Klabin and Heineken entered into a partnership to create a 100% circular territory in Telêmaco Borba, in the interior of Paraná, where glass, paper, aluminum, metal and plastic materials and packaging are transformed, reused and recycled after consumption instead of being sent to landfills.
The project will be applied until the end of 2022 in the city, which has 80 thousand inhabitants. According to Julio Nogueira, Klabin's sustainability and environment manager, the project should be taken to other Brazilian municipalities in the future.
The initiative to reinvent the use of packaging was structured in 2020 by Hub Incríveis, a creative innovation network, and has the support of ViraSer, a reverse logistics program that works to accelerate, qualify and professionalize selective collection systems in municipalities.
The senior sustainability manager of the Heineken Group, Ornella Vilardo, says that the objective is to take an important step towards the necessary changes in relation to the use of post-consumer packaging in Brazil.
"We believe in the potential for collaboration between the public and private spheres to address these issues, as we understand that, only together, it will be possible to guarantee the positive impacts we aim for from end to end in the packaging chain", comments Vilardo.
How will the recycling partnership work?
The project mapped the main problems and challenges of waste management and pointed out measures to increase the recyclability potential, uniting the efforts of the city hall and cooperatives, citizens and companies.
Actions include improvements in the structure of cooperatives, improvement of public policies, training and development of leaders, environmental education initiatives and the creation of a recycling network.
In the first phase of the 100% Circular Land in Packaging (TC100) project, which took place in 2021 and was sponsored by Klabin, a detailed diagnosis of the amount of recycled packaging materials sold by the local cooperative was carried out, in addition to measuring the total amount of materials directed to the landfill.
This survey identified that only 11.7% of Telêmaco Borba's packages are recovered through selective collection per year.
The second stage of the project involves the joint creation of solutions, with an open call for startups, NGOs, companies and other interested institutions.
Source: Estadão
