the type of mixed plastic-and-paper packaging that milk sometimes comes in, are almost certainly dross. While the catadores will still sort and bale them using a machine that crushes everything into tidy cubes, their market value is as low as their demand.
It’s the “gold,” as Castro puts it, that gets people paid and keeps the lights on. It’s also what has a high likelihood of ending up in a Veja shoe.
Veja, which means “look” in Portuguese, is sometimes known as Paris’ favorite sneaker, even though the shoes are almost entirely constructed in Brazil. (A European outpost in Portugal is also beginning to take shape.) The material inputs—save for leather, which comes from Uruguay, away from potential cattle-ranching-driven deforestation in the Amazon—are sourced in the South American nation. Its organic cotton is grown by 1,600 small-scale farmers across seven northeast states and its natural rubber obtained from more than 20 cooperatives in the Amazon region. Its polyester, derived from recycled plastic bottles, hails from 13 catadore-owned hubs in Minas Gerais, including Atremar. An equitable economic approach at every stage of the supply chain is what makes Veja’s shoes 30 percent more expensive than those cobbled in East Asia, it says. But this has also made it a soul-crushingly hip—and morally superior—status symbol for only those in the know to know about.
For the most part, anyway. When Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, donned a pair of Veja’s V-10 shoes at the 2018 Invictus Games in Sydney, Australia, the ensuing attention nearly crashed its website. “Who is this Meghan Markle?” Sébastien Kopp, who founded the brand with his childhood pal François-Ghislain Morillion circa 2004—the two disagree on the precise year—demanded to know. Ultimately, he didn’t care. Veja doesn’t woo celebrities with freebies, dole out discounts or fritter away cash on advertising. All that money goes back into the supply chain because that’s the Veja way.
Veja has almost always used polyester made from recycled plastic bottles, even though most of it was blended with virgin materials for reasons of strength or elasticity. The majority of this, which was purchased, as it were, whole cloth from China, went into the lining of its casual model, but without the same visibility or oversight other materials received.
It was a couple of years ago when Veja decided it wanted to break recycled polyester out of its black box. Traceability was one reason, said Olivia Lyster, the brand’s sourcing supervisor. So was having more control over the manufacturing process and therefore its impact. But there was also the fact that Veja wanted to replicate the work it was already doing in its other supply chains, like rubber and cotton, where it was paying fair trade prices and making a social difference. Because that, too, is the Veja way.
“That’s when we decided: we’re going to set up a PET supply chain,” Lyster said. “But because traceability is a very obscure sector, it’s very difficult to find out where and who people’s suppliers are. It’s difficult to get back to the plastic bottle. So that was the first and really the biggest innovation.”
But Veja had a second trick up its sleeve. Working with Dini Têxtil, a manufacturer in São Paulo, it managed to develop a textile derived from 100 percent recycled plastic bottles—something it wasn’t sure it could do and still retain the performance characteristics a shoe required. The fabric, which became known as Eleva, clads a single pair of shoes in the equivalent of four plastic bottles.
By now most people have a rough idea of how the bulk of recycled polyester is made: PET bottles are collected, sanitized and any labels and remaining caps separated out. The clean plastic is shredded into flakes, then melted down at high heat to create “little balls of plastic,” as Lyster puts it. Finally, the pellets are liquified, dyed and extruded through a showerhead-like device to create long, skinny strands of fiber that can be woven into fabric.
From the time Patagonia worked with Polartec to use this process to create the first recycled synthetic fleece in the early ‘90s, this was the environmentally virtuous thing to do. And indeed, many a brand from the late noughties onward have hinged their entire sustainability strategy on the use of the so-called rPET, which they touted as a way to reduce the world’s reliance on virgin fossil fuels while taking a bite out of plastic pollution that was clogging up landfills and poisoning marine life.
