10 07 29 Master thesis Juliana Leon - e-Waste. This guide

3.5.1.3 Social benefits
Allowing the recicladores to perform the collection of CRT-monitors (or other
electronic devices) and paying them for this service at least as much as they would
earn by recovering the materials is a way to achieve one of the goals of an inclusion
system: to prevent pollution without diminishing the income IS workers have. Such a
system would benefit a high number of low-skilled workers who are often the ones
suffering from extreme poverty and social exclusion. Furthermore, avoiding informal
manual dismantling in inappropriate conditions reduces serious health risks for the
workers and their families.
3.5.2 Disassembly in waste cooperatives and municipal recycling centres
For the time being, Colombia has made many progresses concerning the
organization of recicladores within cooperatives or associations. The benefits for the
recicladores belonging to a cooperative are the increase of their revenue
(cooperatives can negotiate better prices from bigger intermediaries or recycling
companies), the amelioration of their working conditions (no more work on
dumpsites, getting tools such as gloves, uniforms, etc.), and the access to credit,
training and social programs. At present, some of the existing cooperatives have their
own warehouse or have contracts allowing them to work in the municipal recycling
centres, sorting and pre-processing recyclables from solid waste.
With this evolution, some of the once street recicladores are now employed as
operators in cooperatives deposits or municipal recycling centres and the ones with
entrepreneurship skills have founded their own recycling business. This is only an
example of how offering economic alternatives to recicladores allows them to
ameliorate their income and gives them opportunities to move to others steps in the
recycling chain improving their quality of life.
Another alternative to the one presented in the previous chapter is that in addition to
performing collection, recicladores would be trained for the dismantling of electronic
devices in adapted workshops. These workshops can initially be set up in the
cooperatives warehouses, but depending on the collected quantities, it would be
worth to evolve as e-waste dismantling workshops. Figure 27 presents the computer
waste and money flows for a system including dismantling by waste cooperatives.
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