Reciclagem, educação e meio ambiente: interlocuções da vivência numa associação de catadores

Abstract

Amid schemes and dramas, recycling was designed as object of investigation in this study for inciting a series of concerns on a system that favors big corporations and imprisons the garbage collectors on a web of links among political, economic and educational speeches that immobilizes them around an imposed state, with little prospect of change and social rise. Therefore, in an attempt to overcome any preconceived judgement and to understand the high formative potential of recycling, sometimes leaning on theory or sometimes experiencing practice, it was possible to understand some of the main issues that permeate the subject, placing it as a field of tension between environment, society and education, which requires intense discussion in order to overcome the reductionist view on the issue of garbage disposal, whether at school or outside of it. This paper, after tracing a brief historical perspective, approaching some technical issues and reviewing literature on the subject, focuses specifically on the task of understanding the role of garbage collectors in the tangled plot that permeates the solid waste recycling process. Through the Dialogical Action Theory described in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Ethnography, the methodological research path is designed from an immersion in the world of the Collectors of Paper and Cardboard Association – APARES. The analysis of this experience refers to five episodes portraying the first five days with the collectors: Respect; Overcoming; Frustration; Alterity and Politics. From this analysis, we seek to enlighten a possible dialogue between recycling, environment and education, guided by the perspective from individuals who have recycling as a profession and means of living. The results of this study allowed to deconstruct conceptions and myths that permeate the way we deal with recycling ideals advocated by society, among which stand out: the ineffectiveness of educational projects that approach recycling as merely waste sorting; the biased look at the environment, guided solely by the ideal of sustainable development and sustainability; and the political and economic interests that lead to recycling actions simply for the compliance of internationally established goals.