But the reality that has emerged into view in recent years is less simple. Clothing made this way cannot be recycled into clothing again, at least not at a scale that makes practical and economic sense, meaning that a Dasani bottle’s reincarnation into a pair of harem pants only marks a brief respite before it ends up relegated to the trash heap or in a hapless turtle’s stomach. Hijacking PET to appeal to the trendsetter also snatches it from a truly circular process: turning it into another bottle. It also doesn’t address problems that continue to plague virgin polyester: Its inability to biodegrade, for one, and microplastic generation for another. Plus, there’s also the possibility that people might use it as an excuse to overconsume, whether it’s bottles or apparel—or footwear, for that matter.
This is something Lyster has been thinking a lot about.
“It’s true; ideally, we wouldn’t be using polyester,” she said. “But there’s no other material that has the characteristics that polyester does. And so it’s been, ‘OK, if we use this material, how can we make it the absolute best it can possibly be?’”
And Brazil, it must be said, goes through its share of plastic bottles. While the stuff from the faucet is typically treated, most people stick to bottled water because they prefer the taste or to avoid potential contamination. The country, according to the World Wildlife Fund, pumps out roughly 500 billion single-use plastic items every year, making it the largest producer—and polluter—of plastic in Latin America. Sea Shepherd Brazil and the Oceanographic Institute of the University of São Paulo estimate that 90 percent of the garbage on Brazil’s beaches is plastic, with single-use items making up 61 percent of that total. This is despite the fact that its PET recycling sector is operating at only 70 percent of its total installed capacity.
All of which is to say, without other forms of intervention, there’s plenty more where those plastic bottles came from but more investment is needed.
The 800,000 catadores who roam Brazil’s streets looking to recover resources are a living infrastructure that Brasilia’s Institute for Applied Economic Research says collects nearly 90 percent of the nation’s recycled material. They’ve filled a gaping hole that a lack of formal infrastructure for collecting, sorting and reusing materials has left behind. Without them—the people who rummage through public bins and knock on doors to ask for recycling—Brazil’s war against waste would be lost.
It’s also a sector with a high degree of vulnerability, in part because it’s such an inclusive one. “A lot of people have disabilities—for example, learning difficulties—or who may not be able to find other jobs or get income in other ways like people who are single mothers and have young children, so they work only half of the time,” Lyster said. Even so, she added, very little of the value of the materials stays with them.
Here’s how PET bottle collection typically works in Brazil: After enough bales are generated, usually by a cooperative that aggregates the waste to achieve the required volumes, they’re sold to an intermediary who purchases them for cheap. The middleman then, in turn, peddles these to different factories at a higher price that leaves him a comfortable cut. Factories don’t like working with the cooperatives or more loosely organized catadores because they think they’re “too chaotic,” though there’s also a degree of prejudice and perhaps snobbishness, Lyster said. That Veja wanted to shorten the chain was met with surprise, derision and even anger.
“It’s very rare for a company to care, to want to know the people that are in the supply chain directly, which is why I think a lot of companies are interested in certification because it’s kind of a shortcut that allows you to know where your stuff is coming from without having to do the hard work of really knowing your supply chain,” she said. “For the factories, they’d never had anyone come in and say ‘We want to buy directly from cooperatives.’ And so they were a bit like, ‘It’s just not done in this sector. You guys don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about recycling.’ Which was fair enough.”
Kopp and Morillion would be the first to tell you they didn’t know anything about sneaker production when they founded Veja. They were just tired of the “blah blah blah” they kept hearing from the companies they worked with that were “speaking a lot but not doing lots,” Kopp said. “And so we said, ‘If we don’t try to do something different, who will?’ So we said, ‘Let’s build something out of nothing.’ And then we said, ‘What if we do a real product, something that we’re wearing every day, something that is a symbol? That would be completely deconstructed, torn apart and rebuilt with ecological materials with fair trade?’”
With 5,000 euros apiece, the duo picked a country they both loved—Brazil—and started looking for organic cotton growers, spending months in the fields with their shaky Portuguese. Then, with the vague idea that sneakers in the ‘40s and ‘50s used rubber, Kopp and Morillion decided to explore the material next, leading them to ford rivers to reach remote villages of rubber tappers in the Amazon. From the start, the goal was to pay producers the prices they deserved, not what the commodity markets decided. That became the Veja way.
