Tuesday 3rd May

Today was our second day in Sao Leopoldo... a good summary of the city is avaliable here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Leopoldo

An early start today at 8am - we visited a large reserve in the centre of the city which was the site of a large amount of rubbish and settlement by very poor people who lived off the collection and sorting of it..... A resulting 5,000,000 Brazillian Real project was undertaken the majority of the funds to rehouse the poor people to a new settlement and to build a new recylcing facility. There was 5,000 tonnes of waste on the site, of which aboutu 3,000 tonnes has been removed.

This picture was taken when the park had a number of poor people living on it with the associated rubbish from which they made there living.... the council were keen to point out that a major part of this project was the social issues surrounding the reolocation of these residents and the provision of employment and housing.....

This video shows bits of the park site... with facilities...

Meeting with the President of the Sao Leopolodo City Council.

The Rotarians in Sao Leopoldo seem very well connected! So today we had a conversation with the President of the council in the city. The public setup in Brazil is a little complicated, but the President did his best to explain, there are at least 3 levels of legislation... althrough it is hierarchical... this means that there are many regulations... but not all are adhered to if one has funds. One local law introduced was to force the train to be suspended above the roads.. whereas in Canoas it divides the city by running on the ground.

 It cannot be help in decision making that there are 13 members of the council from 6 different parties! There apparently are more than 30 parties in Brazil, with only 5 or so of significance - apparently some are setup in order to take advantage of funding and promotional tine... so called ´rent´ parties....
The public bodies have a budget of 460,000,000 Brazillian real - a not insubstancial sum for a city of about 210,000 people. This money goes into projects which are agreed by the council, and which can also be suggested by members of the public - althrough this has never happened.

We keep hearing about many projects not happening... but it is really unclear how things work when you get to this stage!

.. had lunch... where we did our presentation.. in well recieved portuguese!

... visit to the RS daily newspaper editor...

We then visited the main municipal landfill site for the city which recieves 140 tonnes of waste a day, the rubbish is also sorted by a workers co-operative under contract by a company which owns and maintains the site.... some videos below....

This arrangement means that the co-operative is responsible for the Health and Saftey of the workers, the sorted waste going to the co-operative. This is an interesting arrangement - the service agreement between the co-operative and the company would be interesting to have a look through... this is the same co-operative I think that the workers who were displaced from the site we visited in the morning work for.

We in the UK would use a greater amount of mechanisation, and thats in recycling, I dont think we would ever try and seperate household waste manually.

These cars are very common along with the VW ´combis´or classic camper vans which we call them in the UK.

We then visited a plastics recycling plant... the fumes within one of the buildings were quite sufficating... i must admit i was concerned for the long term well being of the workers... both at this plant and also those who are sorting the municiple waste...

Another Goucho night out! With some interesting variations of dress...

A mini-case study could be written about all that we learnt today! Disseminating this information is going to be an interesting excercise... both for the final presentation at the conference - where we are asked to pick out some of our highlights and observations and also of course debriefing on our return.

.. up in 6 hours! bed!