Diseño e implementación de rutas de recolección de residuos aprovechables en el casco urbano del municipio de Puerto López

Abstract

The consumption encouraged by a linear economic development at present produces a significant amount of solid waste which causes that cleaning systems collapse and demand the construction of sanitary landfills with greater storage capacity that impacts negatively the ecosystems and nearby human settlements. In response to this problem, the formalization of the recyclers offers alternatives from the environmental, economic and social perspectives: from the environmental point of view, the use of recyclers reduces the waste that ends up in the sanitary landfills and reintroduces the recovered material into the economy; from the economic side, the use of recyclers strengthens marginalized economic sectors, such as recycling, due to the commercialization of a greater quantity of recovered material and, from the social one, a great quantity of vulnerable population that has as its only source of income the sale of material collected in the streets of the cities. That said, recycling must be reinvented and to adopt technologies that allow improving its collection and increasing the amount of material recovered. In this sense, geographic information systems are technological tools that can make the collection process more efficient and effective due to their large capacity to store data. It also has the characteristic of having spatial representation which benefits waste picker associations who find that collection can be an easier task and that this directly represents greater income for their members with a positive impact on their quality of life. Cooperation with government agencies, as well as with civil society, is also complementary. The significant role played by these associations within the public cleaning service must be recognized in terms of the line of use and the value of dignifying their work.