“So we started from nothing,” Kopp said. “With a production of 5,000 pairs, we bought 2 tons of organic cotton at a special price with a special contract, and so on. And we delivered the shoes. And one week later, there were no shoes anymore in the stores. So all the stores—we had 20 clients at the time—were calling us, saying ‘Yes, we want more shoes.’ And then we said, ‘You have to wait six months because it’s going to be a second production and we don’t have enough organic cotton.’ So we started with 5,000, which became 11,000, which became 20,000, etc. And Veja grew and grew naturally.”
Today, Veja is a 600-employee-strong company that makes roughly 4 million pairs of sneakers a year. (Roughly 400,000 of these, or more than 90 percent of the shoes that utilize recycled polyester, are now lined with Eleva.) Veja cares less about certifications than about knowing the people involved. Because when you’re on a first-name basis with the cotton grower, rubber tapper or plastic bottle picker—when you know the names of their children and their pets—that’s already more due diligence than the vast majority of businesses do.
Lyster, together with Luciana Batista Pereira, head of Veja’s cotton sourcing, also refused to be daunted, even in what turned out to be a male-dominated industry. “We were like two crazy women, saying, ‘We want to buy from cooperatives,’” she laughed. They ended up speaking to Valgroup, a plastic production giant that snaps up a good proportion of the country’s bales. Valgroup said no. Then no again. And again. And again. Finally, the company relented.
Castro, who dreams of seeing Paul McCartney in a pair of Vejas she helped make, and Luenia Maria Silva de Oliveira are the leaders of Rede Sul e Sudoeste de Minas Gerais, a network that the 13 catadore cooperatives formed 10 years ago. They are also catadores themselves. At their first meeting with Veja, Lyster and Pereira confessed that they didn’t know anything about recycling, only that they wanted to purchase plastic bottles from the people who picked them. Castro and de Oliveira, both warm and motherly presences, embraced the two immediately.
“Together, we started to think about what do the logistics look like? What does a fair price look like in the contract? How can we get the plastic bottles from the cooperative to the factory and all the different details? And they were instrumental in doing that with us,” Lyster said. “So they really are our partners in this product. And what that involved was a lot of visiting and a lot of talking to people.”
Catadores who sell through an intermediary can expect to garner 1-2 Brazilian reais (18-35 cents) for every kilogram of clear plastic bottles. Without the middleman, the factory gives them 3-4 Brazilian reais (53-70 cents), depending on the market rate, which fluctuates according to seasonal demand. On top of that, Veja pays a bonus of 7 reais ($1.23) per kilogram, which is divided between the network and the cooperative (20 percent each) and the catadores (60 percent).
In the three years since Veja started the initiative, it has purchased 100 metric tons, or the equivalent of 6 million plastic bottles, a year, at what is essentially three to four times the market price. The cooperatives can use the money to purchase additional sheds and trucks or strengthen their security systems. For many catadores, the extra cash has been life-changing, allowing someone to pay for a child’s education or save up for a house or car. At Atremar, a catadore can eke 1,500 reais ($263) per month, on par with the legal minimum wage. One says she dreams of visiting Disneyland one day.
“This isn’t charity,” Lyster said. “These people are the crux of recycling in Brazil. They’re providing a service to society by dealing with all of our materials. And they’re providing a service to the environment by making sure that things that can be recycled don’t go to landfill. And so it’s a very concrete service that they’re providing. It just tends to be something that’s not given much value by society. We’re just trying to give value to what they’re doing.”
The last thing Veja says it wants to do is to make the catadores dependent on it, although to an extent they are now because it’s the only company shelling out higher prices. But Veja is a shoe company, not an NGO. Part of the bonus is allocated to cooperatives so they can build autonomy and capacity, so that if Veja disappears one day, they’re not left twisting in the wind.
“Because if the cooperative is strong enough to function by itself, it can find other markets and negotiate prices for themselves,” Lyster said. “A happy moment for us would be for them to start negotiating prices with us because it means that they don’t see us as a donor; they see us as a trade partner.”
At Valgroup’s sprawling facility in Poços de Caldas, a two-and-half-hour drive past rolling hills and open skies from Três Pontas, photography is forbidden in all but one area: the open-air storage area where bales of plastic bottles are trucked and stacked near-daily. They loom like buildings some 15 feet above the ground, a city upon themselves. The floor is littered with flattened pieces of plastic that have escaped their former confines and then ground into the dirt by so many footfalls. Across similar setups in Brazil, Mexico and Spain, Valgroup recycles 100,000 metric tons of PET per year, or the equivalent of 4.8 billion bottles.
But recycled PET makes up less than one-quarter of Valgroup’s production. It’s mostly in the business of churning out virgin plastic, even though it’s trying to mitigate some of that impact by ramping up its use of wind and solar power, which now make up half its energy sources. Recycling PET, too, isn’t without its hazards. The pyrolysis process that liquefies plastic at temperatures close to 290 degrees Celsius (554 degrees Fahrenheit) can unfurl toxic byproducts, such as antimony, benzene or toluene. The company says it conducts extensive testing, followed by “cleansing” that removes problematic substances and treats the wastewater afterward.
For now, bales purchased directly from cooperatives only make up a sliver of Valgroup’s accounts. But the experience so far has been a revelation, said Eduardo Berkovitz, its
institutional relations and compliance director, adding “Valgroup will continue to source directly from the cooperatives even if Veja says it has enough.”
Morillion goes by “Ghislain” in France but the more flamboyant “Francois” in Brazil, which can confuse people who think he is two separate people. In a sunny boardroom in São Paulo, he says he doesn’t see Veja using polyester, recycled or not, forever. For the most part, he sees recycled PET as a transitional material until something better comes along. Until then, Veja will continue its efforts to encourage people to hold on to their kicks longer through its repair and resale business. Since 2020, it has refurbished more than 35,000 pairs of shoes at “repair stations” in Bordeaux and Paris in France, Berlin in Germany, Madrid in Spain and New York City in the United States. Eventually, Veja hopes to crack textile-to-textile recycling for footwear.
“I hope plastic bottles disappear from the world ASAP,” he said. “At one point, we were already trying to get rid of polyester. And we still are, and testing new materials and developing new alternatives.” If the Eleva project lasts 10 years, helping and promoting the catadores, “that’s good enough,” he added. “And if plastic bottles are then forbidden, which I hope they will,” then perhaps the catadores will be onto better things by then.
At Atremar, the catadores are free agents, as free to come and go as Reciclita, a slinky orange-and-white tabby who is the cooperative’s mascot and inspiration. (His name is derived from the word “recycle” in the local Portuguese.) On average, they work from 7 in the morning to 5 in the evening, alternating between street collection and table sorting. Each one can lay their hands on 4,000 kilograms of materials every day, only 40 percent of which might be the “gold” that is PET. It’s hard, backbreaking and sometimes dangerous work: One catadore was jabbed by a suspicious needle and required six months of shots. All of them frequently experience that carelessness that people throw things “away,” not knowing that “away” leads to places like Atremar, with broken crockery, dead animals, feces and obvious garbage a regular sight among the recyclables. It’s a disrespect they’re familiar with, complete with the flinging of epithets like “horse” (because of the carts they pull) and “garbage people.”
Sometimes, however, the silence is even worse.
“Most companies don’t even want to talk to us,” Castro, who also serves as Rede Sul e Sudoeste de Minas Gerais’s financial director, said through a translator. “But Veja sat and ate with us. Only Veja is different.”
A key difference is engagement that is relational rather than transactional. It’s not only the money but also the recognition of the catadores’ work that’s important, she said. And now, with the passage of time, a model that no one thought would work has proven successive, which also makes it replicable. The naysayers have also been repudiated. Valgroup now says that the cooperatives deliver the “most beautiful,” meaning the cleanest, bales. This is a particular source of pride for the catadores.
“Things only work when we work together,” Castro said.
This article was published in SJ’s Sustainability Report. To download the full report, click here.